**The Academic Book of the Future**

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Ben Clements: **Surveying Christian Beliefs and Religious Debates in Post-War Britain**

Robert A. Stebbins: **Leisure and the Motive to Volunteer: Theories of Serious, Casual, and Project-Based Leisure**

Dietrich Orlow: **Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic**

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: **Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film**

Catherine A. Lugg: **US Public Schools and the Politics of Queer Erasure**

Olli Pyyhtinen: **More-than-Human Sociology: A New Sociological Imagination**

Jane Hemsley-Brown and Izhar Oplatka: **Higher Education Consumer Choice**

Arthur Asa Berger: **Gizmos or: The Electronic Imperative: How Digital Devices have Transformed American Character and Culture**

Antoine Vauchez: **Democratizing Europe**

Cassie Smith-Christmas: **Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home**

Liam Magee: **Interwoven Cities**

Alan Bainbridge: **On Becoming an Education Professional: A Psychosocial Exploration of Developing an Education Professional Practice**

Bruce Moghtader: **Foucault and Educational Ethics**

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth: **Teaching about Rape in War and Genocide**

Robert H. Blank: **Cognitive Enhancement: Social and Public Policy Issues**

Cathy Hannabach: **Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms**

Adam Bennett, G. Russell Kincaid, Peter Sanfey, and Max Watson: **Economic and Policy Foundations for Growth in South East Europe: Remaking the Balkan Economy**

Shaun May: **Rethinking Practice as Research and the Cognitive Turn**

Eoin Price: **'Public' and 'Private' Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication**

David Elliott: **Green Energy Futures: A Big Change for the Good**

### **The Academic Book of the Future**

Edited by

Rebecca E. Lyons *Research Associate, University College London, UK*

and

Samantha J. Rayner *Senior Lecturer in Publishing, University College London, UK*

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

THE ACADEMIC BOOK OF THE FUTURe

Selection, Introduction and editorial matter copyright © Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner, 2016.

Individual chapters copyright © the contributors, 2016.

All rights reserved.

Open access:

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the work's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license,

visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One New York Plaza, Suite 4500 New York, NY 10004–1562.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

ISBN: 978-1-349-88797-2 E-PDF ISBN: 978-1-137-59577-5 DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775

Names: Lyons, Rebecca E., 1986- editor. | Rayner, Samantha J., editor.

Title: The academic book of the future / [selected and edited by] Rebecca E. Lyons, Research Associate, University College London, UK ; Samantha J. Rayner, Senior Lecturer in Publishing, University College London, UK.

Description: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN<PHONE_NUMBER> | ISBN<PHONE_NUMBER>768 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Scholarly publishing. | Academic writing. | Open access publishing. | Textbooks—Authorship.

Classification: LCC Z286.S37 A35 2015 | DDC 070.5/94—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037749

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

### **Contents**

### **Acknowledgements**

This book would not exist without the incredible hard work, dedication and enthusiasm of all 13 contributors. First and foremost, credit must be given to them. They worked to some fairly improbable deadlines, yet each delivered everything punctually and – equally as importantly – with grace, good humour, and a sympathetic understanding of the book and its aims, as well as the wider Project. Their chapters are honest, thought-provoking, and important – resounding with experience and expertise. For this, and for so much else, we thank them.

Palgrave Macmillan must be thanked next. This Palgrave Pivot was their idea, and a risk, but the whole team there has been completely supportive throughout the entire process. Their willingness to experiment, and dedication to participating in the conversation has enabled this book to happen, and has made for a professional end result – just as an academic book should be. No stage in the rigorous reviewing process has been skipped, and people have committed to working round the clock to get the book ready for Academic Book Week. We would especially like to thank Jen McCall, who has been a marvel! Also Lauren Pettifer for the marketing, April James and Tomas René for the editorial support, and Philippa Grand, Caitlin Cornish and Katharine Nelson for the first conversation with the Project team where the initial idea for 'a book in a week' was suggested!

We'd also like to acknowledge the support we had for printing the first copies of the book, and for taking on distribution: to David Taylor, Andrew Bromley and all at Ingram Lightning Source – we are hugely grateful for your vital input into this project!

Finally, I would like to thank the person who does, perhaps, more than any of the rest of us involved in this volume, represent the academic book of the future: our Research Associate, Rebecca Lyons. She has project-managed the stages of the book to submission of the manuscript, communicated with speed and efficiency (and unflagging good temper) to all involved, edited with tact and skill, and shown exceptional multitasking talents in juggling this with all the other Project activity. With a background in publishing, but now in the final stages of writing her own PhD, Rebecca shows what the academic of the future will be like, and it is very impressive: thank you, Bex, for everything!

We have been incredibly lucky to work with people who have given so generously of their time and shared their experienced perspectives: despite the cynicism that surrounds many of the contexts the wider Project is investigating, we are finding a huge amount of work out there that is positive, collaborative and innovative. So we are incredibly proud and excited to be a part of the conversation around the academic book of the future, and to have played a part in the publication of this book.

> Samantha Rayner September 2015

### **Notes on Contributors**

**Sarah Barrow**, Head, School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln**:** As a media and film scholar who has published in the more traditional 'book' format, Sarah has always enjoyed the opportunities afforded by working with and championing film-maker, performance and artist colleagues and students. The perspective in her chapter draws also on experiences of cinema production, film education and festival programming. Since 2011, she has been part of the team that brings Frequency Festival of Digital Cultures to Lincoln, and in 2014 she jointly co-ordinated the Practice as Research festival/symposium The Impossible Constellation at Lincoln.

**Amy Bourke-Waite**, Senior Communications Manager, Palgrave Macmillan: Amy works in the communications team for Palgrave Macmillan and Nature Publishing Group, both part of newly formed company Springer Nature, a major new force in scientific, scholarly, professional and educational publishing. Amy has been involved in Palgrave Macmillan's Open Access monograph programme from its inception in 2013, and is fascinated by how Open Access book models are evolving in a challenging market, and how academics' perceptions of Open Access are changing over time.

**Anthony Cond**, Managing Director, Liverpool University Press: Anthony is the Managing Director of Liverpool University Press, the IPG Frankfurt Book Fair Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year 2015, and the Bookseller Independent Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year 2015. He is a Director of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and an Honorary Fellow in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool.

**Craig Dadds**, University Bookshop Manager, Canterbury Christ Church University: Craig has worked in academic bookselling at Canterbury Christ Church University since 1998, and prior to that from 1989 managed a branch of Albion Bookshop, a small chain of independent booksellers in South East England.

**Jaki Hawker**, Academic Manager, Blackwell's Edinburgh: Jaki's years of involvement in web-based digital text development, academic bookselling and managing textbook sales in the second largest academic bookshop in the UK have provided her with a broad perspective on text, publishing and bookselling. In a challenging retail environment, a successful academic bookshop has to be proactive and knowledgeable about their customers and their market, identifying trends and supporting learning.

**Peter Lake**, Group Business Development Director, JS Group: Peter has worked in publishing and bookselling for the past 30 years. As a publisher, he worked for Pearson, Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters where he was CEO of the leading legal publisher Sweet & Maxwell. During his time at Sweet & Maxwell, the business transitioned from being a print publisher to an online database and services provider. As well as running publishing businesses in the UK, he has also run businesses in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. For the past four years he has worked at the JS Group. The JS Group has two principal areas of activity: on campus, bookselling under the John Smith's brand and providing solutions for governments and universities to distribute financial and other support to students with the Aspire range of services. JS Group is also working very closely on the development and deployment of the Kortext eBook platform.

**Maja Maricevic**, Head of Higher Education, The British Library: Maja is responsible for the British Library's strategic relationships and developments with the higher education sector. In this role she is responsible for the Library's collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's new national institute for data sciences, which has its headquarters at The British Library. She is leading on the development of The British Library's relations with FutureLearn, the UK's largest MOOC provider, and has worked over a number of years to broaden the Library's postgraduate programme. She leads The British Library's collaborative work with the AHRC that has led to The Academic Book of the Future Project. She is actively involved with the Project as a member of the Advisory and Strategy Boards. She is also a member of the Universities UK Open Access Implementation Group, and a member of the RCUK Advisory Group, which is currently working to develop the RCUK Concordat on Open Research Data.

**Jenny McCall**, Global Head of Humanities, Palgrave Macmillan: Jen manages Palgrave Macmillan's humanities editorial team, and has overall responsibility for Palgrave's publishing portfolio of monographs, edited collections, handbooks and Palgrave Pivots covering literature, history, philosophy, theatre and performance studies, culture and media studies, and film studies. Latterly she has been working to develop Palgrave's Campaign for the Humanities: http://www.palgrave.com/page/humanitiescampaign/

**Tom Mole**, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh: Tom is the author or editor of four academic books, including *Byron's Romantic Celebrity*  (2007) and the *Broadview Reader in Book History* (2014). The Centre for the History of the Book, which he leads, was founded in 1995 to support advanced research into all aspects of the production, circulation and reception of books. In particular, he focuses on how understanding the history of the book in relation to past moments of media change can inform current debates about the future of the book.

**Michael Pidd**, Digital Director, HRI Digital, University of Sheffield: Michael has more than 20 years of experience in developing, managing and delivering collaborative research projects in the digital humanities. He believes that we are in a period of transformation, as all traditional aspects of academic book production and consumption are being challenged. In his view, understanding what the future of the academic book might be like is critical to understanding what the future of academic discourse might be like.

**Frances Pinter**, CEO, Manchester University Press and Founder, Knowledge Unlatched: Frances has been a publisher of scholarly books for several decades – publishing thousands of monographs over the years. She worked for the Open Society Foundation and saw first-hand the thirst for access to scholarly books around the world. She is the founder of Knowledge Unlatched.

**Kate Price**, Associate Director (Collections & Research Support), King's College London: Kate is responsible for strategic leadership across a diverse range of activities, including the provision of support for the research community in moving towards Open Access publication and the effective management of research data; the timely and cost effective procurement and cataloguing of library materials in all formats; and the management of the nationally significant Special Collections and Archives housed at King's. She is currently Chair of UKSG, an organisation that exists to connect the knowledge community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. Along with Virginia Havergal, she co-edited *E-books in Libraries: A Practical Guide*, published by Facet in February 2011.

**Neil Smyth**, Senior Librarian, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham: Before taking up his current post, Neil was the Arts Faculty Team Leader. Based in the Hallward Library, he is responsible for working with senior representatives in the Arts Faculty to shape the strategic direction of library services. His perspectives on the academic book come from working in a university library, where he is surrounded by academic books and, perhaps more importantly, current and future authors of books.

#### **OPEN**

### **Introduction: The Academic Book of the Future**

*Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner*

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004.

In early 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) partnered with The British Library to launch a call for teams to run The Academic Book of the Future Project. The Project brief was 'to explore the future of the academic book in the context of Open Access publishing and the digital revolution'.1 Our team2 successfully pitched to facilitate a two-pronged approach. We are using the expert services of the Research Information Network and Dr Michael Jubb to undertake a wide-ranging series of focus groups, gathering responses to our research questions,3 whilst the core Project team are consulting with the communities of practice connected to academic books to evoke responses via more detailed pieces of commissioned research, symposia, workshops and conferences. The mid-point of the Project, Academic Book Week (9–16 November, 2015),4 will highlight a week-long showcase of this activity, plus other special events from our partners, including the launch of the volume you are now reading.

