The publishing experiences of historians

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 197-240

  Dalton, Margaret Stieg ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA   (United States)

Author keywords

Articles; Buying patterns; Electronic publishing; Historians; Monographs

Indexed keywords

EID: 42949090884     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp.39.3.197     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Special thanks go to Dr Elizabeth Aversa, director of the School of Library and Information Studies, for her generous support on this project. Cherry Quinn, Administrative Specialist; Clay Davis, Manager, Area Computer Services; and Xu Jie (Patrick), my graduate assistant, went above and beyond the call of duty with assistance on the survey. Patrick did all the correlations and statistical calculations. Linda Bathgate, of the publishing firm Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, suggested the important question, 'Please describe briefly the kind of books you think the field of history needs' for the questionnaire. The members of the Department of History of the University of Alabama and my acquaintances among library historians performed that necessary favour, pre-testing the paper and electronic versions of the survey.
2. The crisis in the publication of journals is primarily a matter of rapidly rising prices and is particularly acute in the natural sciences. For books, the issues are more involved. For a definition of the term scholarly monograph,' see the questionnaire (reproduced as Appendix A) that was the basis of this article; the term is defined in the questionnaire's preface.
3. The proceedings of a conference sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries provides an introduction to the voluminous literature. Mary M. Case, ed., The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1999).
4. Robert B. Townsend, 'History and the Future of Scholarly Publication,' Perspectives 41, 7 (October 2003), available at http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2003/0310/0310vie3.htm, reviews many of the issues with specific application to the field of history.
5. See also Margaret Stieg Dalton, 'A System Destabilized: Scholarly Books Today,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 37, 4 (July 2006): 251-69.
6. These figures are rough estimates and make no pretence of exactitude. They are based on a study of the publications from four representative university presses at private institutions (Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Princeton University) and four representative university presses at public institutions (the University of California, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois, and Louisiana State University). All records in WorldCat in which one of these presses was listed as a publisher were retrieved, and percentages for classification numbers (either Dewey or Library of Congress) in history were calculated. A number of factors require caution. The presses selected are considered representative; no random sampling was attempted. In addition, only through machine cataloguing, which began with the MARC project in 1967, can one be certain that all university press publications are in WorldCat, although the number not listed is bound to be small. Finally, using classification numbers to determine what publications are in the field of history omits many historical publications. To give one example, Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1985) is undoubtedly historical, but it is classified in the LoC scheme as HQ ('The Family, Marriage, Women') and by Dewey as 306 ('Culture and Institutions'), and therefore is not included in the figures presented here: only books in the C, D, E, and F categories of the LoC classification scheme and those in the 900s of the Dewey decimal classification system have been counted.
7. E.g., Margaret F. Stieg, 'The Information Needs of Historians: Or, How Historians Don't Use Libraries,' College and Research Libraries 42, 6 (November 1981): 549-60;
8. Margaret F. Stieg, 'Refereeing and the Editorial Process: The American Historical Review
9. and R.K. Webb,' Scholarly Publishing 14, 2 (February 1983): 99-122;
10. Margaret F. Stieg, The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals (University: University of Alabama Press 1986);
11. Margaret Stieg Dalton and Laurie Charnigo, 'Historians and Their Information Sources,' College and Research Libraries 65, 5 (September 2004): 400-25
12. James Thomas Flexner, Maverick's Progress: An Autobiography (New York: Fordham University Press 1996);
13. H. Stuart Hughes, Gentleman Rebel (New York: Ticknor & Fields 1990);
14. John Lukacs, Confession s of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor & Fields 1990);
15. Dexter Perkins, Yield of the Years (Boston: Little, Brown 1969)
16. Two obvious factors are the inexorable progress of specialization in academic fields and the heavy emphasis on productivity within universities.
17. 'Interchange: The Practice of History,' Journal of American History 90, 2 (September 2003): 576-611, 577, 588, 590, 594
18. Approximately twenty completed pre-test questionnaires are included in this figure, slightly reducing the rate of return from the 40.6 percent represented by the total of 461. For a more detailed description of the survey, see Appendix A.
19. The only reliable statistics on this are from modern language departments, where, in the years between 1994/95 and 2003/04, only around 10 per cent of tenure applicants were rejected but well over 20 per cent of tenure-track faculty left the departments that had originally hired them before coming up for tenure. It seems probable that statistics for history departments are not much different. See Modern Language Association, Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship and Promotion (December 2006), http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion. This report was issued in 2006 and discussed at the MLA's December 2006 meeting.
20. Because some of the historians surveyed published their first books twenty or more years ago, only information about the acceptance and revision of their most recent book was requested.
21. A total of 204 historians indicated a publisher for both their first scholarly monograph and their most recent.
22. The perception of quality of a university press was considered to be the same as the perceived quality of the program in history. The rankings come from Marvin L. Goldberger, Brenden A. Maher, and Pamela Ebert Flattau, eds., Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change (Washington, DC: National Academy Press 1995), Appendix Table P-22, 'Relative Rankings for Research-Doctoral Programs in History.' History programs are divided into twenty-two groups of five. The highest-rated programs are those of Yale University, the University of California - Berkeley, Princeton University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. The presses at those universities are therefore Group 1, the highest-ranked university presses. To Group 1 were arbitrarily added the presses of Oxford University and Cambridge University. Both these presses publish a significant number of tides by US historians, and their reputations are generally considered at least equal to those of US institutions in Group 1.
