Issues in Scholarly Communication: Another Approach
November 2008
One of my operating assumptions when I arrived at Choice, some 13 years ago, was a belief that publishers and librarians were natural allies. So I was startled to learn, as I settled into my new role after twenty-five years in book publishing, that this bucolic view of the scholarly publishing landscape was not universally shared. Not only were some of the academic library natives restless, a few were downright hostile.
The many, however, were warm and welcoming. Academic librarians, as I quickly learned while making my initial rounds at ALA conferences and other meetings, are a diverse and wonderful bunch of people. Some are quiet, some are vocal, some are serious, and some are effervescent, but as a group they share a laudable, common belief in the importance of the scholarly enterprise and the vital role of academic librarianship in that enterprise, a belief that resonates with me.
Over time, however, it also became clear that among some academic librarians the word “publisher” is an expletive. Publishers, in their view, are not part of the scholarly community but rather malevolent outsiders. How could this be, I wondered? Do we not share a common goal and a deep commitment to the same vision?
Today, I have a much better and deeper understanding of the fault lines that characterize the scholarly communication landscape. Money is a contributing factor as librarians, working with limited budgets, are continually frustrated by an inability to maintain their collections in the face of steadily increasing prices for the materials they must purchase from publishers. Not surprisingly, one result is an increasingly widespread antipathy toward the people who set the prices, namely, publishers.
While this reaction is understandable, I believe we will make more progress on the problems facing scholarly communication today if scholarly publishers are viewed as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. For one thing, they are a potential source of valuable information and expertise. They know stuff. For another, there are the people. When I consider scholarly publishers and academic librarians, I see more similarities than differences, one of the similarities being a deep commitment to the scholarly enterprise. Among the university press, society, and commercial publishing people I know, none are in it for the money. Scholarly publishing is, in the end, an extremely labor- and capital-intensive enterprise. It requires a lot of workers per dollar of output, and this is reflected in salaries. Scholarly publishing isn’t investment banking, or at least not what investment banking was until recently, and it simply doesn’t attract the same kind of people.
The people it does attract are people who value knowledge, scholarship, and education, people who aren’t out to maximize their income but are looking for challenging, interesting work that makes a contribution to the larger society, people a lot like academic librarians.
In the end, there are two basic ways we can attempt to address today’s scholarly communication issues, confrontation or cooperation. Dear reader, I vote for more dialogue, more common ownership of shared problems, and more cooperation between publishers and librarians, two groups of people with more in common than either sometimes appears to realize.—IER
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