Communities of Practice: The Academic Book of the Future

在过去的20年里，未来的学术书籍一直是一个备受关注和争论的问题。专著、论文集和评论版本是人文学科学术的基石，许多人的职业生涯都依赖于书籍的出版，以及通过定期的卓越研究框架（REF）给予他们的荣誉。但是，由于它们的销量很少，而且由于图书馆受到两个方向的挤压（预算下降和丛书价格上涨），它们的生产并不划算，而核心馆藏的购买数量也在稳步下降。过去，出版商承认学术书籍无法盈利，或者通常无法收回成本，但他们认为学术书籍是极其重要的亏损类图书，通过其他业务产生的收入来支持出版。但在出版界，各种力量都在起作用，这意味着这种权衡不再总是可能的。数字技术和社交媒体的出现也对出版业的各个领域产生了重大影响——印刷新闻正在遭受免费互联网信息的冲击，电子书越来越受欢迎。正如约翰·汤普森所说，“学术出版已经成为两个不同世界的逻辑——出版世界和学术世界——聚集在一起并发生冲突的领域之一，有时会导致紧张、误解和相互指责”（汤普森，2005）。在这个新的世界里，现在和不久的将来，学术界如何撰写和传播他们的作品？发行商该如何应对新的挑战？图书馆如何管理、保存和传播各种形式和格式的图书？鉴于芬奇报告和HEFCE关于开放获取的建议等授权，我们面临哪些经济、政治、社会和智力挑战？在回答人权委员会提出的研究问题时，我们调查的核心是杰罗姆·麦格恩在2010年提出的问题：“学者想要什么？”无论我们是使用数字资源还是纸质资源，或者两者兼而有之，我们的基本需求都是一样的。我们都希望我们的文化记录是全面、稳定和可访问的。我们都希望能够通过自己的贡献来扩大这一记录。”传统的印刷格式及其电子版本在代表艺术和人文学术的广度方面也越来越有限。新技术允许新的出版形式更适合许多学科：考古学，艺术史，人类学，电影研究，古文字和手稿研究，金石学和其他非文本至少与文本同等重要的领域。但这些都带来了自己的问题，例如，图像和基于时间的媒体的出版权，开发新出版形式的成本，可持续性。开放获取仍然在许多学者的心中引起恐惧和怀疑（例如，参见Jonathan Bate最近在TLS上的一篇文章，http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1360491.ece）.There)。最近有许多项目和出版物试图解决这些问题：2011年，美国大学出版社协会（AAUP）发表了一份报告，《维持学术出版：大学出版社的新商业模式》。在这个信息“极度丰富”的时代，出版是每个人都能接触到的：然而，报告并没有把这视为一种威胁，而是断言“学术事业是长期的，而不是下一个病毒式的轰动。”因此，学术生态系统——图书馆、大学、学术出版商、学者——需要确保整个生态系统随着时间的推移保持强大，并且我们构建的系统能够很好地为学术服务。”这些信念是本项目的核心，旨在确保我们的研究是并将建立在强大和一致的实践社区。

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.