23. The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) produces a subject-area grid that shows the areas in which each AAUP member press has a 'strong interest': Association of American University Presses Subject Area Grid, http://aaupnet.org/resources/AAUPGrid2008.pdf. Its 128 members are the presses of universities in the United States, but its membership also includes both non-university scholarly presses, such as those of the Brookings Institution and the National Gallery, and non-US university presses such as those of the University of Toronto, Oxford University, and the American University (Cairo) When tabulated, the results show that 93 profess a strong interest in history. Specialties in history are distributed as follows: American history, 83; environmental history, 58;: modern history, 58; European history, 51; Latin American history, 39; British history, 33; Asian history, 30; Classical history, 29; Middle Eastern history, 28; ancient history, 27; Canadian history, 22; African history, 22.
24. This discussion is based on William Y. Arms, 'Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web,' Journal of Electronic Publishing 8, 1 (August 2002), available at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/08-01/ arms.html;
25. Margaret A. Boden, 'Appraisal of Research,' in Karen Brookfield, ed., Scholarly Communication and Serials Prices (London: Bowker Saur 1991): 15-23;
26. Jeanne Galvin, 'The Next Step in Scholarly Communication: Is the Traditional Journal Dead?' Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship 5, 1 (Spring 2004), available at http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v05n01/galvin_j01.htm (an excellent summary of the pros and cons);
27. May Katzen, 'Electronic Publishing in the Humanities,' Scholarly Publishing 18, 1 (October 1986): 5-16;
28. Cass T. Miller and Julianna C. Harris, 'Scholarly Journal Publication: Conflicting Agendas for Scholars, Publishers, and Institutions,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 35, 2 (January 2004): 73-91;
29. Geoffrey Rockwell and Lynne Siemens, 'The Credibility of Electronic Publishing,' http://web.mala.bc.ca/hssfc/Final/QuestionnaireR.htm (a survey of faculty attitudes in Canada);
30. and Aldrin E. Sweeney, 'Tenure and Promotion: Should You Publish in Electronic Journals?' Journal of Electronic Publishing 6, 2 (December 2000), available at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/ sweeney.html (a survey of faculty attitudes at the University of Florida).
31. Patrick Manning, 'Gutenberg-e: Electronic Entry into the Historical Professoriate,' American Historical Review 109, 5 (December 2004): 1505-26;
32. Kate Wittenberg, 'Digital Technology and Historical Scholarship: A Publishing Perspective,' Journal of the Association for History and Computing 5 (November 2002), available at http://mcel.pacificu.edu/ JAHC/JAHCV3/ARTICLES/wittenberg/wittenberg.html
33. Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam 1972), s.v. 'prestige'
34. MLA Task Force Report, 38
35. Herbert S. Bailey, 'The Future of University Press Publishing,' Scholarly Publishing 19, 2 (January 1988): 63-9
36. Mary M. Case, 'Foreword,' in Mary M. Case, ed., The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1999): v-vil;
37. Kate Torrey, 'Welcome and Introduction,' in Mary M. Case, ed., The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1999): 3-8, 8;
38. Joanna Hitchcock, 'Reaching Specialized Audiences: The Publisher's Conundrum,' in Mary M. Case, ed., The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1999): 25-30, 27;
39. and Marlie Wasserman, 'How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Monograph and Why?" in Mary M. Case, ed., The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries 1999): 33-40, 36, all note the same sharp decline, and some of their estimates are even lower.
40. Bailey, 'The Future of University Press Publishing,' 64
41. If one does the math, it appears that for each title in history published by a university press, a publisher could expect that approximately 98.4 copies would be sold to individual historians. In 2005, according to R.R. Bowker Inc., 'Bookwire University Press Production 1993-2004,' http://www.Bookwire.com/university.html, university presses published 1599 titles in history. If one multiplies the average, number of scholarly monographs purchased in the last six months by the historians who responded to the survey (16.9) by the number of faculty listed in history departments in the 'doctoral/ research universities - extensive' category, the result is that those 4651 historians bought 157,203 books per year. Dividing that by the number of titles gives a result of 98.4 copies per title. Admittedly, this figure is very approximate. Not all scholarly monographs that historians might purchase are published by university presses, nor are all books published by university presses scholarly monographs; all historians who might buy books are not located at universities in this category. On the other hand, because of their institutions' focus on research, not to mention their better salaries, these historians are probably more likely than other historians to buy university press publications. The significance of selling 98.4 copies per title would also vary with the publisher's expectations. If the average scholarly monograph sells somewhat fewer than 500 copies, those 98.4 copies represent about 20 percent of total sales.
42. These figures are hardly exact. Many respondents used terms like 'a lot' or said they could not remember.
43. Again, this is an estimate. 'Most' was a term often employed.
44. Quoted in Gene R. Hawes, To Advance Knowledge: A Handbook on American University Press Publishing (New York: American University Press Services 1967), 32
45. Only one respondent addressed the general reader's uncomfortable allergy to footnotes. This historian was told by his editor (from one of the elite group of university presses) that footnotes were to be kept as short as possible; he was to avoid discursive footnotes, avoid putting dates in titles and chapter headings, and dwelling too much on scholarly debates, or his book might read like a dissertation. In other words, he was to 'avoid making the book too scholarly!' Yet such a book is 'what one's "scholarly" reputation (and thus tenure decision) will be based on.'
46. Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner, 264