Books matter. They contain knowledge, and knowledge, as the saying goes, is power. Over the centuries, control of the production of texts has been (and in some places still is) manipulated by governments, by religious groups and by those who fought (and those who are still fighting) for their wider, more openly accessible distribution. Books *are* matter: they are containers, crucibles, confrontations. They can teach, guide, inspire, soothe, and agitate. They can exist physically or digitally. Trying to define what a book is, or could be, is a challenging task: it exists in so many different guises, and is always finding new ways to reinvent itself. Our Project seeks rather to try and curate a map of these many guises, underlining the strength in the diversity of choice available to the author, whilst highlighting the challenges of production, distribution, use and preservation that these choices bring.

Academic books, at least in the UK, have a currency as part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which measures the quality of academic research. There is, therefore, a pressure to understand the map of academic publishing in its entirety. Given that scholarly communication operates on a global stage, with different countries having different (or no) national assessment systems, and that books (physical or digital) circulate in ways that are difficult to track, the Project team acknowledges that as cartographers, the most impact they can have on that map is to log and analyse some key landscape features. Engaging with so many different agents in the academic book circuit has enabled us to appreciate their widespread willingness to collaborate and their curiosity to learn from what others have done or experienced.

The small volume that you hold in your hands or are reading on a screen therefore represents a mighty amount of energy and commitment to the academic book – to all academic books, in their past, present and future states. The contributors have worked together with the teams at Palgrave and the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project to produce a witness to the extraordinary – and relevant – set of talents and experiences, ideas and reflections that connect people who inhabit the communities of practice that form the contexts of the academic book.

### **This publication**

An initial conversation with Palgrave Macmillan in March 2015 resulted in the challenge to create a Palgrave Pivot for Academic Book Week. The original suggestion – to create a book in a week – was modified to an attempt to go from commissioning to production to distribution in a rapid time frame: a Palgrave Pivot.5 Contributors were shortlisted from across the Project's four main stakeholder areas: publishing, libraries, academia and bookselling. A proposal was submitted by the Project team to Palgrave, and was sent off for review. The authors were approached and chapters commissioned in late July 2015. The proposal reviews came back just before first chapter drafts were due to be submitted, and in late August 2015 all of the authors submitted their chapters. Review and editing were undertaken by Rebecca Lyons, Samantha Rayner and Palgrave's Jen McCall, and with a turnaround of roughly one week, the chapters were back with their authors for amendments. The existence of this book owes a great deal to the unfailing dedication of each of the 13 contributors, who worked to extremely tight deadlines to expedite the crucial commissioning, editing and review stages.

It is fitting that this volume begins with the perspective of a book historian: no foray into the future should ignore the contexts of the past. Dr Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, suggests that whatever shapes or formats books might take in the future, their most important role will continue to be their 'transformative contributions to knowledge' (p. 16). Whilst digital technology affords new possibilities in terms of research and dissemination, it might also have drawbacks in terms of readers' engagement with, and comprehension of, the text. Mole reminds us of the usefulness of the printed codex, and the 'need to ensure that the most valuable qualities of the academic book as printed codex migrate to the new media environment without being devalued' (p. 16).

The next chapter moves from the past into an imagined future. In his satirical dystopia, Michael Pidd, Digital Director for HRI Digital at the University of Sheffield, describes a future in which books are wearable: smart lenses that project data onto the back of our eyelids, networked chips embedded into our hands to 'summon sheets of interactive v-paper', and Data Projection Gloves (p. 19). In this iteration of the future, the academic book has reached optimum levels of media-embedded, holistic, user-friendly interactivity. But the biggest innovation of all is the concept of 'Linked Ideas'. Books, articles and other research outputs have lost all their old distinction, because ideas on a topic can automatically be 'located, retrieved and assembled' from amongst 'all written discourse' (p. 10). 'Like' and 'dislike' indicators and a 'comment' facility are used for the peer-review process, and the need to submit books for assessment is obsolete. But does this vision of the future satisfy?

Dr Sarah Barrow, Head of the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln, moves the academic section towards an examination of the challenging issues of Practice as Research, and considers the academic book of the future in terms of research that does not conform to purely textual outputs. Barrow argues against the prioritisation or fetishisation of text over other forms of research output, and seeks to eliminate the walls between theory and practice, pointing to the video essay as a potential format that enables such work. There is a need, she argues, to 'trust in alternative ways of doing and presenting research' – the academic book of the future should be allowed to be 'other' (p. 25). But, she goes on to highlight, changes in policy and evaluation exercises will be required to enable and facilitate such otherness.

The needs of academics have shifted, but publishing and its processes and products have also changed. Developments such as print on demand – as well as huge shifts in digital affordances – have offered publishers new freedoms, such as in the format and platforms for ebooks and other digital content, and the ability to publish titles in smaller print runs for lower costs. This has coincided with changes in the way that academics research and write their books. In their chapter, Jenny McCall, Global Head of Humanities, and Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications Manager, at Palgrave Macmillan discuss the Palgrave Pivot format, and the motivation behind its development within these contexts.

The function of the academic book will be just as important as its form, argues Dr Frances Pinter, CEO of Manchester University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched. The 'scaffolding' (p. 40) around academic books, including business models, supply chains, metadata and digital tools, will require special attention. In the evolution of the academic book, it will be 'knowledge infrastructures' (p. 40) that are key: the 'ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects and their relationships within each discipline'.6 Interdisciplinarity will increase as digital affordances not only provide answers to old questions, but also encourage new questions to be asked. Delivery and discovery systems for ebooks will have to improve. And publishers, she says, will have to move with the times.

Anthony Cond, the Managing Director of Liverpool University Press, highlights the inextricable links between the university press (UP) and academia. A UP reports to its university library, senior university managers or quasi-university committees: it is 'a mirror to the budgetary, utility and reputational concerns of the subjects and institution it serves' (p. 47). But Cond is fairly confident about the place of UPs in new and emerging landscapes and contexts. Open Access and digital materials seem an inevitable part of the academic book of the future, but Cond holds that the 'esteem of the university press brand and the rigour of university press peer review' (p. 50) will be crucial – perhaps more so than ever. The academic book may have several possible futures, but, Cond says, the need for 'credentialisation' (p. 43) will remain a constant.

The close relationship between national libraries, researchers and academic books has not altered in its essence despite huge contextual changes, such as digital developments, says Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education at The British Library. However, researchers' 'reading and information seeking behaviours' (p. 59) have shifted, with Google becoming the most-used research channel. In such contexts, national libraries will be pivotal for their preservation role, with researcher access being provided through other channels. National libraries will also become increasingly useful for their role in preserving digital collections outside of scholarly publishing: non-academic ebooks, online newspapers, growing audio and video collections, web archives and digitised heritage collections. Going forward, Maricevic suggests, a stronger relationship between funders, policy-makers and other national libraries will be a key aspect of The British Library's role, as well as a willingness to experiment with new ways of working – this Project being a key example of this kind of initiative.

Neil Smyth, Senior Librarian of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham, also considers the possible strategic issues and opportunities surrounding the academic book of the future – with regard to university libraries. The expansion in book format options from physical to digital; the changing roles of academics and librarians, and the consequently shifting relationships between the two groups; and the importance of academic books to the REF and university funding all have massive implications for the role of university libraries. How, asks Smyth, will academic books be organised and accessed in the future, if they are not in libraries? What conversations should take place between academics and librarians around academic books? What is the place of libraries in processes such as the REF? And finally, how can libraries best support the academic authors of the future: the students?

Kate Price, Associate Director (Collections & Research Support) at King's College London, broadens the focus to consider the academic book beyond the academy. As agents of cultural change, the reach of academic books is wide, transforming knowledge and perceptions (consider Darwin, for example), and influencing cultural attitudes as their content and ideas disseminate. Price considers the social and technological barriers to accessing academic books; the potential volatility of digital content (issues with archiving social media, for instance), and the role that libraries might play in these issues in the future. Price calls libraries agents of cultural continuity, providing access to current and past thought, as well as the threads of reasoning linking the two, and examines the implications in an Open Access future where the academic book is entirely 'de-coupled from the concept of the library collection' (p. 78).

Jaki Hawker, Academic Manager of Blackwell's Edinburgh, views the future of the academic book in terms of demand and supply. 'For me,' Hawker states, 'the bottom line in considering the academic book of the future is not "What does it look like?" but "Does it sell?"' (p. 89). The consumer will shape the academic book of the future, which will be 'inclusive, collaborative, available across multiple platforms and in a number of formats' (p. 90). Given innovations such as Open Access, print on demand and learning platform development, it seems that the academic book of the future has infinite possibilities. And maybe it does. But Hawker argues that they will be 'created, enabled and shaped by the market' (p. 90).

Peter Lake, Group Business Development Director of the John Smith Group, focuses on a particular type of academic book: the undergraduate textbook. Traditionally the staple for academic publishers, this type of academic book is in decline in the face of major sea-changes in the ways that universities deliver their courses, and the ways in which publishers are catering for them. Universities often now create their own materials – materials that increasingly replace textbooks – including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), online lectures and other digital resources. Publishers are creating new solutions too, blending 'traditional textbook content with adaptive learning technologies, embedded testing and assessment features, integrated assignment functionality, personal study wallets and records, and collaborative learning tools' (p. 94). 'So,' Lake asks, 'if the university bookseller is going to be selling fewer textbooks, what will its role be in the future?' (p. 94). The bookseller of the future may very well assist in the discovery of resources 'from multiple providers and in multiple formats' (p. 95); create and maintain digital content platforms; and take an active part in analytics and evaluation services.

Craig Dadds, the University Bookshop Manager at Canterbury Christ Church University, considers the campus bookshop and its relationship with the people and contexts in which academic books are written and used. For Dadds, the campus bookshop is key to the cultural life of the university, the student and staff experience, and the options and opportunities available to those within the university system. He is supported by a survey, undertaken at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), of one hundred academics. When asked 'What are the benefits of an academic bookshop on campus?', responses cited the importance of the academic bookshop as a bridge between academia and the wider public, with open talks, book signings and other events playing a key role. CCCU's academics named the bookshop as a pivotal location for locating niche and specialist information with the support of knowledgeable staff. The bookshop is also an important symbol of 'academic rigour and learning' (p. 100) to those embedded within its contexts, as well as those without. In this chapter the bookshop emerges as a key player in the world of academic books, aiding not just in their dissemination, but assisting in their creation and reach into the wider world beyond academia.

### **A launch pad for further conversations**

The practice-based research process of creating this Palgrave Pivot has not only resulted in an output with an integrity that the uncompromised review procedures protected, but it has innovated in several different ways: the spread of authors across very different areas; the speed with which they composed and submitted their chapters; the work flows; and even the cover – which was chosen by a public vote. But the greatest innovation of this publication – what really makes it unique – is the conversations that have been and will be created around it. Read them individually, and the chapters in this volume are interesting, thoughtprovoking, insightful. Put them together, and suddenly new angles emerge: contexts shift, horizons broaden.

