The Future of Scholarly Publishing

172 The Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, established by the Modern Language Association in 1999, set out to examine the current state of academic publishing in the fields of languages and literatures. The committee’s charge was to investigate and understand the widely perceived crisis in scholarly publishing and make recommendations to address the situation. Librarians, editors, faculty members, and graduate students share the perception that there are severe problems currently facing scholarly publishing. However diverse the explanations for them may be, some factors have been established. Library budgets for monographs in the humanities have declined steadily, in relative and sometimes in absolute terms, leading to proportional reductions in the number of scholarly books sold. Subsidies for university presses have also declined as operational costs have risen, often placing the publishers under great pressure to make profit-based decisions. Even as they face growing economic problems, university presses are receiving ever more submissions as a result of increased expectations for promotion and tenure in our disciplines and at our institutions of higher learning. As the committee examined a growing bibliography on these topics and listened to specialists from the publishing world, the need for well-informed decisions by university administrations became apparent. After all, the same universities that have reduced the proportional budgets available for library acquisitions in the humanities and for scholarly press subsidies have also raised standards for tenure, thereby leading to increasing production of manuscripts submitted to presses. The suggestion that scholarly presses are publishing fewer specialized studies The Future of Scholarly Publishing