In Canada, questionable dealings between former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and a German businessman relating to the sale of Airbus jets continues to receive significant media attention. The Airbus scandal, or Mulroney-Schreiber affair, was the subject of 2003’s A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron, and the Public Trust by William Kaplan, published by member press McGill-Queen. The book was an early examination of the scandal, and Kaplan is now regularly consulted as expert on this developing situation. A Secret Trial is available from McGill-Queen’s website, http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1759
Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press) was itself the subject of Powell’s Book’s “Review-a-Day” on December 6. The review, written by James Wolcott, is available at: http://www.powells.com/review/2007_12_06.html
A Review of the MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship
by Lynne Withey
Director, University of California Press
By now, most of you will have
read — or at least read about — the report of the Modern Language
Association’s Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and
Promotion. If not, you can find it at http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion.
It is well worth reading in full, all 80 pages of it. From the
perspective of scholarly publishers, Part I, “Revising the Meaning of
Scholarship,” is the most compelling section. Parts II and III deal with
the responsibilities of hiring institutions and the mechanics of the
tenure review.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of the task force’s
work. After years of debate about the “crisis in scholarly
publishing,” finally, a thoughtful group of scholars has moved beyond
the now-familiar laments about declining sales of monographs, strapped
library budgets, and vanishing subsidies for university presses to ask
the hard questions: do we really need all those monographs? Are there
other, equally valid, ways to evaluate faculty for tenure? Are
tenure requirements becoming unrealistic? The fact that one of the
largest and most prestigious scholarly societies has framed the
questions and offered hard-hitting recommendations is especially
welcome. It increases the odds that the academy will pay
attention. Bravo to the leaders of the MLA who initiated this
project and to the task force members who accomplished it! We
scholarly publishers are in your debt.
The central theme of the report is concern about the future of junior
faculty and, by implication, the future of the profession. The
task force studied the percentage of newly minted PhDs hired into
academic jobs; the percentage of those jobs that are tenure track; the
requirements for attaining tenure, variations in requirements among
different types of institutions, and changes in requirements over time;
and the nature of the tenure process itself. Among the most
interesting conclusions are the following:
Notwithstanding these conclusions, the task force did not shy away from
recommending changes in the current system, even to the point of
challenging the accepted definition of “scholarship.” The
report argues that scholarship should encompass teaching and service to
the profession as well as research. “Scholarship in the
humanities,” the report states, “constellates three activities:
research, interpretation, and reflection. Research is not to be
equated with scholarship; it is a component of
scholarship….Furthermore, scholarship should no be equated with
publication, which is, at bottom, a means to make scholarship public,
just as teaching, service, and other activities are directed toward
different audiences. Publication is not the raison d’etre of
scholarship; scholarship should be the raison d’etre of publication.”
(pp. 23-24) Following from this definition, the report
argues for “multiple pathways to tenure.” Institutions should
establish tenure standards commensurate with their missions and
values. The monograph should not be the only route to
tenure. (See recommendations 2 and 3, p. 70 and in the executive
summary.) The report also recommends that institutions recognize
the legitimacy of scholarship published in digital format (including
collaborative work) but, thankfully, understands that digital
publication is not a solution to the economic challenges of scholarly
publishing. (See recommendation 4.)
The report offers a perceptive analysis of dissertations and their role
in launching the careers of junior faculty. The primacy of the
monograph has ensured that dissertations are viewed as “larval
monographs”—the first step in the book-for-tenure process. But
the trend toward digital publication of dissertations may make it even
more difficult to get that lightly revised dissertation published in
book form, thus adding to the pressures faced by beginning faculty
members. If the revised dissertation is no longer publishable,
will departments require a second, entirely new book-length work for
tenure? The Task Force argues instead that the dissertation
itself and the graduate curriculum should be reconceived.
There is much more in the Task Force report. Twenty
recommendations cover every aspect of the tenure process, in addition
to the publication requirements. For publishers, however, the
report’s compelling message is the need to reconsider the standards for
tenure and, in particular, the elevation of the monograph as the
so-called gold standard in literary scholarship.