This volume serves as a launch pad for future conversations to take place. These will help to generate responses that will feed into and shape the second half of the Project's life, and they will also help to shape the wider conversations taking place around the academic book in broader areas, such as policy and government.

Professor Geoffrey Crossick ended his report *Monographs and Open Access* by remarking how impressed he had been by the willingness of the arts, humanities, and social science communities to engage with him, and urging: 'It is important that this engagement continues, because there is much to be gained by working with the grain, and much to be lost by not doing so.'7 This Palgrave Pivot provides tangible proof (in hard copy and Open Access formats, and in the paratexts that have been created and collected around its production) that engagement is continuing via the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, and beyond. The future of the academic book is collaboration. The future of the academic book is in your hands.

### **Notes**

Department of Digital Humanities, King's College, London) and Rebecca Lyons (Research Associate, UCL).

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

### **OPEN**

### 1 **The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact**

*Tom Mole*

**Abstract**: For as long as it has existed in its modern form, the academic book has operated in what Jerome McGann calls 'a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes […] and the bibliographical codes'. It unites a particular discursive genre with a particular material format. But now the double helix is starting to unravel as new, genetically modified digital formats force us to rethink what the academic book can be. This moment of media change meshes with shifts in the funding and assessment of research, developments in researchers' intellectual agendas and the challenges of Open Access. As disciplinary boundaries become more porous and scholarly outputs more varied, these changes will affect every stage in the life-cycle of the academic book.

**Keywords:** academic book of the future; academic codex; assessment; book history; format; funding monograph; hiring; PhD thesis; promotion; research output; socially-embedded media artifact; the academy

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006.

For as long as it has existed in its modern form as a printed codex, the academic book has operated in what Jerome McGann calls 'a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes [ ... ] and the bibliographical codes'.1 It unites a particular discursive genre with a particular material format. But now the double helix is starting to unravel as new, genetically modified digital formats force us to rethink what the academic book can be. This moment of media change meshes with shifts in the funding and assessment of research, developments in researchers' intellectual agendas and the challenges of Open Access. As disciplinary boundaries become more porous and scholarly outputs more varied, these changes will affect every stage in the life-cycle of the academic book, from research, collaboration and writing through publication, marketing, reading and preservation, whether it is a monograph, a scholarly edition, a collection of essays or a record of creative endeavour. Addressing the challenges the academic book of the future poses requires academics, librarians, publishers, funding councils, creative technologists, and research consumers to collaborate.

Intellectual work is starting to take on a variety of new forms, both as a result of scholars rethinking the best format in which to share their ideas, and as a result of external demands for transparent, measurable outputs. These shifts mandate a moment of self-reflection about the academic book. We can't afford to draw battle lines between the boosters of new technologies and the naysayers who cling to things as they were. Instead, we need a debate that is both historically informed and technologically literate. It should examine what new kinds of intellectual work the academic book of the future will make possible. But it should also consider what current features of the academic book are essential to excellent research and scholarship and should be preserved in the future. As we consider how field-changing work of lasting and transformative value in the humanities will be written, funded, rewarded, disseminated and preserved in a new media environment, we need to understand the affordances and limitations of the printed codex as an artefact of intellectual life. As the field that studies the production, circulation and reception of books as material artefacts in historical perspective, book history brings a distinctive approach to such debates. This short essay reflects this perspective by situating the academic book materially, institutionally and historically in order to understand what's at stake in its current transformation.

The current form of the academic book as a printed codex constrains arts and humanities researchers in various specific ways: scholars of screen media cannot include clips from films, TV programmes or computer games; cultural geographers cannot include dynamic interactive maps; art historians and scholars of visual culture cannot typically include large numbers of colour images; musicologists cannot include audio; researchers working with large data-sets cannot typically publish the data on which their arguments depend; textual editors cannot include all the documentary evidence they have assembled; scholars engaged in creative and performing arts research cannot always document their practice adequately. The processes of assessment and production are slow and post-publication revision is difficult. It should be possible to overcome some of these constraints when the academic book no longer (only) takes the form of a printed codex. This means that the academic book of the future must do more than remediate the printed codex, replicating the experience of paper books in digital formats as current e-readers typically do.

Even as the constraints of the printed codex become harder to ignore, systemic factors combine to pressure scholars to write more of them. Many North American universities that would not have required a monograph for tenure in humanities disciplines a decade ago now routinely look for one, while some that have always expected a monograph for tenure now expect to see significant progress towards a second book. In the UK, Research Excellence Framework (REF) panels tend to value monographs highly (and arguably to undervalue edited collections and scholarly editions). Monographs feature prominently in hiring and promotion decisions, increasing the pressure on scholars at all career stages to think of their work in terms of monograph publication.2 At the same time, many academic presses are publishing fewer monographs – especially in certain disciplines such as modern languages – and are printing fewer copies of the monographs they do publish. Libraries buy fewer monographs, largely because they spend increasing fractions of their shrinking acquisitions budgets on bundled scientific journals published for profit. In these conditions we have to ask what the academic book is for.

Despite its limitations, the monograph has become a gold standard in many humanities disciplines for good reasons. The academic book's rise to the centre of our intellectual lives has its own long history. The codex and the architecture of the page have been built into the fabric of the academy and the careers of those who work there ever since the university system developed in the twelfth century.3 The advent of printing helped produce the Renaissance's flowering of humanistic scholarship and the transformation of the academy it entailed.4 With the massive proliferation of printed books at the end of the eighteenth century the modern research university took shape, as Chad Wellmon has argued, as an institution to control the production, dissemination, organisation and storage of books.5 As the modern disciplinary organisation of knowledge emerged in the nineteenth century and then the higher education sector expanded in Europe and North America in the twentieth, the monograph became the most valued form of research output and, eventually, the signal achievement allowing access to senior positions in the profession. In these contexts, the monograph aimed to be the definitive statement of an author's work on a well-defined topic, reflecting a relatively ambitious research programme, typically carried out over several years, informed by a comprehensive grasp of existing work in the field, which reflected sustained intellectual effort at the highest level and aspired to produce a lasting contribution to knowledge.

Understanding the history of the academic monograph shows us that the printed academic codex is a socially-embedded media artefact, whose significance lies as much in the institutional and professional structures it helps to produce as in the technology of print itself.6 The academic book has fostered assessment practices that assure quality, such as peer review, and add value, such as publishers' editing, design, layout, indexing and so on. These structures ensure that the prestige of the academic book is justified and they must be replicated or revised in the digital environment. The academic book has given rise to professional protocols that inform credentialing, hiring, promotion and reward decisions. While a PhD thesis differs in important ways from a published book, the shape of the doctorate mirrors the form of the monograph: a doctorate is in large part a course of training in how to write a book. The monograph has been connected to a marketing and dissemination apparatus that allows it to reach its audience effectively. It benefits from institutional structures and communities of practice, such as libraries within and beyond universities, that ensure its long-term preservation and accessibility. The academic book is and will remain embedded in social, professional and institutional structures that make it an effective research output. Changing the form of the academic book will mean changing those structures in order for them to remain fit for purpose. If our current moment of media change is to enrich and empower humanistic scholarship rather than cheapening it, then, we need to think about how new forms of output will force us to revise our institutional structures, our forms of training and credentialing, our narratives of professional development, our models of research practice, our understandings of collaboration, and our forms of knowledge production, circulation and archiving.

Not all of the academic book's future users will be human. As machinereading, text-mining, online 'social annotation' and related approaches come of age, the academic book will need to be optimised for new reading techniques. This creates particular challenges where the book includes non-textual content. As humanities researchers increasingly want to zoom in and out between 'distant' and 'close' reading protocols, the academic book will need to facilitate scaleable reading.7 We must ensure that academic books are designed today in such a way that they will be findable, citeable and readable in the long term, using as yet undeveloped tools. Scholars in the future will want not only to write different kinds of books, but also to discover, study and interrogate books in new ways. The academic book of the future will need to be future-proof.

We can read printed books that are 600 years old. The academic book of the future may not remain useable for so long. The printed codex marries hardware (the paper and ink) and software (the words and ideas). This makes it one of the most durable data-storage technologies ever devised. This is not the case for electronic formats, where the 'content' needs to be readable on new devices powered by upgraded software. Most printed books exist relatively well in regimes of benign neglect. With reasonably constant temperature and humidity levels, and without overexposure to light or moisture, they remain readable for centuries.8 The same is not true of electronic formats, which often become irrecoverable after only a few years due to obsolescent hardware and software. We therefore need to consider who will bear the ongoing responsibility and cost of maintaining long-term access and usability of academic books created in digital formats, and the datasets associated with them. This means remixing the division of labour that currently exists among faculty, publishers, and librarians.

As the academic book of the future takes shape, we will also need to engage seriously with the concerns raised in many quarters that digital media make sustained intellectual work more difficult, even while they facilitate research in some respects. Drawing on the neuroscience of reading, some commentators have asked whether the kind of long-form linear argumentation that has been the gold standard of humanistic scholarship will be sustainable in digital formats or will find readers among digital natives.9 There is some evidence that reading on the screen produces lower levels of comprehension and retention compared with reading on the page, at least among the current generation of university students.10 The kind of sustained absorptive reading the humanities value and academic monographs demand may simply be harder on screen, especially on internet-enabled devices with their endless potential for distraction.

Finally, there is a politics of the academic book. Those of us employed in the academy, especially in the UK, are increasingly asked to work faster, to submit to greater scrutiny, to be more responsive to agendas we didn't set, and to undertake research that will produce immediate, direct and measurable impacts beyond the academy. The academic monograph as a form, with its long gestation, its in-built reflection on its own working assumptions, its resistance to quick reading or easy summary and its aspiration to long-term significance, offers some resistance to these demands. The academic book of the future might allow us to work faster and more responsively thanks to the affordances of digital media. We must learn to benefit from these advantages, without accepting uncritically the managerialist insistence on accelerated production, the demand to be responsive and 'relevant', or the wider culture of endless distraction, soundbites and clickbait.

Scholars in the arts and humanities have already begun to reflect on how shifts in the media ecology will transform their work.11 We now face the challenge of imagining how the academic book of the future will continue to make transformative contributions to knowledge. As new formats for the long-form output emerge, they have the potential to transform not only the way we disseminate our research but also the ways in which we conceive and produce it. Innovations from within arts and humanities scholarship and pressures from outside are combining to produce a shift in the forms of scholarly communication that may come to seem as significant as the introduction of print itself. Many people have a stake in the academic book of the future. If the UK can innovate in this area it will compete internationally for research talent, student recruitment and intellectual leadership. At the same time, we need to ensure that the most valuable qualities of the academic book as printed codex migrate to the new media environment without being devalued. If we get it right, new understandings of what a book can be will enable academic work that at present remains unwritten, indeed unthought.

