Communities of Practice: The Academic Book of the Future

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The Academic Book of the Future has been a matter of intense concern and debate for the last 20 years. Monographs, collections of essays and critical editions are the cornerstone of scholarship in the humanities, and the careers of many rest on the production of books, and the credit given to them, through the regular Research Excellence Framework (REF). But they are uneconomic to produce, given that they sell in small numbers, and as libraries are squeezed in two directions (falling budgets and rising serials prices) a steadily decreasing number are bought into core collections. In the past, publishers accepted that academic books would not make profits, or indeed, often, cover their costs, but regarded them as vitally important loss leaders, with revenue generated to support their publication from other parts of their business. But all kinds of forces are operating in the publishing world which means that such trade-offs are no longer always possible. The advent, too, of digital technologies and social media has had a significant effect on publishing in all areas--print journalism is suffering under the onslaught of freely available internet information, and ebooks have risen in popularity. As John Thompson has said, "Academic publishing has become one of the terrains on which the logics of two different worlds - the world of publishing and the world of the academy - come together and clash, leading on occasion to tension, misunderstanding and mutual recriminations" (Thompson, 2005).How, in this new world, is the academic of now and the near future to write and circulate their work? How are publishers to respond to the new challenges? How are libraries to curate, preserve, and disseminate the diverse forms and formats coming their way? What economic, political, social and intellectual challenges are we facing in the light of such mandates as the Finch report and HEFCE's recommendations regarding Open Access? At the heart of our enquiries in responding to the research questions posed by the AHRC is the question posed by Jerome McGann in 2010: "What do scholars want?" Whether we work with digital or paper-based resources, or both, our basic needs are the same. We all want our cultural record to be comprehensive, stable, and accessible. And we all want to be able to augment that record with our own contributions." Traditional print formats and their e-versions are also increasingly limited in representing the breadth of arts and humanities scholarship. New technologies permit new forms of publication more suited to many disciplines: archaeology, art history, anthropology, film studies, paleography and manuscript studies, epigraphy and other areas where the non-textual is at least as important as the textual. But these bring their own problems, for instance, rights to publish images and time-based media, the costs of developing new forms of publication, sustainability. And Open Access still causes fear and suspicion in the minds of many academics (see, for example, the recent piece in the TLS by Jonathan Bate, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1360491.ece).There are a number of recent projects and publications seeking to address these questions: in 2011 the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) produced a report, Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses. In an age of information 'hyperabundance', publishing is within everyone's reach: rather than see this as a threat, however, the Report asserts that "The scholarly enterprise is in it for the long haul, not the next viral hit. As such, the scholarly ecosystem -- libraries, universities, scholarly publishers, scholars -- needs to ensure that the entire ecosystem remains strong over time, and that scholarship is well served by the systems we construct." These beliefs are at the core of this Project, which seeks to ensure our research is and will be set in robust and coherent communities of practice.