The big question, of course, is—what next? Will this report make
a difference? Or will it join the ranks of so many other task
force reports, set aside after a brief flurry of attention?
Coverage in the press has already sounded a note of skepticism, and
rightly so, given that tenure decisions are highly decentralized, and
the importance of “standards” and “reputation” in the academic world
will make it difficult for any institution to take the first
step. But I am optimistic. This report may follow the
typical academic task force model in its length and proliferation of
recommendations, but do not be fooled by the package. The task
force recommends very significant changes and backs them up with
serious, thoughtful analysis. With the weight of the MLA behind
them, there is hope for action.
* The Task Force surveyed 1339 departments in 734 institutions divided
among three categories: PhD-granting institutions, masters degree
institutions, and four-year colleges. In addition, they interviewed
deans, department chairs, and other senior administrators and solicited
comments from MLA members.
Read the report here: http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion
David Nicholls, MLA Director of Book Publications, will chair a session
at the 2007 AAUP Annual Meeting to discuss the Task Force’s findings
and recommendations. The session will be held Friday, June 15, 10:45 AM
to 12 Noon, at the Hilton Minneapolis.
by Alex Holzman
Books reviewed: From Dissertation to Book by William Germano, and Revising Your Dissertation, edited by Beth Luey
University presses, for all the hullabaloo about changing product mix and presentation these past few years, still look to the scholarly monograph as the bread-and-butter of our existence. Not the greatest revenue source, perhaps, but the form of writing that allows the best combination of some revenue combined with a raison d’être—that we further knowledge and an entire promotion and tenure system by tending to this garden.
A well-known species of monograph is the revised dissertation, viewed by most presses with the same enthusiasm as an annual physical exam. We know it’s good for us, but it still gives us a bit of a chill. Why? Well, dissertations themselves are often too-narrow, over-documented, literature-review-packed bores that have no real beginning, middle, and end, substituting instead the aforesaid review and a collection of chapters whose connective tissue remains severely underdeveloped. The newly-minted PhDs revising these ultra-specialized works often lack the training needed to morph them into what we mean by “book” as we set about building our lists. Graduate programs do a good job of training people in the literature of their fields and in the research methods they employ; they do a lousy job of ensuring that writing skills are a prerequisite for being called a scholar. This is even true, heaven help us, in English departments.
Twenty years ago, in a very different publishing world, we could accept a level of revision that was, shall we say, less than optimal. Today, with the shrinking markets we know so well, and with perhaps an oversupply of manuscripts, we really do need to insist that even first books achieve a level of organization, writing, and felicity that was not previously seen. We as publishers need more than ever to be aware of the needs of a book’s audience and the means of maximizing that readership. This is a good thing—I work with the bias that clearer writing and economy of presentation will improve knowledge—but it leaves the poor souls looking to convert dissertations to books feeling more mystified than ever about the process.
Senior scholars, who generally do want to see their junior colleagues survive and thrive, have taken some action themselves. Most academic departments, at least in the humanities and social sciences, are providing some workshops, brown-bag lunches, etc., in which they provide some guidance on everything from how to approach publishers to how to revise. Presses are helping conduct these sessions on many campuses, trying to save faculty (and themselves) headaches down the line while providing real service to the university community. Learned societies are doing the same at their annual meetings. And now, perhaps not coincidentally, two university presses have offered new volumes on how to go about the actual revising. They are William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Beth Luey’s edited collection, Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (University of California Press, 2005).
Alert readers will recognize both Luey and Germano as familiar names on the scholarly author-publisher circuit. Luey’s Handbook for Academic Authors is in its fourth edition (Cambridge, 2002), while Germano wrote Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (Chicago, 2001). Those earlier works are more eclectic and consider a broader range of scholarly communication issues, including revision. These new books zero in on dissertation revision itself, though both also contain useful information about approaching publishers, a process most first-time authors find equally mysterious. But though both offer invaluable advice, Germano has the ultimate advantage of a single author’s point of view. He embraces an ideology, namely that writing is a form of thought and more writing—and revision—can only make for better thought. Though I have some quibbles with this notion, it is a powerful core on which to structure a whole.
