Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/130



Monographs

By now, it is trite and clichéd to note that the scholarly monograph is in crisis. Indeed, several papers given at a conference in 1997, now seventeen years ago, questioned whether the rhetoric of crisis was better framed as ‘chronic illness’ as the state seems perpetual.1 It is also fair to say, as Robert McPherson notes, that there are disciplinary differences in the nature and/or severity of the crisis.2 Nonetheless, because humanities departments exist within budgetary constraints set throughout the institution and not in isolation, the economics of monograph purchasing are intrinsically bound to the forces determining journal ﬁnances and are, therefore, rarely stable; the rhetoric of crisis is here to stay.3 This crisis, though, is not singular; it is in fact the same phenomenon that we saw with journal publishing wherein the term ‘crisis’ denotes two paradoxical supply-side and demand-side crises. Nobody ever complains of having too little to read, as Richard Fisher, the managing director of Cambridge University Press’s academic division, has put it at many conferences. Yet, most humanities academics feel the need to publish books for their jobs and, more importantly, simply to disseminate their ﬁndings. This chiastic formulation was challenged by an MLA committee in 2002, which asked: ‘On a practical level, how can ever-increasing demands for publication as a qualiﬁcation for tenure and promotion be sustained when scholars ﬁnd it harder and harder to publish their books?’4 It is, of course, a rite of passage for new academics to publish their Ph.D. theses as reworked monographs, a fact that often hampers the imposition of OA mandates on doctoral work.5 However, this ‘need’ to publish in a quasi-trade market has also led to claims of the 112