### **Notes**

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view

a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

### **OPEN**

# 2 **Wearable Books**

*Michael Pidd*

**Abstract**: This chapter explores a dystopian world in which technology has become pervasive throughout academic discourse, controlling the way in which books are authored, read, cited, and assessed. However, this is also a parody of the present: our obsession with data and metrics; our suspicion of consumer technology; and our unspoken feeling that there are perhaps too many academic books in the world. Above all else, this chapter seeks to reinforce the importance of books as the carriers of ideas*.*

**Keywords**: digital humanities; ebooks; humanities; ideas; Linked Data; peer review; printed books; technology

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0007.

The Research Impact Framework of 2038 (RIF2038) was no more remarkable than previous RIFs in many respects. As a self-imposed audit of the impact of academic research by UK universities, it had been exhausting, expensive, hair-splitting, and largely ignored by the public for whom the Pub Enjoyment Index of 2031 remained a greater influence on undergraduate admissions. However, the RIF had become a bastion of the academic book in its wearable form. For those who pondered the future of academic books and, no less, the future of academic discourse itself, it was clear that unless the RIF changed its rules as to what constituted an acceptable submission (in other words, an acceptable catalyst of impact), Wearable Books were here to stay. RIF performance underpinned all promotions during each year's academic transfer window, so most scholars continued to spin Wearable Books without much questioning. Of course the fact that the RIF's rules were determined by the academics themselves, as they had been for time immemorial, tended to be forgotten by its critics.

However, dissenters of the Wearable Book did exist. It was not the specifically *wearable* aspect of the book that these people were unhappy with. There were plenty of media for accessing academic content, such as smart lenses that projected data onto the reverse of your eyelids, smart spectacles for the squeamish, and the electro-latex Data Projection Glove (reminiscent of surgical gloves) that pre-dated Apple's famous iGlove. Some people even accessed academic content on their television (unwearable books; because in those days the TV was connected to the Internet). Of course now we can easily summon sheets of interactive v-paper to appear thanks to the networked chip embedded in our hands. No, it was not the media that made Wearable Books alarming to some academics. It was the 'Linked Ideas' that underpin their content and the way in which these ideas were assessed.

It is perhaps difficult for many of us to recall that in the mid-2020s the use of Linked Ideas had emerged as the primary technical method for structuring academic discourse. It evolved from the earlier Linked Data concepts pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, whereby structured information could be identified by computers, retrieved, and combined with other structured information in ways that were more meaningful for users. In other words, computers could appear to *understand* information. Initially Linked Ideas simply referred to a general set of technical methods for combining Linked Data, but the term gradually became associated with what happens when lots of information becomes dynamically linked together: ideas form. Eventually academics began authoring not only research data (in the sense of information) but also concepts, theories, beliefs, and opinions using Linked Ideas methods.

The result was a new type of book. Books were no longer lengthy discourses from the perspective of a single individual. Books became narratives that located, retrieved, and assembled ideas from all written discourse based on the topic at hand. For example, when reading *Bracknell Lives*, Snaghen and Bootmender's book about crime and poverty in late twentieth-century Bracknell, their ideas concerning the influence of human agency on Bracknell Forest Council's evolving social policy would be interweaved with the counter-arguments from Numen, Steer, and James, respectively. However, Numen's view that only call-centre staff exhibited agency in Bracknell would be counter-argued by Howie's reference to a data visualisation of TV-licence dodgers in Winkfield. The book would also give helpful tips where appropriate, such as 'people who agree with Snaghen also think this ...'. Readers would be led through a narrative that presented the tradition of argument and counter-argument. Readers were free to move on to the author's next idea once sufficiently illuminated or dulled by the present discourse.

Linked Ideas meant that the old distinction between articles, monographs, and co-authored books disappeared. Text was text. It was just a question of the length of an academic debate around an idea; the value of what was being said rather than how long it took for you to say it. Linked Ideas also enabled academic discourse and research data (the evidence on which academic ideas were founded) to be combined, enabling better scrutiny of one's interpretation of the evidence by others. During the early twenty-first century many academics had been peculiarly resistant to the idea of academic books moving into the same digital domains as their research data. Even ebooks were viewed with distrust. However, the rise of open content, the RIF, and the demise of academic print publishers1 accelerated this change due to the citation effect that was created by the principle of 'if it ain't free then I ain't reading it'.

The beauty of Linked Ideas was that deliberately engineered academic algorithms were able to automatically identify, retrieve, and combine relevant aspects of other people's written discourse. Further, the algorithms would re-write the text in the process of assembling it, giving the illusion of a single-authored book without the discordance of different writing styles. Undertaking tedious literature reviews became a thing of the past, whilst those academics who failed to structure their books using Linked Ideas methods would consign themselves to oblivion. Naturally, deliberately engineered academic tools had to be created that would assist with the process of authorship. These labour-saving tools would constantly scan an author's transcript and make suggestions as to where one idea began and ended, so that it could be tagged and identified as such. These helpful prompts were critical for ensuring that an academic's book was correctly tagged. You could switch them off if they proved too irritating, but that would be consigning yourself to oblivion. University libraries, who were the curators of Wearable Books, would never accept a treatise of unlinked ideas.

Linked Ideas enabled a revolution in peer review and assessment, subsequently adopted by the RIF. Academic peers were able to comment on a colleague's work instantly using the very same Linked Ideas methods and deliberately engineered academic tools. However, all responses had to be accompanied by a 'like' or a 'dislike' indicator for RIF counting purposes ('likometrics') because it was no longer considered practicable to actually read books for assessment. In the USA where academic books were driven by the tenure system, it was generally accepted that 1,200 'likes' were needed to secure a tenure, although these could be spread across multiple ideas, whilst 800 'likes' for an individual idea would promote it to the status of a fact and eligible for inclusion in *Wikipedia*. Since every 'like' had to be accompanied by a full, critical response to the academic's idea, and this in turn could be liked or disliked by other peers, computer science departments had been required to debate the minutiae of counting algorithms at length in published works that nobody ever read. Further, any ideas that received too many 'dislikes' would be relegated automatically by the algorithms. In other words, it was unlikely that a disliked idea would be incorporated into the discourse of a Wearable Book.

Wearable Books and Linked Ideas had originated in the sciences where lengthy discourse was not of interest, and had been developed in response to what had already been happening with popular fiction. Printed books were antique, the subject of book historians, and new books were only ever printed in paper or ebook formats as novelty gifts for Christmas and Father's Day. All useful printed books had been digitised and ingested into the universe of Linked Ideas long ago.

However, it was in the humanities that dissenting voices began to be heard, culminating in the RIF2038 when a university somewhere in Yorkshire included a printed monograph by the historian Professor Audrey Chad as part of its submission. The subject of the book was unmemorable. It was unclear to the RIF panellists whether the book should be accepted or disqualified; whether they should count it or read it. Chad was asked if she would digitise the object and re-submit, but she declined to do so. Not even as an ebook.

As she would later say, 'It can be stultifying to be required to work within the constraints of the Wearable Book format, deafened by the constant noise of competing academic discourses that are the stock-intrade for Linked Ideas, always reminding you that your own ideas are not an island'.2

In Chad's opinion there was sometimes a value in reading a lengthy, reflective work on a particular topic without the intrusion of other people's views; hearing a single voice articulating one person's ideas, irrespective of whether the ideas are transformative or not. This, she argued, was the genius of the old monograph in its printed form. Further, Chad argued that footnotes and a passing reference to primary sources could sometimes suffice, rather than blurring one person's discourse with the immediacy of evidence. 'Leave it in the repository! #StopTheData' she famously twerped.

Chad's book did little to influence the RIF, but it did give rise to Print Humanities and new ways of communicating research. It showed that non-digital methodologies can enable you to answer existing research questions from new perspectives, as well as explore new types of research questions that would be inconceivable using digital techniques. For example, writing slowly and at length could become a tool for thinking. Crucially, Print Humanities enabled academics to begin disempowering the class that sociologists now dub 'the knowledge elite': the people who understand how the technology of knowledge works, such as programmers, designers and engineers, as opposed to the consumers who simply use technology for access to knowledge, such as academics and others. Technology companies had been in the vanguard of this shift towards a knowledge elite in the early twenty-first century, but eventually even humanities scholars had need of a technologist in order to undertake research and publish their findings. Gradually – beginning with the transformation of the ebook into an unnecessarily over-complicated hypertext 'journey' – technologists dictated the shape of discourse.

Print Humanities is now emerging as a serious and respected body of methods within humanities research and communication. Practitioners have their own Manifesto. Barely a week goes by without a new Chair in Print Humanities being advertised, and the next RIF is expected to explicitly permit printed monographs, which will go a long way towards making printed books an acceptable part of the discourse ecosystem. The printed book's future is likely to be disruptive, with some academics declaring that it is here to stay and others believing that it will be a short-lived fad. Some colleagues even argue that Print Humanities should be treated as a new discipline. What is certain is that the future of the Wearable Book and Linked Ideas is no longer guaranteed. As such, a consortium of key stakeholders – academics, librarians, technologists and opticians – is now needed to explore what academic books might be like in the future.

Likes: 1,198. Dislikes: 7.

### **Notes**

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

### **OPEN**

### 3 **The Impossible Constellation: Practice as Research as a Viable Alternative1**

*Sarah Barrow*

**Abstract**: This chapter draws attention to the features, values and debates of Practice as Research, arguing for its approaches, methods and outputs to be considered as equivalent to those used by more traditional humanities scholars, i.e. the 'academic book'. Indeed, it asks us to rethink our fetishisation of the physical book artefact as the pre-eminent model of publication in academic terms, and suggests we explore and support the development of other forms that might be more relevant to the digital age, and that attempt to break down the walls between theory and practice. It ends with a focus on the video essay form, which has the potential to reshape the subjects of Media and Film Studies in particular*.*

**Keywords**: fetishisation of text; non-textual research outputs; Practice as Research; theory and practice; video essay

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0008.

The difficulty with the term 'academic book' for those working in creative arts subjects, whether critical studies or creative production, or a fruitful combination of both these areas, is that the very word 'book' conjures up almost exclusively the image of a physical set of written, printed, illustrated sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, and fastened together at one side. And yet in an age of technical innovation, when we are encouraged by funders, institutions, our students and our own imaginations to think and work more creatively and to explore across traditional disciplinary boundaries, it is time to normalise alternative ways to publish and circulate ideas. This statement is not an attempt to undermine the enormous value of the physical 'book' or the rigour and review that goes with its publication; rather it is to do with seeking acknowledgement for and trust in alternative ways of doing and presenting research, valorising interdisciplinary and collaborative effort, and accepting that high-quality academic endeavour might result in something 'other'.