This is not to say there’s anything amiss with the Luey book. Indeed, there’s much that’s very good, particularly the inclusion of first-rate chapters on specific areas of scholarship, from humanities (Jennifer Crewe) to social sciences (Peter Dougherty and Charles Myers) to science (Trevor Lipscombe). The last in particular not only details methods for revising a dissertation into an article or articles, but provides a primer on the different types of scientific journals and the kinds of articles they encourage. Luey herself, in the introduction and conclusion, provides the perspective and encouragement of a scholar who’s been through all this herself, but has also lived a career that includes particular expertise in scholarly writing and publishing.
If I have any criticism of this volume, other than the usual ups and downs of any edited book, it’s that the first part, “Rethinking and Revising,” may over-emphasize the possibility of revising for the mythical educated reader. No doubt true in some cases, but I’d argue that the primary audience for the vast majority of revised dissertations is scholarly, ranging from post-doctoral to undergraduate. This changes nothing in terms of advice about clear writing, but it does change assumptions about audience knowledge and purpose. General readers want to learn, yes, but in doing so require a higher degree of entertainment than most first-time authors are able to or should have to provide.
Luey and Germano offer much of the same information on where to publish, the channels of publication available, audience, and market—though Luey, with chapters on reference and professional publishing, really mines every conceivable outlet for a revised dissertation. Germano, enjoying the space provided by a single-author book, is able to develop nuances such as cosmetic versus deep revision, the importance of a table of contents in both planning revision and speaking to audience (also covered, but less developed, in Scott Norton’s interesting contribution to Luey, “Turning Your Dissertation Rightside Out”), but most of all, on writing as a thinking process and revision as a rethinking process. My only caveat is that at some point you can change the words but you can’t really make either the thought or the writing any better. For those inherently nervous about releasing their writing to the world, or at least to a publisher, the notion that more revising means more improvement can provide a justification for never finishing. In fairness, Germano does warn about this.
So to which book the palm? Here I must split the baby and mix the metaphor. They are both fine and any dissertation reviser would do well with either. So too would junior editors who haven’t written dissertations themselves and need to know more about both the nature of the beast and its metamorphosis into publishable book. For those who prefer to dip in and out of such a guide, picking the area that is of particular concern at any moment, Luey’s may be of most use. For those who want to read a complete, but wonderfully brief, introduction to all the issues, Germano is the place to turn. And all of us in scholarly publishing should thank both authors—and their presses—for providing texts that will help us help our authors and potential authors over the hurdle they face in turning dissertations into publishable scholarship.
by Robert B. Townsend American Council of Learned Societies. “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences” (2006); available online at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/. This report poses an important challenge to the non-profit publishing community, forcing us to consider and explain our role in an increasingly digital culture. The report is nominally a survey of the changing information landscape in the humanities and social sciences, and a proposal for building a new technological infrastructure. But for anyone trying to negotiate between the worlds of print and digital culture, the report’s pastiche of techno-optimism, open-access rhetoric, and general indifference to the interests of non-profit publishers will be a bitter pill.
Assistant Director for Research and Publications, American Historical Association
In broad terms, the report offers a “vision” that connects the best developments of the past to the brightest opportunities for the future; a list of “constraints” impeding progress; and a set of recommendations to advance toward that goal. At the level of vision, the report lays out a compelling argument for a vast digital warehouse of information, freely searchable by the public and open to a plethora of new tools for scholars. Unfortunately, the commission goes on to develop its analysis by flattening qualitative distinctions in the “digital information” being produced (as “quantity can become quality”), and erasing the contribution of non-profit publishers to the system of scholarly communication.
