(From Crooked Timber.)

There are several interesting discussions going on at the Invisible Adjunct’s, Chun the Unavoidable’s and Brad DeLong’s about scholarly publishing. The basic theme is that universities are currently making incompatible demands. Their tenure committees demand books for promotion. Their finance offices demand that the presses be profitable. And the kind of books that get published for tenure aren’t profitable.

I’m mostly posting this to link to the interesting discussions, but I thought I’d also add some points about how philosophy differs from the humanities in these respects, and how things look a little more hopeful from our shores.

First, book publishing hasn’t been required for tenure in philosophy for a long time. You can become a very important philosophical figure without having a book at all. Donald Davidson never wrote a book, and Saul Kripke reached the peak of his philosophical influence before his first book came out (as a book). More locally, my colleague Jamie Dreier, who just got promoted to Professor on the basis of some excellent articles, has never written a book, and that doesn’t seem to have hampered his career.

So here’s a simple solution to the scholarly publishing crisis. Stop requiring books! If philosophers can do it, so can sociologists and historians and literary critics. Quality is more important than quantity. This is meant a little flippantly, but at some level I’m not entirely sure why the quantity standards are so different in different fields. Maybe philosophers are missing something.

Brad DeLong’s solution to the crisis was to cut costs by moving to e-publication. This is a great idea, but of course a problem is that e-publication may not be taken too seriously. This fact is not entirely independent of the fact that it is affordable. When there are barriers to entering the publication market, the mere fact that something is published is at some level a sign of quality. When those barriers fall, there is no such signal. So it might not be unreasonable to be a little suspicious of e-publications at first.

On the other hand, judging a publication by where (or whether) it appears is pretty crude to start with. Much better to try actually reading the publication.

If we are judging quality by location, it’s not clear, at least in my fields, that our current practices make it easy to judge book quality. The problem is that the book publishing market is not as finely segmented as the paper publishing market. Currently in areas I follow, Oxford is publishing by far the best work. Almost all the books I’m reading from the last seven years are Oxford books. (Not that I read a huge number of books, but the ones I do read tend to be Oxford.) Still, that a book is published with Oxford is nowhere near as reliable a sign of quality as that a paper is published in Mind or Nous. Not that no Oxford books are at the level of those journals. Many are. But there are so many Oxford books that many more are not. And that’s the very best press. There are so few presses, relative to the number of journals, that looking at the imprint just can’t give you detailed quality information.

If the current book industry doesn’t provide detailed quality signals to those of us too lazy to read the books in question, an e-industry wouldn’t be much worse in this respect.

Finally, if you want an electronic press to have a high reputation, there is some evidence you can do it, provided you put in enough work. No one’s tried for books yet, but some electronic journals are establishing themselves as major players. The Philosopher’s Imprint, based out of the University of Michigan, has built up a very good reputation over its three year life span, in part because of the high reputation of the people running it, and in part because it has been very selective about what it publishes. This year, one of its articles (Do Demonstratives Have Senses? by Richard Heck) was selected to be reprinted in the Philosopher’s Annual. The Annual is an interesting attempt to find the best 10 articles from the previous year and reprint them in a prominent format. I don’t want to get into debates about their accuracy in actually getting the best papers, or into philosophical debates about what might constitute the best papers. I just wanted to note that the fact they are even considering articles from an e-journal is a sign of how well respected an e-journal could be. (The Imprint by the way is free, so it’s doing its bit to help the library funds crisis.)

Now it’s not clear that what goes for article publishing goes for book publishing. But there’s a hopeful sign here that academics can adjust to new forms of publication, and take seriously publications in electronic format, even in relatively short spaces of time.