This brief essay highlights an approach to research and publication that has become increasingly important within the creative arts, and yet which still seems to be treated with scepticism by those more comfortable with traditional formats. This approach, most commonly known as 'Practice as Research' [PaR] has been much debated and scrutinised over the last two decades in particular, with a burgeoning literature, specialist subject networks, funded investigations in the UK and elsewhere, and a host of events that have attempted to gather together so-called traditional scholars with practitioner researchers to test the boundaries of acceptable research approaches and publication formats.2 Since this approach emerged as a result of the establishment of positions, programmes, departments, and even universities of and for the arts when previously artist-scholars and art schools were regarded as separate entities, it has become necessary and desirable for distinctions to be identified between 'Practice as Research' and professional practice (whether from artistic or industry contexts) where the research element is not so vital. For Denis Nelson, for example, 'PaR involves a research project in which practice is a key method of inquiry and where, in respect of the arts, a practice (creative writing, dance, musical score/ performance, theatre/performance, visual exhibition, film, or other cultural practice) is submitted as substantial evidence of a research inquiry'.3 It is a kind of 'practical knowing-in-doing', where insight, methodological rigour and originality are key, and might be shared with and learn from other practice-based disciplines such as education and ethnography.

This issue for media subjects in particular in terms of the pre-eminent privileging of 'the book' was brought to the fore yet again in the most recent Research Excellence Framework 2014, when the sub-panel for Unit of Assessment 36 (Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management)4 failed to include a single practitioner-researcher.5 This led to understandable anxiety amongst some academics (or their institutions) when it came to making the key decisions about which of their outputs to propose for submission. Many decided to play it safe and stick with the traditional output formats even when some of their most complex, rigorous and original work – with the most impact potential – had been produced in a media format: video, script, installation, sonic art, multimedia platform, for example. It is not just academic institutions that have been hesitant to support the Practice as Research approach, despite the possibility of embracing a more inclusive agenda in so doing. Within the media subjects, many professional practitioners-turned-academics from a more emphatically industrial background tend to resist the need to make explicit the specific research elements of their creative endeavour, viewing it as 'an unwarranted imposition from beyond their culture'.6 Meanwhile, more established scholars in media with backgrounds in the humanities/social sciences have struggled to appreciate Practice as Research as a viable approach for subject areas that are still fighting to be taken seriously by the academy as disciplines in themselves. And yet, with increasing economic pressures, the need for practitioners, as Sullivan has put it, 'to consider their responsibilities as *researchers* as well as teachers' has become impossible to ignore and in fact has the potential to force institutional structures to open up 'in response to a new mood of innovation and change'.7

One PaR approach to enquiry and output that has long been familiar within the world of experimental media, and seems to be making a resurgence as a serious player on the research and publication agenda is the video essay/essay film. The term was used as far back as the 1940s by abstract Dadaist German film-maker Hans Richter, as a form that 'allows the film-maker to transgress the rules and parameters of the traditional documentary practice, granting the imagination with all its artistic potentiality free reign'.8 During the period of the French New Wave (1959–68), philosopher film-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais distinguished themselves with their 'interrogations of a world of images – and [ ... ] the power of the moving image itself – characteristically set to literate voiceovers of wilful indeterminacy'.9 The format continued to gain momentum and distinction amongst philosopher film-makers such as Chris Marker whose meditations on time, humanity and memory in *La Jetée* (1962) and *Sans soleil* (1982) are considered by academics and critics to be some of the greatest *film essays* (or, more accurately given their meditation on the nature of film itself, *essay films*) of all time. Indeed, the potential for cinema to become a vehicle for ideas about art and imagery, and about the world itself, has been acknowledged since at least as far back as the uber-film theorist André Bazin of the 1940s whose ontological approach to the image was part of an even older quest to 'secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art' that extends back almost as far as the birth of cinema itself.10

So, what is a video essay and how does it work as example of Practice as Research in terms of approach, genre and output that might be regarded as a viable alternative to the academic book? A substantial video essay, through both its content and its formal qualities, should of course provide new insights, whether into specific films or sets or films and/or into the aesthetic, socio-economic, political and/or cultural contexts within which those exist. The best of these might also break new ground in demonstrating how the emerging form of the video essay, often articulated as experimental documentary, without voice-over or subtitling, might help us to view the world from a fresh perspective. They should also, as Erlend Lavik argues, demonstrate 'the ability to not just engage with complex thought, but to pull it into focus, and to articulate and communicate those ideas clearly'.11 Above all, the video essay should serve as 'a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent with its own place in the world'.12 The video essay format, which can vary considerably in length, has experienced a noticeable renaissance thanks to the work of respected theorist-practitioner-activists such as Catherine Grant and Michael Chanan, amongst others, who not only develop and distribute – mainly through peer-reviewed Open Access platforms – their own new insights through video-essay collections, but also champion the work of others in the field.13 Indeed, for Grant,14 the potential of the video essay is that it 'can inspire compelling work not only because, with its possibilities for direct audiovisual quotation, it can enhance the kinds of explanatory research that have always been carried out on films, but also precisely because of its potential for more "poetic", creative and *performative* critical approaches to moving image research'.

Of course there will continue to be arguments put forward about the difficulties for the storage, conservation, referencing and archiving of such practice-led research outputs, as well as about equivalence with traditional outputs. The ephemerality and instability of such work, especially when dealing with performance or time-based multi-media installation, for example, 'pose particular challenges to the notion of a fixed, measurable and recordable knowledge'.15 Nevertheless, the challenge must be taken on if we are to embrace the creative and epistemological potential of twenty-first-century technology; for, '[i]n the age of the digital, there is [surely] no need to stop, or even start, at the printed word any more'.16 Let's hope that the main networks supporting the media subjects in the UK, MECCSA and BAFTSS will show leadership in this regard and support initiatives and opportunities for innovative routes to publication.17

### **Notes**

#### Sarah Barrow

teach and research practice have a strong voice within the subject association and beyond. BAFTSS (the British Association for Film, TV and Screen Studies) has just launched the first Practice Research Award, reflecting the growing 'performative' tendency of film and moving-image research taking place in/through/around practice-based outputs.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

# Part II **Publishers**

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0009

### **OPEN**

### 4 **The Academic Book of the Future and the Need to Break Boundaries**

*Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite*

**Abstract**: Market research demonstrates that scholars' attitudes towards monographs are changing, and that there is appetite for a shorter monograph form. The introduction of mid-length research format Palgrave Pivot in 2012 has proved that such a venture can be successful, and that more flexibility and speed may hold the key to the academic book of the future in humanities and social science research. In this chapter Jenny McCall, Global Head of Humanities at Palgrave Macmillan, and Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications Manager at Palgrave Macmillan, consider the demand for Palgrave Pivot and similar mid-length offerings from academic publishers, the reception they have received from the academic community, and where we might go from here.

**Keywords**: academic publishers; market research; mid-length offering; Palgrave Pivot; print on demand; publishing speed; shorter monograph form

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0010.

Traditional methods of publishing academic research, for scholars working in the humanities, business or social sciences, have been to choose to publish either one or more journal articles, or a monograph. Both follow standard formats which were originally dictated by the limits of printing presses. Most scholarly journal articles are between 7,000 and 8,000 words, and most scholarly print books are between 70,000 and 110,000 words in length, with little flexibility for any word count in between. Scholars whose research findings naturally falls in between those word counts have, for hundreds of years, either separated their long research into a number of journal articles (which requires a huge time commitment) or have expanded their word counts unnecessarily to fit the requirements of a monograph.

Reform of the status quo has been possible for a while. As sales of print monographs decline, digital publishing has been slowly on the increase. Journal publishing has embraced digital since the early 1990s, and sales of ebooks are growing, albeit slowly (according to analysts Simba,1 they still only represent 6 per cent of sales). Meanwhile, printon-demand technology has enabled publishers to run smaller print runs at increasingly lower cost and higher quality, further freeing content from the restraints of physical printing. In 2010, an article in *The Economist* claimed that 'About 10 of Cambridge University Press's sales of academic and professional titles are generated by books printed on demand – compared with 3 five years ago. Before POD, if sales of one of the publisher's books dropped below 50 copies a year, it was taken out of print. Now a publisher can keep titles available forever.'2

Emboldened by ad hoc conversations between Palgrave Macmillan editors and their authors, who seemed frustrated by having to adhere to what many saw as arbitrary boundaries set by the limits of traditional publishing and printing, in 2011 Palgrave carried out a programme of quantitative and qualitative research to understand how we might improve the academic publishing landscape.

The Palgrave Macmillan Research Panel was established in October 2011, and was formed of 1,268 researchers recruited from a wide range of disciplines and geographic locations across the humanities and social sciences (HSS). The in-house team devised and circulated a survey to comprehensively investigate the panel's views on the process of HSS publishing and specifically on the length of publishing formats. Of the responders, 93 per cent had published one or more peer-reviewed research article in the last five years, while 54 per cent had published a peer-reviewed monograph in the last five years.3

Two-thirds (64 per cent of the 870 who responded to the survey) felt that the length of journal articles was about right, while for monographs this figure was 50 per cent. The results demonstrated that a number of authors (36 per cent journal article authors and 50 per cent monograph authors) were not satisfied with the formats available to them. Almost all those who felt that the length was not right said that the length was too long. The results showed that only 16 per cent believed that current outputs (journal articles and monographs) were sufficient. Of those who felt that a mid-form was a good idea, or who were neutral, 84 per cent indicated that they would be likely to publish in this format.4

The survey responses confirmed the suspicion of the Palgrave Macmillan editors that for some members of the academic community, a lack of mid-length publication options and slow production times represented a real problem. A mid-length format for original research which published faster would represent a solution to that problem. However, the editorial standards our authors expected could not be compromised.

At this time, the mid-length research that was available consisted of condensed summaries of existing research. Springer, one of the bigger academic publishers, announced SpringerBriefs in November 2010. SpringerBriefs are concise summaries of cutting-edge research and practical applications across a wide spectrum of fields, usually between 50 and 125 pages in length. Springer produce versions in print, ebook, and MyCopy for readers to access 24 hours a day, and boast a quick turnaround for production.\*

Similarly, Princeton Shorts were launched in 2011, an initiative by Princeton University Press. These were brief selections taken from previously published influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format.5

Based on the market research we had undertaken, we believed that there was demand for high-quality, original, peer-reviewed content produced quickly. Consistently, participants expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the length of time it takes to produce a typical monograph. Many wanted to be able to publish research reacting to current affairs more quickly, especially in response to the Research Excellence Framework's request for academics to prove their works' impact.

The then Managing Director of Palgrave Macmillan Sam Burridge summed it up effectively when she told the *London Review of Books* blog: 'Original, cutting-edge research is the fire that fuels knowledge and education. Without the dissemination of new thought, new ideas, and challenges to current thinking, textbooks don't change, we don't learn from the past, and society doesn't advance. What we publish today will impact what our children study tomorrow, our social policy, and how businesses are run'.6

She added: 'Our role as a publisher now goes beyond the selection and dissemination of content. It's about ensuring the impact of research is at least equal to its importance. The humanities and social sciences find it much harder to be heard than the science subjects, as there is less funding and fewer tools available to support our academics. But we see our role as working to change this, breaking down boundaries, and in doing so, helping research to improve our world.'

