The Futures of Scholarly Publishing :: Education Library Reading Essays

Tradition bothy, university libraries, flush with funds, have been the principal(prenominal)stay of scholarly publishing. They bought all the latest, most important books and maintained subscriptions to all the important journals. But in todays environment of budget cuts and rising tuitions, many libraries (especially those at public universities) argon being forced to cut back. Retailers, meanwhile, are more and more corporate. In an age in which book-selling is dominated by chains uniform Borders and Barnes and Noble, it is increasingly arduous for scholarly books to reach their market. Unsure of being capable to recoup their losses, publishers are less and less spontaneous to take on academic booksespecially those which do not have immediate conjure to a broad audience or are unlikely to be used as textbooks. Meanwhile, university faculty in the humanities whose tenure prospects compute on being able to cite book credits are scrambling to be publishedand are fin ding fewer and fewer publishers willing to accept their work. These are just a few of the factors behind the flow rate crisis in academic publishing. In a meeting of the American Council of well-educated Societies choke year, panelists Carlos J. Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, John M. Unsworth, and Lynne Withey discussed these and other important issues in-depth, and their remarks were published in an ACLS free-and-easy paper entitled Crises and Opportunities The Futures of Scholarly Publishing. The panelists were a diverse group, representing several diametric perspectives on the publishing crisis. Carlos Alonso is a Professor of Romance Languages and Chair of the incision of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania Cathy Davidson is Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the John intrust Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University John Unsworth, at the sequence of last years ACLS meeting, was Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia and Lynne Withey is Director of the University of California Press. This paper addresses each of their remarks in turn, closing by relating those remarks to the experience of the Clemson University Digital Press. In his remarks to the ACLS, Carlos Alonso addresses two main issues in scholarly publishing the relationship between publication and tenure, and the difficult issue of funding scholarly publication at a time when most public universities are facing significant budget cuts.