It is interesting to compare the two “crises”. Who plays the role of OPEC, who the role of “Big Oil”, who the role of the oil-guzzling SUVs (I’m in London right now and it seems clear that the SUV is peculiarly American….), who owns the ‘filling stations’, who has nuclear power, who is working on hybrid cars and battery-powered cars, who drives a Prius or a SmartCar, and what the alternative energy sources (and their technological and non-technological barriers to adoption) will be.

Somehow it is always easier to see the solutions in an industry other than one’s own!

John

So what’s the new paradigm that will take a generation to make it to Conventional Wisdom? Publisher’s lost the last round and we are still feeling the effects of that.

There’s a real possibility today’s almost evangelical concern for OA will become the new CW if it hasn’t already.

It takes that level, almost missionary zeal, to move the system. Where are today’s publishing visionaries who can build a counter perspective? Are they at BMC and Hindawi? Or are they at Sage and Oxford? At Springer and Wiley/Blackwell or Highwire and BEPress? Is it platform or content or a new amalgam of both or something else?

There are many things awry in the system of scholarly communication today, but I want to focus my remarks here on just two of them: the inequities that now exist more than ever among different academic specialities in the prospects for publication of books; and the need to view scholarly communication as a system of many interacting parts if any viable long-term solution to the crisis is to be found.

But first it may be useful to offer some historical perspective on this so-called crisis. It has, in fact, been with us for so long now that maybe “crisis” is really a misnomer–”chronic illness” may be a more accurate description. The librarians in this audience will be familiar with a now classic NSF-funded study by Bernard Fry and Herbert White published in 1975 that found, for the period 1969-1973, that the ratio of book to journal expenditures in the largest academic libraries had dropped over that five-year period from better than 2 to 1 to 1.16 to 1 (Fry/White 1975: 61), with every expectation that this trend would only get worse–as, indeed, it has. (Recent ARL statistics show the decline in monograph purchases since 1986 among these libraries to have been nearly 25%.) Fry and White’s prognosis for university presses was particularly gloomy: their situation, they said, “can be described, without exaggeration, as disastrous. Already heavily encumbered by operating deficits…, university presses appear…to be sliding even more rapidly toward financial imbalance” (Fry/White 1975: 11).

This precarious situation was viewed with alarm by university presses themselves at this time. A series of articles appeared in the journal, Scholarly Publishing, in April 1972, July 1973, and April 1974 based on successive surveys of presses covering the years 1970-1974. The first article, entitled “The Impending Crisis in University Publishing,” “clearly indicated that presses were in the midst of a period of extraordinary financial stress, which posed a serious threat to the continuing survival of many of them” (Becker 1974: 195). The next two articles bore the titles “The Crisis–One Year Later” and “The Crisis–Is It Over?” The somewhat encouraging conclusion of the last article in this series was that, “except for the smaller ones, presses for the most part have managed to survive their financial difficulties quite well by making a host of adjustments, including radically increased book prices, substantially lower discounts, economies achieved in book production costs, slashing staffs, publishing more books with sales potential and fewer which cannot pay their own way, special inventory sales, and so forth.” But, the author wondered, how much more can such methods be used without becoming at some point self-defeating. Ominously and–as we can now see with the wisdom of hindsight–presciently, he ended by pointing to “the increasing danger that presses will turn more and more to publishing books on the basis of saleability rather than scholarly merit.” And, while noting the temporary mitigating effects that a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to presses for publishing books in the humanities might have, he asked: “But what then?” (Becker 1974: 202)