Palgrave Pivots are a digital-first, peer-reviewed, original research format of around 30,000–50,000 words, with a commitment to publish the books within 12 weeks of acceptance. All elements of the Palgrave Macmillan publishing process were interrogated to allow for the mid-length format and enable faster publication. Authors are asked to answer any questions from copy-editors and typesetters very rapidly, and a wide range of attractive template cover designs are used instead of bespoke designs. In an interview with the *Vulpes Libris* blog, Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor for Literature at Palgrave Macmillan, reinforced the integrity of the process. He said: 'All [Palgrave Pivots] are copy-edited and typeset by us and we certainly wouldn't expect authors to present camera-ready copy. Part of the service that we provide as a publisher is the layout/typesetting and editing ... and we wouldn't dream of compromising on this to cut costs or to simply speed things up.'7

Print copies are available on demand. In order to ensure that the publication format would be used by academics in practice, Palgrave Macmillan liaised closely with stakeholders including librarians and booksellers to ensure that they would be promptly announced and correctly classified. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) confirmed that research outputs published with Palgrave Pivot are eligible for the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) – subject to all other criteria being met.8

October 2015 will be the third anniversary of the launch of Palgrave Pivot. In that time, we will have published over 550 books, which have taken an average of ten weeks to publish from acceptance. The shortest time to publication was Kath Woodward's *Sporting Times*, which was published in five weeks. The average page length is 132 pages, and the shortest 78 pages.

Palgrave Pivot titles are published by authors based at institutions all around the world, and they are already making an impact. For example, the Palgrave Pivot *Adoption: A Brief Social and Cultural History* by Peter Conn was published in January 2013 and cited in an Amicus Brief to the United States Supreme Court in opposition to Proposition 8, which would have restricted the recognition of marriage to same-sex couples. Conn would not have been published in time to influence the legislation if he had not chosen publish through Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Pivot has been useful in accelerating academics' careers too. Sue Ellen Henry, author of *Children's Bodies in Schools*, wrote to her editor in August 2015 on the positive impact having written a Palgrave Pivot had on her tenure application. She said: 'I did get promoted (effective August) and while the committee doesn't give precise details about the review, I have to believe that having a book was a major supporting feature of my dossier. Indeed, I believe that one of my external reviewers learned of my book through the review process and then invited me to speak in a grad course via Skype on the topic.'

Ben Doyle described how Palgrave Pivot has changed the way he commissions: 'In terms of the kind of material that we've seen submitted for the format, the variety really has been surprising. I've published slightly more focused studies that require more room than a journal article affords but that couldn't be usefully padded out to monograph length. That said, I've also found the Pivot model to be a good length for particular types of work – work written in a more essayistic style, for instance, or work that adopts a more polemical tone. Many of the academics that I've discussed the format with have viewed it as an excellent length at which to make an initial intervention into an emergent area upon which other academics can then build.'9

Attitudes often change slowly in academia, and Palgrave Macmillan was prepared for adoption of the mid-length format to take some time. As Leonard Cassuto notes in his 2013 article for *The Chronicle of Higher Education*: 'The new, midsized kid on the block has a future, but […] it's not yet clear how long it will take to gain full welcome on the playground. Academe is conservative (with a small "c"). Such conservatism may guard against fads, but it may also slow change that can be necessary.' Cassuto quoted one English professor at a state university who said: 'My sense would be that established scholars will have to give these new kinds of venues credibility first before more vulnerable younger ones can risk counting on them ... That's just pragmatism speaking.' A dean interviewed by Cassuto speculated that tenure committees, deans and provosts would be 'more flexible than most might assume' but that 'the real conservatism on these questions comes from faculty who are afraid of looking too different from their peers'.10

However, Sam Burridge was amazed to see how academics reacted to the launch of Palgrave Pivot. She said: 'Authors have responded incredibly positively. In the 18 years I've been in publishing I've never been involved in a product with such a positive response ... I don't normally get authors emailing me directly, praising us as a publisher.' The hundreds of books published since then attests to that.11

Recently, Goldsmiths University Press was launched in tandem with an invitation for academics to submit proposals for short or mid-length monographs, as well as short book and pamphlet series. Press director Sarah Kember told *The Bookseller* that the Press sought 'thought-inaction, provisional or process-capturing work' such as briefs, scripts, blogs, storyboards, notebooks, essays, clips, and previews.12 It is also interested in non-standard modes and forms of communication, such as an article in the form of a comic or graphic novel.

Indeed, the market for mid-length research seems to be going from strength to strength. There are also now Stanford Briefs, an imprint from Stanford University Press, running at 20,000 to 40,000 words in length. They publish bite-sized original research in essay format, but aimed at a wider, more popular audience (as are Sage Swifts and Policy Press Shorts). In 2013, Palgrave Pivot introduced an Open Access option for authors who wish for their work to be freely accessible and shareable at point of publication. Much has been made, in the last few decades, of the potential 'death of the monograph',13 but despite print sales declining recently, the slow but inexorable rise of digital and the influx of innovations such as mid-format research shows that the monograph still has life.

### **Notes**

\*As part of Macmillan Science and Education, in 2015 Palgrave Macmillan merged with Springer.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

### **OPEN**

# 5 **The Academic 'Book' of the Future and Its Function**

*Frances Pinter*

**Abstract**: Ripping off the physical covers of the 'book' and moving swiftly into the digital realm immediately raises a number of issues around form, substance, supply chains, delivery platforms, discoverability and business models. Heated ideological, philosophical, pedagogical, and political debates leave people either exhilarated or exhausted. The meaning of the word 'book' itself will never again be confined to that of a physical object to be held, admired, loved, subject to spilt coffee, or burning by dictators. The 'book' will be defined more around its function than any of its other characteristics. This chapter discusses some of the factors that need to be understood when pondering the new function of the 'book'*.*

**Keywords**: book delivery devices; book intermediaries; book of the future; book supply chain; future of the book; knowledge infrastructures; monographs; publishing; scholarly academic books

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0011.

Any thoughts about this topic must first rip off the physical covers of the 'book' and move swiftly into the digital realm. This thinking immediately raises a number of issues around form, substance, supply chains, delivery platforms, and discoverability. Questions then spring up around business models. Thereafter, heated ideological, philosophical, pedagogical and political debates leave people either exhilarated or exhausted. One thing is clear though. The meaning of the word 'book' itself will change forever and will never again be confined to that of a physical object to be held, admired, loved, subject to spilt coffee or burning by dictators. The 'book' will be defined more around its function than any of its other characteristics.

Books have evolved alongside academic practices, which form an increasingly complex interdisciplinary web. These academic practices and realities have the potential to change with exponential speed, courtesy of digital technologies and knowledge infrastructures that are rushing (some would say struggling) to catch up.

The concept of 'knowledge infrastructures' is a useful lens through which to focus on this topic. Christine Borgman defines knowledge infrastructures as the 'ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects and their relationships within each discipline'.1 Publishers are part of this ecology. How are these infrastructures being transformed by the new digital affordances? What impact are these changes having on scholarly communications? And, what are the implications for the academic 'book'? Its function will be determined by where it finds itself located within these new infrastructures.

Whatever the new functions of the 'book' are to be, they will be influenced by the existing scaffolding around scholarly communications – as built up by publishers, libraries, intermediaries, funder requirements, tenure committees, and so on. The transition we are experiencing is taking place within a charged environment of conflicting and competing forces. Many are excited about these new digital affordances. But in reality, there are sunken investments in existing scaffolding within the ecology, entrenched interests in the status quo, and very real concerns about the varying speed at which good people who care about scholarship are able to adapt (or not) to the new world.

At a workshop convened by the Sloan Foundation,2 participants agreed that some of the most salient features of the new knowledge infrastructures are that: '(1) borders of tacit knowledge and common ground are shifting; (2) complexities of sharing data across disciplines and domains are challenging but increasingly exciting, and (3) new norms for what counts as knowledge are being generated more quickly than ever.' These features, along with the opportunities opened up by computational interrogation of big data, are intertwined and contribute to defining the boundaries around the ecosystem of any subject area. This has profound implications for publishing.

'Scaffolding' may not appear at first glance to be the right term to describe the support role that publishers provide in a very fluid ecology. However, given the rigidity of the legacy systems of supply and delivery, it may not be a bad metaphor. Physical books that have sustained us so well for centuries were (and are still) served by a host of intermediaries including bookshops, library suppliers, and aggregators. In other words a vast, established supply chain exists that is no longer best suited to deliver the new 'book'. We are now experiencing a whole host of pressures that will require the dismantling and reconstruction of some kind of scaffolding. We are somewhere inside a fundamental transformation – in a 'pupal' stage of development. What will emerge is as yet unknown. Wherever and however we end up will be in response to changes to the way that academics conduct their work, how knowledge problems will be solved, and how traditional career paths might change.

What does all this mean for the 'book' of the future? Some of the challenges include: newly shaped ecologies of knowledge infrastructures demanding shared data; new forms of publication; interdisciplinarity; facilitated collaborative work; and fast turnaround. Features that are likely to remain are long-form publications, shorter narrative structures within a coherent whole that can stand alone (e.g. edited chapters) as well as collectively (edited volumes), alongside more sophisticated ways of presenting interpretation of data or sources in light of theory. Features of the 'book' that are likely to be less prevalent are the physical object (which may not be printed unless requested) and therefore 'writing' will become more influenced by the use and the embeddedness of multimedia. The rigidity of single disciplines will wane – though to what extent is still unknown. Digital affordances not only provide new answers to old questions – they encourage new questions to be asked.

For years, there has been tension between subject depth vs subject breadth. Interdisciplinarity too has always been controversial. Now, with new digital affordances, we no longer have silos of discipline-limited knowledge infrastructures. Nevertheless, the publishing industry (admittedly of necessity) has lagged behind, following an age-old inclination towards an obvious choice of bookshelf in an imagined bricks and mortar bookshop.

Publishers want their output to be more relevant to a wider market because there are now easier ways to reach readers via social media and digital marketing. However, to achieve this they need to create better metadata, think more carefully about what 'list building' means and work more collaboratively with authors as 'co-creators' of information about the 'book' as well as the content of the 'book'. The challenges in our new world for getting the provenance, metadata and ontologies right (essential to improving discoverability) is impacting on the new boundaries around the knowledge infrastructures.

We have not yet fully faced the implications of the basic infrastructural problem of metadata creation and maintenance, both from a technical and an ontological perspective. Nor have we fully grasped the huge benefits of metadata travelling with and within the 'book' rather than residing in an unattached catalogue. We don't have the metadata to facilitate building the bridges to create true interdisciplinarity. As categorisations in the digital world were built up from a single-discipline basis we don't yet have the standards demanded of our multi-faceted world. For instance, only now has a new universal and interdisciplinary coding structure called Thema come onto the market, transcending BISAC and BIC. Less and less fits into the traditional subject-based classifications of knowledge.

The challenge for publishers is to find ways of enabling these exciting developments to flourish. After that has been achieved, some kind of sense of the future 'book' will emerge. The 'book', depending on its function, will take its place within the ecology and support it. Its objective will still be to present complex arguments as well as synthesise existing and new knowledge in a form that is digestible to other academics and beyond.

Here is an attempt to identify just a few of the driving forces that will change what the 'book' will look like and its place in the world's knowledge infrastructure.