To make its case, the commission simply ignores skeptics who ask whether the rush to mass digitization could hurt reading and scholarship, and whether there might be other casualties on this road to progress. This offers a rather narrow view of the “grand challenges” facing the humanities and social sciences, and limits the array of problems that might be remedied by a developed cyberinfrastructure. This seems part of a larger rhetorical strategy in the report, however, which positions potential problems and the costs of digitization as external to its vision of technological progress—limiting them to social, political, or financial failures that can be assigned to publishers and “conservative” academics.
I was particularly troubled at the way the report touches only superficially on the mundane costs arising from the ephemeral nature of the technology, and then largely ignores them when it comes time to offer solutions. Almost every digital project I have been involved with over the past ten years seemed to require starting back at the beginning of a new learning curve, and struggling to see all the necessary choices and consequences. Even after the learning phase was over, these projects never seem to reach closure. Like Jacob Marley’s chains, link-by-link we forge these digital burdens that we can never seem to lay down. The information has to be updated, links fixed, and the technological containers for the data regularly refreshed. The commission never really explores how this makes our choices in this arena more costly, more transitory, and the price of failure higher.
To the contrary, the report offers a rather fanciful lesson in the economics of scholarly publishing that makes first-copy costs and sustainability disappear into a fog of “public goods” and “collective action.” The resulting picture should really trouble non-profit publishers, as the commission rather blithely erases our role in the system of scholarly communication along with the costs we have to recover. As a result, we seem to be re-cast as an unnecessary impediment to the development of a cyberinfrastructure. When the commission then calls on us to engage with other parties (librarians and university administrators) about these issues, it just seem to be inviting us into a dialogue about the arrangements for our own funerals.
While scholarly communication could undoubtedly be improved by an infusion of funds from the federal government and others, the report undercuts that possibility by being so vague about the actual costs and leaves little room for more modest, incremental alternatives. After framing the issues in terms of large needs and expensive remedies, the commission’s only alternative to federal support is to encourage “experimentation with new forms of cooperation between the private sector and cultural institutions.” So much for the public good, apparently.
Naïvely perhaps, I continue to think the non-profit publishing community can play a vital and positive role in building up the cyberinfrastructure. We can still stand for a position of cautious optimism that upholds standards of scholarship and quality, explores and adapts to new technologies, and maintains a realistic view of the costs and the benefits of the technology. Hopefully, when the public money fails to arrive and the commission members discover the strings attached by their private benefactors, the non-profit publishers will still be here to muddle along, doing the best we can with what we have.
by Sanford G. Thatcher The
Director, Penn State University Press
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has consistently been the only foundation
that for decades has taken a keen interest in the evolution of the
system of scholarly communication. Some credit for encouraging that
interest is owed to my mentor in publishing, Herbert S. Bailey Jr., who
was director of Princeton University Press for over thirty years
(1954-1986). During the tenure of William G. Bowen as Princeton’s
President (1972-1988), who in that capacity was an ex officio member of
the Press’s Board of Trustees, Bailey engaged Bowen in an ongoing
dialogue about the challenges facing university presses, which were
heralded in a series of articles in Scholarly Publishing beginning with
an essay co-authored by Bailey with then AAUP Executive Director John
Putnam in April 1972 titled “The Impending Crisis in University
Publishing.”
The dialogue continued even after
Bailey retired and Bowen became President of the Mellon Foundation in
1988. One result of those discussions was the landmark study prepared
by Bailey for the AAUP titled “The Rate of Publication of Scholarly
Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1978-1988” (1990).
During Bowen’s long tenure at Mellon, just concluded when he stepped
down in June of this year, the Foundation sponsored many other major
studies, including Technology and Scholarly Communication (California,
1999), and laid the groundwork for the development of such major
initiatives as Project Muse, JSTOR, ARTstor, and Portico.
Two new Mellon-funded studies that should be of great interest to
university presses appeared during the summer of 2006. The first,
issued in late July, was “The State of Scholarly Publishing in the
History of Art and Architecture.” [Update: The report has now been
published online by Rice University Press under the title “Art History and its Publications in the Electronic Age.“] A good overview of this report appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education at the time of its release: http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i48/48a01201.htm.
