Open Access, re Journals vs. Books
Posted: February 29th, 2008, by Michael JensenThe Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the different products, and the people who populate the two different cultures, within scholarly publishing.
Time past long past, in the mid-90s, I held the lucky position of being the first electronic publisher at a major university press, holding the unlucky responsibility of bridging the divide between the digitizing journals division, and the not-yet-digital books division.
While not as extreme as Snow’s “two cultures” of sciences and humanities, the distinctions between the two cultures of books and journals became clear, as I learned the two enterprises. (Sometime later I’ll address the distinctions between library culture vs. publisher culture, and between technologist culture vs. library vs. publisher culture).
What I learned, in short, and necessarily bluntly:
Journals are about throughput. Books are about craftsmanship.
This is not to demean either publishing variant — they both serve key scholarly needs. But in much of the discussions on these topics, too often “open access” is thought to mean the same thing for every kind of document. Non-publishers in particular often presume that the same rules apply to encyclopedias as apply to monographs, as apply to journal articles. But in publishing, at least, it’s not the case.
Every book is unique. At that time they were each treated uniquely: in editorial treatment, in type and cover design, in marketing plan, in discount schedule, in presumed audience. Each book was a child, nurtured in its embryonic and infant stages, eventually dressed up really nicely as a toddler, and sent out into the world once grown-up.
The acquiring editor had a vested parental interest in ensuring that this special, wonderful thing would get the life it deserved. He or she pressured the Marketing department for appropriate promotion. She or he pressured Production to make sure it was designed appropriately for the content. It was a unique, special, rich, complex, discipline-affecting work of staggering value, at least within a tiny slice of academia. The editors were proud to have acquired it. They wanted to reach the people who would be moved by it. As a consequence, each book was a polished gem.
Journals, however, were all about throughput, driven by the schedule of subscription: every quarter, or every month, the articles were bullied out of editors, who bullied their writers and their reviewers for material. And the articles came through the pipe.
Each article needed to be fit into the specific journal’s style, look, and feel, and turned into something that could be distributed to subscribers and libraries. There are no “acquiring editors” on most small-market, scholarly journals. Each article is one of ten, or twenty, in the issue. It’s not an act of craft — it’s an act of meta-craft. Each article is a small part of what will, overall, improve or sustain the value of the journal.
These two cultures may explain why, at least to my mind, journals were among the first to “go digital.” It made eminent sense: it’s easier to “digitize” the throughput process than the nurturance process.
Journals were already template-based (essentially, CSS-ready). Journals publishers were already greatly focused on automating processes. Economies of scale could make journals production and throughput much more efficient. It also meant that the throughput process could be undertaken by libraries, using smart software (as seen by how many libraries are becoming “journals publishers”).
But I’m not so sure that template-based automated publishing makes sense for book-length scholarly monographs, and other book-length works. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that e-book standards have been so slow to catch on, in the book publishing industry.
We book publishers each think that we know what is right for “our kind of publication” — each of which is unique, special, and unmatched. We want what is right, in terms of marketing, and promotion, and audience, and significance, for that special child.
Is that so wrong? I don’t think so — in fact, I think it’s a powerful strength we don’t want to lose, as we march toward digital universality.
But it’s also a powerful constraint.
Libraries, who are also about throughput (and organization) of products, are an ideal partner for journals production. I’m not so sanguine about libraries being ideal partners for production of the “special.” They didn’t evolve that way, nor are they optimally staffed for the sort of specific promotion, marketing, and outreach required for each unique book-length publication.
How publishers make things “open access” depends on technical infrastructure, and publication content types, and available skill sets and online savvy. But it also depends on the nature of the product.
That every book-length monograph deserves special treatment is open for debate; that some of them do, is beyond discussion. How our academic culture makes that happen — how the funding, the staffing, the nurturance is enacted — may depend on how we understand the processes and purposes of publishing.
March 1st, 2008 at 7:18 am
Thank you for this useful commentary. It speaks to monograph specific conversations now ongoing here at Indiana University Bloomington (where MAR is being published).
March 1st, 2008 at 8:09 pm
From where I sit it is not so clear that the world of ‘books’ or the world of ‘journals’ are either of them as homogenous or as contrasted as this argument would seem to suggest. We sometimes use the word ‘journal’ to mean the kind of ’serial’ that (mainly) only researchers and scholars will read/write, and we sometimes use the word ‘monograph’ in a similar sense to cover those kind of ‘books’ that (mainly) only researchers and scholars will read/write. But the underlying content flow is in both cases very heterogenous and peculiar. Many magazines uneasily straddle the scholarly/cultural/general interest divides, especially in fields such as music, literature, art history. But there are interesting and borderline cases in all disciplines: though bigger areas of fuzziness in ‘popular music’ and ‘architecture’ than in ‘high energy physics’ or ‘formal logic’. The large scientific and scholarly publishers have been in some respects very successful at embracing digital publishing (much, much, more so than the mainstream consumer magazine publishers) but they have done so with mostly closed, silo-style, distribution models which now face problems and possible market failure. As book and periodical publishing moves into ‘the cloud’ it will need to respond with much more subtle and nuanced distribution and access models: models which respect and serve the markets which print and digital publishing create.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
One major difference not noted here is that publishers are invested differently in books and journals, at least university presses are. Presses do not get involved in the peer-review process for the journals they publish; that is managed by the journal editors themselves. By contrast, press staff are heavily involved in the peer-review process for books. Indeed, the peer-review process in university press publishing has no counterpart elsewhere, even in commercial academic publishing, because the faculty editorial board plays a critical role in this process and commercial publishers do not have faculty editorial boards with decision-making power. The dialectic among press editorial staff, external reviewers, and the editorial board is a complex and unique process, combining elements of special expertise and general judgment. Although this is a simplification, staff editors tend to favor cutting-edge research that overturns paradigms and pushes fields in new directions; faculty on editorial boards tend to be senior scholars with vested interests in their field’s established knowledge. Staff editors get to choose who the external readers are and hence can leverage this power to support their preferred outcomes. But editorial boards have real authority and have been known to reject challenging manuscripts even when they have enthusiastic reviews. No such process occurs in journal publishing; peer review is more narrowly disciplinary focused. Because publishers’ contributions to journal publishing are limited to providing services like subscription fulfillment, the contracting of printing and binding, and some marketing, they do not have the same stake in it as they do in book publishing since the all-important editorial-review function is not involved as the publisher’s responsibility. Thus, publishers of journals are much more easily displaced (”disintermediated”) in the electronic arena than are publishers fo books.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Right you are, Sandy. I think of books — as I write elsewhere — as “immersive reading.” They have a different systemic reality than journals, and are less easily “disintermediated” because of it.
And Adam: while I think the distinctions twixt journals and books are being challenged, I’m of the belief that books (which demand linear immersive engagement) are a different ilk than journal articles (which demand only transitory attention).
That may change in the future, but for now, the immersive treatise or monograph still requires a non-digital treatment, to be “read” as it was meant to be read — as a sequential argument.
Currently, that demands a print book. There could be successful tools developed soon that could make it a successful e-book, rather than a p-book, but those tools are not yet in place, for the economics of publishing to work.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:14 am
books, journals, it’s all just words on a page.
as such, it can be digitized just fine, thank you.
-bowerbird