The monograph, long considered the gold standard, has a number of functions. First, it remains a rite of passage. Scholars who are looking for permanent appointments at universities need to publish a book (at least in the humanities and social sciences). This requirement may change in future – but not immediately. However, there are fewer permanent posts available even though universities are expanding.

A new career track is emerging sometimes referred to as 'Alt AC' (Alternative Academic Career) where researchers move from one shortterm contract to another rather than joining an institution for the long haul. 'AltACers' may need to publish monographs for credentialing, but in many fields it may be that other forms of publication will suffice to launch their careers and demonstrate impact. They will have a plethora of formats and platforms available to them with which to disseminate their findings. The impact of their research will be measured by more than just citations. For recognition purposes the choice of medium will be important. This could result in fewer traditional monographs being published.

The 'cross-over book', for which publishers have always had high hopes, has its origins in the monograph. This well-written academic book that appeals to a slightly wider market – and most importantly crosses over into the book trade, stocked by upmarket bookshops and even reviewed in the national media – are few and far between. In reality those monographs that make it into paperback are usually bought by just a few hundred academics for whom the price is now acceptable for individual purchase (in either print or ebook format). There is scope for expansion here for as long as people still want their 'own' copy. Sometimes there is still a surprise success when a potential 'cross-over' book becomes a bestseller, as Harvard University Press experienced with Thomas Piketty's *Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century*.

It was in the seventies that American publishers recognised that there was money to be made from translating academic ideas into popular but serious books. Literary agents especially played a key role in coaching authors, explaining how to write for the general audience, how to build an 'arc' into the narrative, and so on. Some authors (and their agents and publishers) made a lot of money from this type of publication. Popular books in science and other subjects such as history are likely to persist so long as some people still turn to handy print introductions and overviews.

The 'enhanced ebook' is where attention is directed at the moment. But what is it exactly? A succinct definition comes from eBook Architects. 'enhanced ebooks' use enhancements that provide 'extras that make an ebook more interesting, informative, or interactive. They are also a way to add new content or functionality that would not be possible in the printed book.'3 The term is used less now to denote simple links and covers a very broad spectrum, including audio-visual content.

It may actually be a website that contains long-form content that is not considered to be a book, but would be so in another context. The blend of text with other media offers limitless possibilities. However, it will be a long time before norms and standards are developed that make the 'enhanced ebook' into a recognisable commodity.

How knowledge infrastructures evolve will influence how enhancement facilities are used, and vice versa. Individual national requirements such as those of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK play a part in determining the kinds of outputs selected by researchers. The scaffolding needed to support dissemination should develop in tandem, but in reality is likely to move ahead in fits and starts.

Critically for different types of enhanced ebooks there will need to be better delivery systems and improved means of reaching the scholarly community. Peter Costanzo in a 2014 Digital Book World blog says: 'The main problem is that the market as it currently exists does not allow publishers to deliver the same enhanced product across all current digital platforms, whether it be Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and Kobo's Arc. And when you stop and think about it, no other content creator is faced with this conundrum.'4 Delivery and delivery devices are still on the baby slopes.

The intermediaries that bridge publishers and libraries probably have a role to play in the new world, but their own business models need to adapt. As they consolidate through mergers there is the hope that this will lead to more investment in transitioning, facilitating experimentation and the shouldering of mistakes. On the other hand, there is understandable anxiety in the community that consolidation will lead to higher prices for libraries, squeezed margins for publishers and business models plagued with rigor mortis.

Discovery tools are improving, but have a long way to go. Another factor in this period of change is the open/tolled access divide: differences in who pays what, when and how have inevitably added a level of complexity to the next decade or so.

To conclude, much more is being demanded of the scaffolding than ever before. New business models, changes in the supply chain, improved metadata, and developments in better digital tools to help discovery and dissemination will all play a part in how the publishing community positions itself to serve scholarly communications. A definition of the academic 'book' of the future will be clearer after a further period of experimentation (length unknown) with what is possible. To date there are a number of initiatives coming out of university-based publishing, such as at Greenwich University. Some of these originated from libraries, such as UCL Press, while others have been spearheaded by the drive of single individuals (e.g. Open Book Publishers). New organisations such as Knowledge Unlatched are emerging to try new business models. All new approaches, however, struggle with legacy elements in the ecology. There is no single disrupter. Whether the functions of the 'book' will be executed by the most optimal and cost-effective publishing solutions remains an open question.

### **Notes**

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view

a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

**OPEN**

# 6 **The University Press and the Academic Book of the Future**

*Anthony Cond*

**Abstract**: Long perceived as a bastion of the academic book, the university press now finds itself operating under a range of business models, in an increasing number of possible locations on campus, and with the measurement of 'success' markedly different across host institutions. Yet this study of the underpinning rationale for a growth in university press publishing in the UK, and of the award of major grants to several US presses, highlights that the university press remains a barometer for proposed structural changes to knowledge dissemination and debates around the future of the book in the academy*.*

**Keywords**: digital publishing; humanities; monograph; Open Access; university press

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0012.

Much like the humanities field it so often serves, the university press has endured many decades of self-diagnosed crisis and introspective selfreflection. A report from the University of Chicago Press's Director in 1927 noted editorial and authorial concerns over such familiar issues as 'excessive specialization', and an inability to publish important scholarly work with small audiences.1 This long-standing hand-wringing emerged, not least because of debates around the relative value – in library budget terms, among others – of humanities research, the outputs of which have frequently been that cornerstone of the university press publishing programme: the monograph. Thus the university press enjoys a peculiar position: a publishing island atop a sea of academia, its insecurities a mirror to the budgetary, utility and reputational concerns of the subjects and institution it serves.

One in six university presses now reports to a library.2 Presses otherwise report to senior university managers or university or quasiuniversity committees; their editorial boards are drawn from faculty, yet more faculty are engaged as series editors, authors and reviewers, and more still in the inevitable exchange of ideas that happens when an academic department and a scholarly publisher active in its discipline are in close proximity. The university press is, thus, a touch point – above and beyond the author/purchaser/reader relationship with commercial publishers – between the academy's hopes and fears and the realities of the scholarly communication system, all the more so in recent years as savvy press directors have become more engaged in wider institutional politics in order to navigate institutional reorganisation. In thinking about the medium-term future of the academic book, changes in the university press landscape provide a tantalising glimpse of how a much written about soup of Open Access, digital scholarship, funding policies, authorial conservatism, challenging library budgets, publishing consolidation, internationalisation and new business models may be consumed.

In particular, a reading of the most recent round of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gives an idea of how a future of the academic book is perceived by that great engine of scholarly book production, the membership of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), who, according to the Association's website, collectively publish almost 15,000 books each year.3 Whilst the 2015 annual conference of the AAUP provocatively included the panel 'When Publishers Aren't Getting It Done', the Mellon grants have provided much-needed capital for university presses to plan for the future. As Donald J Waters, Senior Programme Officer at the Foundation, has put it: 'University presses are seeking to retool their operations to take advantage of digital media and digital workflows to bring new works of scholarship to the broadest possible audiences at the lowest possible cost.'4

In May 2014, the Mellon Foundation sent university press directors a request for proposals for long-form digital publishing for the humanities. Noting the growth of digital scholarship, the Foundation recognised an 'urgent and compelling' need for university presses to publish and make digital work available to readers. It also recognised that it was challenging to find the resources that are needed to do so. The Foundation therefore asked university presses to submit collaborative bids to test new longform digital publishing business models, or tackle its component parts, such as (1) editing; (2) clearing rights to images and multimedia content; (3) the interaction of the publication on the Web with primary sources and other related materials; (4) production; (5) pre- and post-publication peer review; (6) marketing; (7) distribution; and (8) maintenance and preservation of digital content.5

Projects that received funding from Mellon in response to this call, and in related funding immediately before and after it as 'part of Mellon's overall initiative in academic publishing', can be grouped into three broad categories: digital book platforms, Open Access tools and distribution channels, and platforms for enriching the user experience of books both before and after publication:6

at universities and presses for the development, publication, and preservation of born-digital interactive scholarly works, including a focus on the legitimisation of digital scholarship to ensure that digital and traditional scholarship are given equal credit in tenure and promotion; and \$1million to West Virginia University for the development of Vega,11 an online open sources academic publishing system that will support the peer review, copy-editing, and publication of multimedia-rich scholarship.

Is this, then, the direction of travel for the academic book of the future? In some cases certainly: it will be digital, it will be iterative, the cost of making it available in Open Access form (if so desired) will reduce through a shared infrastructure, it will be rich in supporting data, and the esteem of the university press brand and the rigour of university press peer review will be brought to bear on all of this. But it has been a mistake of a great many publishing commentators to pronounce on *the* future of the academic book when there is in fact no one future for it. Indeed, perhaps the sole common future of all kinds of academic book will be the process of credentialisation as being 'academic'.

According to a 2014 survey of 2231 academics undertaken by JISC,12 83 per cent of humanities scholars use electronic scholarly books but 87 per cent used a print copy for the last text they read. While percentages are no doubt in flux they point to an audience regularly imbibing scholarly research in more than one format, rather than an exclusively digital one. It is unlikely that the audience for print will disappear entirely. Intriguingly, of the 98 per cent of respondents who felt that reading the monograph was important or very important for career purposes only 10 per cent of respondents felt that it was difficult or very difficult to access monographs, which suggests that any significant growth in readership for the academic book in whatever form it takes will come from outside its conventional audience, regardless of new distribution strategies.

The practice of iterative publication, of utilising networked technologies and online communities, offers the potential for a deeper and more varied engagement from readers at different stages of the publication process. Research undertaken by Palgrave in 201413 showed that over two-thirds of the authors they surveyed thought publishers should be experimenting with alternative peer review methods: 'Responses indicated that rather than this interest being driven by dissatisfaction with existing peer review methods, it was inspired by curiosity in what new approaches might offer.' However, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes, 'even the most ingenious new structures for publishing a text online will not automatically get any randomly selected group talking. Technologies like these can, however, facilitate discussions among those who are both motivated and prepared to have them.'14 The process will require careful curation to solicit engagement, requiring either a financial investment by publishers or one of time by authors, who, like their potential readers/ reviewers already face the demands of teaching, research, 'knowledge exchange', conferences, writing and reviews of traditional scholarship, and so on.

