No Single Solution: Increasing Author Equity in Scholarly Publishing and Library Collections By Kristen Twardowski (Director of Sales and Marketing, Northwestern University Press) <kristen.twardowski@northwestern.edu>
T
his is likely a different article than the one Against the Grain imagined I would write. My mandate was both to explore how publishers can elevate marginalized voices and to identify the challenges of getting that content into libraries. This article’s theme is, thus, large in scope. Over the centuries of its development, academic book publishing has become entrenched in inequitable systems that privilege certain voices over others. The vast majority of scholarly publishing today still functions within these systems with all of the benefits and injustices that implies.1 This leaves us with several questions: how do you publish in an equitable way; and how can libraries support that work through their collection development strategies?
large institutions increased standards. 6 At the same time, 53.5% of institutions reported replacing tenure-track lines with contingent faculty ones,7 and the average full professor made over twice what an untenured instructor did.8 Combined, these datapoints indicate that scholars now have to publish more to secure one of what is, potentially, a dwindling number of tenure-track positions. For a humanities or social sciences scholar, this likely means they need to publish a book to move into a more stable, better paying position. For both adjuncts and for independent scholars with no institutional support, publishing that book can be a tricky process.
This article will not entirely answer either of these questions. I don’t think any article entirely could. It will, however, provide some background as well as guideposts for thinking through how your institution can support equitable publishing.
Open Access, Limits, and Labor
Because of my own professional experiences, this article largely focuses on US-based university press publishing in the humanities and social sciences. These presses, though less wellresourced than their commercial counterparts, do crucial work advocating for their regional communities and ensuring the continued bibliodiversity of scholarly publishing.2 The people working at them care deeply about their authors and hope their books will be read by as many people as possible. In some cases, this means publishing open access (OA), but in the humanities and social sciences, funding to support open research has not been readily available. Because of this tension, open access serves as a good test case for exploring how publishers and libraries can think together about author equity.
The Problem of the Monograph For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the book is, to misquote Shakespeare, the thing.3 These academic monographs serve as the space where the “book fields” do their work. For scholars in these fields, the book isn’t just the structure of their research; its publication allows them to continue doing that research at all. As William Germano says in Getting it Published, “you need a book to get tenure, perhaps even to get a job, and in some cases even to get the interview … Writing books, after all, is what academics are expected to do.”4 Barriers to book publication can, thus, be barriers to a scholar’s existence as a scholar, and those barriers are not equitably distributed. Scholars who work within an academic institution often experience a bifurcated employment structure. There are tenured and tenure-track faculty who typically have long contracts and academic freedom protections, and then there are contingent or adjunct faculty who have much shorter contracts, fewer protections, and less access to resources.5 According to a 2022 report from the American Association of University Professors, 17.6% of all institutions made tenure standards more stringent in the past five years, and a whopping 38.7% of
28 Against the Grain / November 2023
Open access books sit in an interesting place of friction. For under-resourced scholars, being able to read academic books for free is a godsend. They can stay engaged with current research and participate in it regardless of institutional support. The authors of this open research similarly benefit from the increased access and engagement brought by OA. In traditional publishing, scholarly monographs may only sell a few hundred copies worldwide, typically to academic libraries or to a narrow group of scholars.9 Books with limited sales necessarily have a limited audience, but making research open access drastically expands that potential audience. The University of Michigan Press recently published a blog post about the impact of their open access initiative, Fund to Mission, a program in which 75% of their frontlist monographs are OA. According to their post, Fund to Mission’s open access books saw 11 times more COUNTER total item investigations than restricted access titles did, and open access titles were viewed in a significantly greater number of countries worldwide than restricted titles were.10 For scholars who need to prove that their research has an impact on the field, whether for a job application or for a promotion, this increased readership and any conversation it inspires is invaluable. But the benefits of open access do not eliminate the costs of publishing a monograph, a process that often takes multiple years of work by numerous staff and can cost upwards of $15,000.11 The question of how to financially support this labor — Via author payments? Grants? Institutional support? — has plagued the scholarly community for years with no simple solutions. In the United States in particular, the question of national funding is at a crossroads. In August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published their Nelson Memo, asserting that federally funded research must be made freely and immediately available.12 However, in July 2023, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives released a bill that, if signed, would prohibit the implementation of the Nelson Memo through
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