Diminishing Publishing Opportunities for Scholarly Monographs

For scholars in hunanities disciplines where the scholarly monograph remains the gold standard, it's well understood that getting a scholarly monograph published can be very difficult or impossible. Indeed, the situation is so bad that some scholars, such as Dr. Marshall Poe of Harvard University, have taken to self-publishing monographs in digital form.

Dr. Poe is not the only historian concerned about the monograph publishing crisis. Dr. Robert B. Townsend has done a detailed investigation of the problem. He notes:

It appears that the research library community initiated the discussion about an impending crisis, warning in the mid-1990s that explosive growth in the cost of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals were soaking up resources for monograph expenditures. . . .

Libraries at research universities (the largest purchasers of monographs and scholarly periodicals) cut their purchases of monographs by more than a quarter between 1986 and 2001 . . . While the upward trend in the last few years might seem positive, staff at the Association for Research Libraries dismisses the change, suggesting that this just reflects increased purchases of electronic copies of titles, many of which libraries already have on the shelves. . . .

The STM effect was just one of the problems that afflicted university presses over the past few years. They also had to confront declining library sales, new distribution channels like superstores and the Internet, and cutbacks in university subsidies and funding.

Since libraries are the main market for scholarly monographs, the decline in the number of books purchased triggered university presses to reduce print runs. While print-runs of 1,000 to 1,500 copies were standard ten years ago, presses are now confronting sales of 400-500 copies. . . . subventions for publishers from such agencies as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have virtually disappeared. These factors, combined with the increase in the cost of paper and other publishing expenses, have brought the system to the point where the unit price to recoup the first copy costs of a printed scholarly monograph makes most books too expensive for the academic market (both libraries and individual faculty) for which they are intended.

In its detailed analysis of the problem, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, stated that:

Departments, in formulating their guidelines for tenure and promotion, should bear in mind the dramatic changes that have occurred in scholarly publishing practices and alter their expectations with regard to all levels of scholarly publishing.