The cost of long-form Open Access publishing will inevitably decrease through the welcome establishment of a robust, shared infrastructure, but it is still unlikely that processing charges associated with gold Open Access will drop to a level that is readily obtainable for the majority of academics, libraries and university departments without external funding. Much rides on the scalability of high-profile Open Access book initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched, which piloted with a predominantly university press roster of publishers, and the nascent, Mellonfunded Open Library of the Humanities, which has mooted a books programme with a small group of university presses. The most rigorous assessment of Open Access business models to date, the *Monographs and Open Access* report led by Professor Geoffrey Crossick concluded: 'There is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting Open-Access publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as dominant.'15

Open Access monographs, then, will be an addition to, rather than substitution of, existing practice, and will be published under a range of models, but another thread of Open Access book publishing is also beginning to gain traction on both sides of the Atlantic: the textbook. In an age when the 'student experience' is king, with an increasingly diverse and international student body, and with teaching income the largest source of revenue for many institutions, the opportunity to develop bespoke Open Access e-textbooks, as is happening at the University of Liverpool – in a partnership between press and library – provides a real institutional benefit. Whilst this turn inwards in a future that is global may seem counter-intuitive, it is worth noting that the first fruits of the project will replace a textbook from a commercial publisher that costs £56 and has been a compulsory purchase for 900 students on campus each year. Indeed, JISC's wider project, The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher project seeks to ascertain whether the institution as e-textbook creator can 'help students by providing a more affordable higher education, and promote a better, more sustainable information environment for libraries, students and faculty'.16

UCL Press, another participant in the JISC project, is one of a raft of new UK university presses that have emerged in the last few years17 unencumbered with legacy and with a forward-looking strategy. University College London, one of the largest and wealthiest UK higher education institutions, has been a public supporter of Open Access. Its new press is funded from the university's research budget, underpinned by a belief, following Kathleen Fitzpatrick, that universities should reassert their role in the scholarly dissemination workflow and outputs. Dissemination is UCL Press's goal and its measures of success are based on that idea, with the benefits of visibility for institutional research, wider use by policy makers and the hope of attracting academics and students to the institution as additional perceived benefits.18

In a similar vein, institutions from Goldsmiths to Cardiff, Westminster to Amherst College in the US have announced new university presses embracing Open Access, digital technology and a mixture of 'standard' and 'non-standard' forms of publication. Just as some universities were prompted by developments in digital printing to experiment with university press publishing, so Open Access and digital publishing has created a willingness in some institutions to invest not just in ownership of conventional publications but to create new kinds of publication that sit outside conventional silos.

It is worth reiterating that these new ventures, and the Mellon grants, are not the strategies and aspirations of publishers in isolation. By the nature of the university press, at some level there will have been input or approval or both from scholars, and often senior university managers and librarians. They show us that it is in the mix of publishing practicality and scholarly satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the current system that the future of the book lies. Where once hardback and paperback sufficed, a variety of formats developed in a variety of ways must be offered to continue the university press mission of supporting the dissemination of scholarship, for, as Joseph Esposito has observed, 'It's not what the presses preserve that is important but the work that they have yet to do. Universities invent the future, presses communicate those inventions to the world.'19

The signs so far are of a slow evolutionary branching rather than a radical revolution of the academic book. Its future is, above all, one of choice for author and reader alike. While the Mellon Foundation has hinted at further interventions, including possible pump-priming for an institutional sponsorship model, the academic book sits within a complex global web with many stakeholders and overnight change is unlikely. In preparing for a diverse future of the book, university presses would do well to heed the words of Rick Anderson: 'Libraries and patrons don't care if a publisher's strategy is innovative. Don't bet your future on innovation. Focus on increasing relevance.'20

### **Notes**

AAUP (2014) 'Library-Press Connections at the Charleston Conference', AAUP website, http://www.aaupnet.org/news-a-publications/aauppublications/the-exchange/current-issue/1265-charleston-2014, accessed 20 August 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

# Part III **Librarians**

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0013

### **OPEN**

# 7 **National Libraries and Academic Books of the Future**

*Maja Maricevic*

**Abstract**: In the near future, national libraries could adopt new roles within the national research infrastructure, such as policy co-ordination, development of national and international interoperability standards, and improving the discovery of academic books, in addition to their traditional roles in ensuring long-term access and preservation. Equally, the complexity and resource-intensive nature of these changes, combined with the rising budgetary pressures faced by libraries, will mean that the future role of national libraries in scholarly ecosystems will depend on their capability to innovate and to transform their relationships with researchers, universities and research funders. This chapter considers some generic trends that might influence how national libraries engage with a growing debate about the future of academic books.

**Keywords**: academic book; British Library; librarianship; monograph; national libraries; Open Access; preservation; research policy; scholarly communications

Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds). The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014.

National libraries provide essential research infrastructure for arts and humanities and social science researchers; they are national centres for academic books. Their traditional role of providing a systemic collection of national publications, in most cases supported by legal deposit (which in some instances has been in operation for centuries), creates comprehensive repositories of academic books past and present.

For many disciplines, national libraries offer an additional advantage of providing unique primary research sources, and significant international collections complementing a continuum of national academic publications. In such an immersive research environment, arts and humanities academic researchers in particular tend to become more than readers, and often develop a deep interest in, and understanding of, how national libraries acquire, provide access to and preserve their collections. In many cases national libraries' collections are seen as a resource integral to the future of their research. Some researchers spend many years investigating specific, often unique collections, while others expect national libraries to provide comprehensive resources for their discipline.1

Digital changes to date have not altered the essence of this close relationship between national libraries, researchers, and academic books. However, if academic books are changing, will this well-established relationship change in the process? Will national libraries become vast digital platforms, where the researchers of tomorrow can remotely manipulate text, data, and multimedia, producing new knowledge through digitally enabled collaborations? Or maybe such digital platforms will be created outside national libraries, emulating model of disciplinary repositories in sciences?2

It is difficult to tell if such integrated digital platforms will be appropriate to support arts and humanities research in the future. However, some present developments can help us to examine how national libraries, researchers, and academic books may relate to each other in the future.

Discussions about whether Open Access will be made mandatory for academic books by research funders are a useful starting point in examining how academic books might develop.3 It is often in this context that we see most clearly that academic books are changing. Open Access debate has reinvigorated scholarly examination of research information policy and publication models in the arts and humanities.4 The growing interest in Open Access has also led to experimentation with new acquisition, publication and dissemination models for academic books through pioneering projects such as OAPEN,5 Knowledge Unlatched6 and the emerging Open Library of Humanities.7

This does not mean that all changes in the academic book environment should be attributed to Open Access. A great deal of change is arising due to changes in researchers' reading and information-seeking behaviours as they take advantage of the pervasive convenience, immediacy, and speed of digital information environment.

In 2012 The British Library and Jisc completed a three-year longitudinal study of doctoral students, which followed a large cohort of 3,000 doctoral students and offered many insights into their research behaviours. For example, young researchers in the arts and humanities perceived ejournals as slightly more important than academic books, with nearly 30 per cent using Google as their main channel to find all resources they need.8

Another driver of change comes from the nature of academic books as a research output, alongside journal articles and data, which means that in order to remain relevant, academic books will most likely need to be 'rewired' to fit the same or similar research assessment environments, and to achieve wider and measurable impact through digital channels.

While we want to hold onto the distinctiveness of research communications in the arts and humanities, and especially acknowledge the unique role of monographs and other long-form publications,9 we also need to acknowledge that some of the change drivers for academic books are similar to what we have already seen in the science, technical and medical (STM) publication environment. It makes sense therefore that we take a hard look at the changes that have taken place in STM and find out what can be learnt by all interested in academic books, including national libraries.

Looking at a recent report published by STM, the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers, we see that technological innovation related to final publications is modest – it is usually a PDF of an article. However, there are significant levels of business process change – new aggregation models, new Open Access publication models, even new models of peer review. Another striking feature of STM publishing is the centrality of funders' mandates.10 In this context, national libraries are acknowledged for their preservation role, and are placed alongside commercial preservation solutions such as CLOCSS/ LOCKSS and PORTICO.11 Significantly for this discussion, the report concludes that there is 'a growing focus on the researcher (as opposed to the library), driven partly by the redefining of the customer in the OA model, but also by a focus on research assessment and metrics'.12

From the perspective of the national libraries, if academic books in the arts and humanities become more like ejournals, this would mean shifts in the expectations of arts and humanities researchers, including an expectation of universal remote paywall-free access for academic books.

The majority of academic books find their way into national libraries via legal deposit. In a digital environment, legal deposit for non-print works still makes this possible and it provides a long-term preservation solution for academic books, but it does not satisfy the researchers' growing need for immediate, remote access to digital resources.13 Such access has to be provided through different mechanisms.

Typically, the access options can be extended by purchasing relevant subscriptions or through linking to Open Access resources, but both of these options require national libraries to find additional resources at the time of ongoing budget cuts for libraries in many countries. As funding becomes more constrained, it becomes harder for national libraries to make a case for required investments in scholarly publications, while also developing their capability to manage the multitude of other digital publications – non-academic ebooks, online newspapers, growing audio and video collections, web archives, and digitised heritage collections. For many of these collections national libraries may be the only home, while the higher education sector has a well-developed library infrastructure and possibly a greater incentive to invest in academic digital resources. In today's resource-constrained environment, it could be argued that arts and humanities research would be better served by national libraries if they focused more on digital collections outside scholarly publishing, which are also essential in arts and humanities research.

Following and adjusting to the complexity of changes in research environments is an expensive and resource-demanding undertaking. Changes in scholarly communications are usually bespoke and follow the rules of research process as much as that of digital publication. Understanding this changing environment means constantly maintaining and growing the capacity to understand academic research, which requires appropriate funding and expertise. National libraries aiming to remain a relevant home for academic books in the future need to consider both their appetite and readiness to meet the changes taking place in arts and humanities research and academic books publication.

We should not be surprised if, under these conditions, a legitimate outcome for national libraries becomes less of a focus on academic books. Inevitably this will mean that the role of the national library as an integrated arts and humanities research ecosystem could be altered and reduced, which is why it is much more likely that national libraries will want to continue their long involvement with academic books – including both their preservation and improving access for researchers. This will be even more likely if it is clear that this continues to be important to researchers in arts and humanities.

The British Library holds 14.7 million monographs, and in 2013/14 alone added 107,554 through legal deposit.14 For this collection to grow and to remain relevant in the future, it is essential for the British Library to understand and anticipate the changes in the academic publishing environment and to work closely with others to meet the challenges of rising costs and the increasing complexity of digital processes.

On this journey it will be essential for national libraries to strengthen relationships with the parts of government that have responsibility for research policy and research funding. Again, looking at the Open Access developments to date,15 it is noticeable that national libraries play a more prominent role in the Open Access implementation in those countries where there are strong links between research funders and national libraries. A description of such a relationship in Sweden paints a picture of a national library as 'a catalyst for a closer cooperation between the main bodies of research and research libraries in advancing an open access agenda and developing a digital research information infrastructure'.16

This points to another key set of relationships that needs to be in place, with academic libraries more generally. In the UK a key document describing the need for closer collaboration of policy-makers, academic libraries, and national libraries is *A National Monograph Strategy* published in 2014. It is interesting that this document recognises the need for collaboration in the digital environment, but it also highlights the need for collaborating in improving management of existing physical collections, which is important if the future arts and humanities publication landscape is to retain physical books.17

One of the most significant alliances with academic libraries should be around the common understanding of the importance of digital preservation. For instance, recent research undertaken in academic libraries and repositories shows the difficulties that they face in maintaining, preserving, and providing long-term access to ebook collections.18 It is an additional reason why preservation of academic books should remain at the centre of future considerations in national libraries.

The British Library worked with the Research Councils UK and the Global Research Council in April 2015 to examine the current status of policy and practice in Open Access communications. This forum reported the following in relation to preservation: