Response to David
By Paul DiMaggioIn David’s otherwise excellent last post, he kindly refers to my previous post, to which he responds, as “trenchant and persuasive” I fear it was neither if he understood it to say that “Rather than struggle to modernize the operations of their eponymous presses….universities could voluntarily cede the turf they are losing to other parties and new technologies.” This is close to the opposite of what I thought Iwas saying, and certainly the opposite of what I believe — which is that university presses are vitally important parts of scholarly communication and they are as essential today as they ever were. My point is that the Ithaka report erred in suggesting that university presses would (and implicitly that they should) become less central if they failed to support university-generated publishing missions. Instead, I argued, the real problem is one of institutional design: Providing incentives for universities to commit resources to presses to a degree commensurate with the value that universities derive from them, while permitting the presses to retain the independence that a good university press needs to flourish.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Paul makes what to me is the central point, and one that the Ithaka report gets quite wrong — it has never been the central mission of a university press to support the particular mission of its host university. The mission of the university press is to support scholarship generally. Sometimes, as in the case of the MIT Press, the press may choose to emphasize subject matter that is of particular interest to its host institution, but it is hard to know how most university presses would behave comparably — surely not to publish solely or primarily the work of their own faculty, for instance. So the underlying problem that the Ithaka report neglects is why universities should continue to fund subordinate units like presses that produce public goods? They have done so for many years, but as we all know their commitment to the production of public goods has waned and is waning. But there are recent examples of just such behavior. One of the most interesting is the plan my successor John D’Arms sold to the universities to provide substantial financial support for the grand new fellowship program that John hoped to put into place. He had foundation commitments for captial contributions, but he needed to grow those funds in order to generate enough annual income to sustain the fellowship program (for postdoctoral research fellowships). He convinced more than twenty universities to pay (the numbers are from memory) about $50k a year for ten years to support the annual fellowship costs, while permitting the endowment to grow. The universities received no quid pro quo, though of course they hoped their own faculty would win some of the fellowships. They need to do likewise with their presses — but I think Paul and I both believe that trying to recommit universities to their presses by harnessing them to immediate university needs is a self-defeating proposition.
October 28th, 2007 at 1:51 am
I stand corrected, and apologize for misreading Paul’s post. The possibility of a future without university presses is one that I do think deserves consideration, in any event. The best arguments against that future—the best arguments for the continued importance of university presses—will have to find some comparative advantage for them in the altered landscape into which scholarly publishing is moving, and I don’t think it’s clear at this point what that comparative advantage will be. There are many plausible, successful futures for university presses, but none of them is a foregone conclusion—nor, I would argue, is it a foregone conclusion that any of the futures in which university presses remain vital actually lie ahead.