Something has been nagging at me as I’ve read the postings in this symposium, and the last sentence or two of Ira’s post helped me realize what it is: Whereas the Ithaka report places responsibility for addressing the challenges it identifies in universities — not just people in universities, but universities as formal organizations — almost all of the postings discuss initiatives most likely to be undertaken at other levels.

As I thought about this, I realized that Ithaka report reads very much like a classic Progressive Era analysis of a cultural field, a genre that begins with the 1918 Rockefeller Foundation report on design education and has continued into the present, though its heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s. Consistent with the genre, the report (1) calls attention to major challenges (2) identifies inadequate and insufficiently organizedResponses and declares a need for (3) enhanced cooperation and (4) central guidance of local efforts. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it makes one wonder if the conventions of such reports determine their content in the same way that the structural conventions of sonnets and situation comedies push those genres into recognizable patterns. And at a moment at which many scholars in economics, law, and sociology are recognizing that formal organizations are, in many respects, convenient fictions and that the real work of institutions often gets done in informal networks of various kinds, the emphasis on the university as the responsible agent sounds a little quaint.

In other words, I suspect that the authors of the Ithaka report may place too much faith in planning and have too little respect for the role of organizational politics in shaping universities' behavior. As Michael Cohen and James March argued in their study of American college presidents, universities are much better at talking about planning (other than facilities planning) than they are at doing it. This is not because their leaders are incompetent or lazy, but because of two features of the way that universities are organized. First, they are not so much bureaucracies as they are confederations of disciplines and professions, each embedded in national networks that, for many purposes, represent more significant reference groups than other members of the university. Second, they are, in many cases, subject to forces over which they have little control. If universities decide to produce a grand plan for scholarly communication, Cohen and March would predict that the planning process would become what they refer to as a "garbage can choice situation" into which many units of the university (presses, libraries, specialized programs, academic departments) would dump their favorite projects, pet peeves, and aspirations for turf. Whether the results of such necessarily political processes would result in better scholarly communication is anybody's guess.

A deeper issue is whether universities are the appropriate agency for planning systems of scholarly communication in the first place — whether the notion that "every university that produces research should have a publishing strategy" makes sense. Lots of entities other than universities currently design systems of scholarly communication, and, I would suggest, they may be better suited than universities to do so. Some of these are subunits of universities, like university presses, libraries, or research centers. Others crosscut university boundaries — for example disciplinary associations or "invisible colleges" of scholars working in the same research area (which are probably the most efficient instruments). Others are superordinate: for example, the Mellon Foundation (which created JSTOR and Ithaka); or the federal science agencies (which have fostered open access publishing and alternatives to extravagantly priced proprietary journals); or Google, which may ultimately have the greatest impact of all. Given the large number of players who have shaped and are shaping scholarly communication, many in constructive ways, it seems odd, and perhaps misguided, to place one's hopes for planning in university central administrations — entities that, however good they are at aggregating resources for the purposes of educating students, facilitating humanistic and scientific research, providing credentials, and often providing homes for the publishing activities of others, have rarely if ever shown much aptitude for thinking creatively or on a broad scale about scholarly communication.

This, in turn, leads to what may be the most serious question of all: Why do presses need to be central to their universities? Why does a Press need a closer engagement with its own University’s specific mission? What are "the community's values" in a University to which the Press should respond? Aren't presses supposed to serve the larger scholarly community? Aside from the sensible practice of using local people as reviewers and informants in order to more effectively monitor those areas in which the press is publishing, it is hard to imagine why scholarship would benefit if presses focused on their own institutions. (If anything, it could lead them to shield local authors from rigorous evaluation — the fear of the perception of which is why untenured people hardly ever choose to publish with their own university press.)

The problem is not with the presses themselves, but with an alignment of incentives that leads many universities to underinvest in our decentralized system of academic publishing - in other words, a classic collective-goods problem: All universities benefit if academic publishing is strong, and the intellectual marketplace will be more fluid and the system stronger if presses are only loosely coupled to the universities that house them. But because the benefits of a decentralized system of scholarly publication cannot be restricted to the universities that pay for it, universities have an incentive to underinvest in their own presses and hope that their peer institutions will carry the load. (There is something similar in libraries in that universities may be tempted to buy too few books on the theory that they can always get them through interlibrary loan, but by and large, libraries must serve local constituencies, to whom they are immediately and noisily accountable.)

How might we overcome this problem of institutional design? One way would be for universities to create a collective entity that would fund university presses by taxing each university that chooses to join a fixed amount for any book that a faculty member publishes with any university press, and using the proceeds to subsidize the best proposals from any university press. (It would be an interesting exercise to compute the present relationship between each university's share of the total university press annual book list and it's share of total university subventions to their presses. I suspect the correlation would be high, but that the exceptions would be interesting.) Such a plan would sustain a national system (with national standards and a free if partly subsidized market connecting authors and publishers), while reducing the temptation for universities to free ride.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under The Future of Scholarly Communication.