The study, begun in September 1995, had as its goal a better
“understanding [of] the challenges faced by both scholars and
publishers working in this area.” The principal investigators were
Hilary Ballon of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology
and Mariët Westermann of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, with research
support provided by Lawrence McGill of Princeton’s Center for
Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and Kate Wittenberg of Columbia’s
Electronic Publishing Initiative (EPIC). To their credit, the project
leaders sought information and advice from a wide swath of journal
editors, librarians, museum directors, publishers, and scholars. The
final summit meeting in early March 2006 included, from university
presses, Douglas Armato, Susan Bielstein, Paula Duffy, Sam Elworthy,
Patricia Fidler, Michael Jensen, Frank Smith, Lynne Withey, and myself.
The second study, released in August, was a
white paper written by a team led by William McGeveran and William W.
Fisher under the auspices of the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard University with the title “The Digital Learning
Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the
Digital Age”: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/files/copyrightandeducation.html.
This resulted from a year-long investigation intended to “explore
whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered
by the restrictions of copyright.” Not surprisingly, given the
“copyleft” agenda that the Berkman Center typically pursues, the
authors “found that provisions of copyright law concerning the
educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and
institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most
important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in
education.”
Unlike the authors of the report on
art history, however, the Berkman Center authors, while claiming to
draw on the advice of “experts in the field,” neglected to include any
publishers among those consulted even though their conclusions and
recommendations rested on assumptions about how our industry functions.
It is hardly the first time that university presses have been ignored
as sources of advice when such reports are undertaken. Another recent
instance was the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report (see article in this
issue). But it belies the good intentions of such an effort, which in
its final section recognizes the need for wide collaboration to solve
the problems identified, when a sector like ours vital to any solution
is omitted from the discussion at the outset. And an invitation to the
authors of the Berkman Center report to engage in dialogue with the
AAUP has so far gone unanswered.
Both of these
reports contain good food for thought, and they are to be congratulated
for acknowledging the complexity of the problems and challenges facing
higher education in the arenas they take as their subjects for investigation. Copyright issues lie at the center of
both reports.
For art history, the difficulties and costs of obtaining permissions
for the use of images have always been impediments to successful
publishing in the field. The problems are well analyzed in Susan
Bielstein’s new book, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property (Chicago,
2006). Among the most contentious issues has been the copyright status
of photographs that are noninterpretive reproductions of works of art
that are themselves in the public domain. Museums and other providers
of images long assumed that such photographs qualified for full
copyright protection as independent creations, but a federal district
court judge ruled in the case of Bridgeman v. Corel in 1998 that this
kind of photograph lacked sufficient creativity to ground a claim of
copyright—precisely because, to be successful in portraying the works
of art faithfully, they could not be interpretive works of art
themselves!
Outside of law reviews and books
like Bielstein’s, this new report contains one of the best discussions
of this controversial but crucially important case currently available.
Although this decision offered some relief to beleaguered scholars and
their publishers, the report recognizes that copyright issues become
even more complex for electronic publications, but makes
recommendations nevertheless for joint action by image-owners and
image-users to alleviate the problems while touting the advantages of
the digital environment for the healthy advance of the field.
For its part, the Berkman Center report lays out in an exceptionally
well-organized manner, complete with succinct descriptions and useful
links to other resources, the host of copyright issues that, in its
view, constitute “impediments” to the full realization of the benefits
of digital technology in higher education. The major “obstacles” it
identifies are of four types: “unclear or inadequate copyright law
relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;
extensive adoption of ‘digital rights management’ technology to lock up
content; practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when
licenses are necessary; undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers
or educational administrators.” Among the “paths toward reform” that it
supports in the final section, the report encourages the greater use of
“open access” and Creative Commons licenses—without, however, showing
any awareness of the potential costs in shifting to a model of full
open- access publishing or of the shortcomings of the Creative Commons
license (which relies on a crucially vague distinction between
“commercial” and “noncommercial” use). For all its biases and
weaknesses, however, the report still merits careful reading by staff
at university presses as it well represents widespread sentiments among
our administrator, faculty, and library colleagues.