Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/33

 need and desire to publish in top journals is increased. Because these journals will then have a continual supply of high-quality material, it is imperative that libraries subscribe to them. As this material overﬂows through rejection and cascades down to the next level of ‘mid-range’ publications, libraries ﬁnd that there are also far more venues to which they must subscribe, a fact triggered by over-supply (not to mention material published in niche journals that may also be necessary for research). In short, paradoxically, there are both supply-side crises (too much competition for top journal slots) and demand-side crises (institutions’ inability to afford all material for students and researchers) in academic publishing. These are split across two forms of scholarly economics into which I delve in Chapter 2: the ‘economics’ of scholarly prestige and the economics of paying for the labour of publishing.

Similar phenomena exist in the monograph sphere and these are dealt with separately in Chapter 4 because of the importance of the book form to humanities disciplines. There are some differences, however, that are worth brieﬂy highlighting here. Monographs are more clearly the gold standard for accreditation and reputation in the humanities. They also take an order of magnitude longer to write than their journal article counterparts, meaning that scholars expect a commensurate reputational return. The print runs for academic monographs in the humanities, though, are extremely low; around 200–250 is the ﬁgure that is usually cited. This means that presses often have returns on volumes and the margins are far lower than in scientiﬁc journal publishing, for instance. Presses then ﬁnd themselves caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they cannot afford to raise prices as they are competing for the same library resources that have been dented by the serials crisis. On the other hand, presses must therefore stringently limit their intake on the basis of quality control (peer review) so that their authors see a reputational gain through exclusivity (prestige) and so that they do not expend labour on titles that will not sell to their target audience. Of course, there are other models: lowering review standards (and perhaps production quality) while opting for a wider list is an alternative tactic that relies on successful titles carrying others through cross-subsidy. Broadly speaking though, there are also supply-side and demand-side ‘crises’ in the monograph world.