Books once defined scholarly communication. However, declining institutional support and library purchasing are reshaping scholarly communications, academic publishing, and the nature of academic work itself. What emerges is a different publishing landscape and experimental forms like open access and open peer review. At the same time, many scholars are shifting their communications to faster moving and more democratic digital forms.

Half a century ago, books were the coin of the realm in scholarly communication. They were the way academic knowledge circulated across time and space. University libraries amassed books in their collections. Scholars conducted seminars around current and classic works, their own offices proudly lined with books in their field. Students were given “required reading” lists about which they were tested. The book was a technology for transmitting information, but it also triggered others to shape and refine those arguments into seminar papers, articles, and, well, other books.

Academic status, tenure, and promotion at many universities usually followed authorship. Writing an important book made you important. The book recorded and shared scholarship, but it was also a credentialing mechanism for many scholars.

The ecosystem, to greatly oversimplify, looked like this: libraries, funded by their universities, could afford to buy books. These purchases, as well as ones from other scholars and students, were enough to sustain scholarly publishers who, in turn, invested in selecting, vetting, and publishing books by scholars. Universities used that selection by presses as a shorthand for a scholar’s quality—those books were peer-reviewed, after all—and would award tenure and promotion partly based on publications. Scholarly publishers were not getting rich, but they made enough to sustain their work.

Market Forces and Adaptive Responses

As institutional budgets declined and costs rose, libraries shifted their shrinking resources away from books toward “big deals” with multinational journal aggregators. They also created ways to share a single copy of a book between institutions. The result was that book sales fell. Twenty years ago, a humanities monograph in the United States might be expected to sell 800 to 1,000 copies, which was enough to cover publication costs. Today, that same monograph might sell only 300 copies, an unsustainable level that threatens the entire system.

Framing this as a crisis overlooks what might instead be an evolution or adaptive response to market forces. Scholarly publishers responded the way you would expect actors in a market economy to behave. They reduced their publishing in fields that undersold, they raised prices, and they shifted their resources to books that might appeal to larger readerships, i.e., trade books for more general audiences and textbooks for students. This left scholars and institutions to rethink how they measure quality and how they communicate.

Other publishers began offering their books open-access, essentially making them available digitally for free. The advantage of this is immediate global access for ideas. The problem, however, persists in finding sustainable funding for publishers’ work including editing, managing peer review, securing permissions, book production, and marketing. Open access works remarkably well when those publishing costs can be sustained.

With a book contract harder to come by, scholars look for other avenues to publish their ideas. Academic fields are often divided into “article fields” or “book fields;” that is, those that value publication in one form or the other. STEM disciplines, for example, have long been journal fields, whereas the humanities and social sciences have traditionally seen books as leading the conversation. As publishers shrink their programs in underselling fields, some disciplines look to journals as avenues to publish.

The Future of Scholarly Communication

Now, at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, scholarly communications look very different. The book persists, but it is not the only way scholars exchange ideas. Today, in addition to journal articles, symposia, and conferences, academics participate in new media and more public-facing work like blogs, webinars, podcasts, and other social media. These newer forms have different affordance than books; they are inexpensive, easy to access, and fast. Moreover, they offer instant global reach. Rarely are they peer-reviewed or edited, and many of those forms lack what scholars consider adequate citation. It is a different form of scholarly communication, and it has become remarkably influential.

This disruption in the traditional forms of scholarly communications challenges academic publishing and raises questions about the future. With many more avenues for scholars to communicate with their peers and beyond, will we see a democratizing effect on access to scholarship itself? How will we measure the quality and impact of work that may escape peer review? Will scholars embrace new forms of review to encompass this new work? How will institutions assess this new work and the quality of the scholars who produce it?

Gregory M. Britton is editorial director of Johns Hopkins University Press, where he acquires the press’s books on higher education. E-mail: [email protected].