Editor’s Note. At each annual meeting the Professional, Teaching, and Research Divisions, and the AHA Committee on Women Historians, sponsor sessions on issues that are central to a committee’s work and to the interests of many of our members. The 1985 Annual Meeting in New York City saw five sponsored sessions; the reports submitted by the session chairs are reprinted below. The chair of the Research Division’s session also includes the text of one of the session papers (on scholarly publishing) as an especially clear and urgent statement by the director of a major university press. Questions, comments, or requests for further information should be directed to session participants, or sent “in care of” to the AHA’s national office (400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003).
Sponsored by the AHA Research Division
The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing
CHAIR: Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University, and vice-president, Research Division
PANELISTS: Matthew Hodgson, University of North Carolina Press
Steven Fraser, Basic Books, Inc.
Margo Backas, Publica tions Program, National Endowment for the Humanities
Deanna Marcum, Council of Library Resources
Charles Tilly, New School for Social Research
COMMENT: The Audience
Approximately eight-five people crowd ed into a room intended to hold no more than sixty on Saturday afternoon, December 28, to hear a distinguished panel discuss The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing in a session sponsored by the Research Division. The panelists were Professor Charles Tilly, Steve Fraser (Senior Editor, Basic Books), Matthew Hodgson (Director, University of North Carolina Press), Margot Backas (Acting Assistant Director, Research Division, National Endowment for the Humanities), and Deanna Marcum (Vice President, Council on Library Resources). Each panelist offered a different perspective on the same problem: the rising prices of scholarly monographs accompanying the dramatic de dine in the sales of such works, especially those in European history.
Charles Tilly described his experience as the general editor of a series of monographs in European social history that is now unable to publish all the excellent manuscripts submitted to it because of sales decreases. Steven Fraser argued that the crisis was not in publishing but rather in scholarly writing, contending that historians were writing for narrow audiences of specialists rather than for the general reading public or persons not specifically in their fields. He pointed to the examples of some broadly cast works, like Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which had indeed appealed to a wide readership. Matthew Hodgson urged the creation of endowments at university presses to subsidize the publishing of worthy but uncommercial volumes, and he noted the irony of the fact that universities commonly funded faculty research but then refused to offer financial assistance to support the publication of that re search.
Margo Backas described the workings of the publications subsidy program at NEH, giving statistics that revealed the extent of the problem facing publishers—the number of libraries regularly purchasing scholarly volumes, for example, has fallen from around 750 to approximately 350 during the past decade.
Finally, Deanna Marcum offered the viewpoint of an acquisitions librarian confronted, on the one hand, with the need to build collections in new interdisciplinary fields, and, on the other, with new tools like RLIN and OCLC and an improved interlibrary loan system that allow a greater sharing of resources to help offset much higher book prices. Technological developments, in other words, have permitted librarians to purchase fewer books but still give their users access to a wide range of scholarly literature.
There followed a lively and extended discussion in which members of the audience raised concerns about such issues as presses that now require authors to subsidize some of the publication costs of their works, either personally or through grants; difficulties of finding a publisher in the first place; ways of placing manuscripts with commercial presses; the usefulness of employing agents; and whether the publishers on the panel had in fact correctly stated the problem (a point raised by a publisher in the audience).
