Chapter 4 of my thesis focuses on the genealogy of the (discourse surrounding) scholarly systems of material production and the book as commodity. You can find a draft of the second part of this chapter underneath. As always, any feedback is more than welcome.

You can find part 1 here.

For chapter 2 of my thesis, see here and here. For Chapter 3 see here, here and here. I will post the remainder of chapter 4 later this week.

4.2.1.3 The Academies and the Journal System

What role did the emerging scholarly societies play in this development? How can they be connected to the systems of material production that were set up around scholarly books? In the 16^th and 17^th centuries new ideas were initially, communicated by means of written correspondences (Kronick 1991: 57). Gradually, with the aid of official scientific academies, the increase in correspondences led to their standardisation in journals or periodicals, which, as Kronick points out, enabled these conversations to take place in a more open setting. At the same time the increase in the amount of scholarly books published led to the development of book reviews. These developments were, as Kronick argues, the start of the development of the first journals such as Philosophical Transactions, which dealt with new ideas, and the Journal des Sçavans, which primarily served as a medium for book-reviewing (1991: 59–60).[1]

In England, as Johns has extensively recounted, it was the Royal Society, chartered in 1662 as a learned society of scholars, that tried to set up an order for the communication of scholarly research that was tailored more to the needs of academia. They did this by, among other things, aggressive intervention in the realm of print (Johns 1998: 44). The Society has become famous for its publishing enterprises, among which is, as mentioned above, the first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions, and Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As Johns points out, however, these are the outcome of long processes of establishing conventions based on experiments within the Society. As with the Stationers, new concepts of authorship, publication, and reading were enacted in conditions of civil trust, ensuring that productions would not be reprinted, translated, or pirated without consent (Johns 1998: 54–55, Shapin 1994: 182–183). The Royal Society thus ‘attempted to contain, and even redefine, the powers of print’ in direct opposition to the order set up by the Stationers’ Company, as we will see. Experimental natural philosophers, in cooperation with the Society, created new forms of sociability and new genres of writing such as the experimental paper, the journal, the book review, the editor, and the experimental author. Within these confines an openness and readiness to communicate was essential to promote the common good (Johns 1998: 472). Virtual forms of witnessing were developed through detailed forms of scientific reporting. This civil domain of print was based on the Society’s own system of internal registration (or licensing) and external publication (Johns 1998: 480). Together, the protocols established around these systems came to constitute the emerging communication system in the experimental community.

Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, first developed an extensive system of external publication by setting up a network of correspondents across Europe connecting the society to the broader world of learned men, which would be the basis of the Philosophical Transactions (Guédon 2001, Johns 1998: 497). This extended the Society’s register into the ‘public’ realm of print, as a new strategy to secure authorship within the scholarly community of natural philosophers, creating forms of international propriety (Johns 1998: 499). Additionally, Johns narrates how licensers Atkyns and Streater proposed a radical solution to the problem of discredit, making it an expressly political problem by suggesting direct royal intervention in the civility of printing: the Stationers’ Company, together with the ‘print-disciplining regime’ it had set up, should be replaced by a system of crown-appointed patentees, where printers would be employed as servants to the Society and the crown. The Stationers Company regulated property via their register which, seen as a threat to the power of the king, was ultimately challenged by this new royal patenting system that promised to replace the Stationers power with that of the monarch. In this new system property and the right to copy came to be embedded in law. In this way powerful intertwined representations of printing and politics (and power and knowledge) were constructed, representing, as Johns emphasises, a revolutionary reconstruction of the cultural politics of print (1998: 322).

This reconstruction also had a historiographical element where, in order to determine what the future of print should be (i.e. should it be based on a registration or on a patenting system) a battle was fought over the historical origins of print, via a reconstruction of the historical origins of the press itself. The licensers from the Royal Society argued that print should return to its pure status as an ‘Art’ that it had enjoyed before being incorporated, owned and regulated by the mercenary interests of the Stationers as a ‘Mechanick Trade’ (Johns 1998: 307). They claimed that the printing craft was the personal property of the monarch, where the Stationers pointed out that it had always been a ‘common’ trade. Through this anecdote Johns shows how the essential properties of print were disputed and how participants in the debate actually created print itself. As Johns states, ‘practitioners of the press (…) made creative use of their own histories to delineate cultural proprieties for themselves and their craft’ (1998: 325).

In the end printing would become part of court service, and would rest on the civility of this system (Johns 1998: 624). The register mechanism became the defining symbol of experimental propriety in the Society itself, and the Philosophical Transactions its emblem abroad (Johns 1998: 541). It is important to emphasise however, as both Johns and Jean-Claude Guédon have done, that the emergence of this scholarly journal system had little to do with democratic scholarly ideas (in the tradition of Robert Merton and something that is also visible in Kronick, for instance) and the public good, but with issues of copyright, with priority claims and with royal hierarchies. As Guédon remarks: ‘The design of a scientific periodical, far from primarily aiming at disseminating knowledge, really seeks to reinforce property rights over ideas; intellectual property and authors were not legal concepts designed to protect writers—they were invented for the printers’ or Stationers’ benefits’ (2001: 10). The limitation of the Stationers’ property rights in favour of the Royal Society as a scholarly institution should thus not be seen as a form of promoting the public good and scholarship in opposition against economic interests. It was most of all a political conflict between the crown and the Stationers, where the crown wanted to reassert its authority via the institution of the Royal Society and the law. In this respect, developments such as copyright should be seen, as Guédon has argued, as specific historical constructions that arise out of a moment of equilibrium between conflicting interests and parties. And just like the system of scholarly communication, this equilibrium is not stable or solid, but keeps on evolving.

To give another example, the peer review system did not initially appear as an integral part of science and scholarship. As Mario Biagioli has emphasised, peer review was a specific 17^th century development tied to the emergence of the new institutions of the academies. These state-sponsored institutions were granted the privilege to publish their own works. Up to then censorship systems had been controlled by religious authorities and licensing by the printers/Stationers. The genealogy of peer review thus suggests that it developed within the logic of royal censorship, not as something protecting the interests of the broader scholarly community. It was about establishing unacceptable claims (censorship), not about establishing good claims (quality), Biagioli points out (2002: 17). As he puts it, ‘So while peer review is now cast as a sign of the hard-won independence of science from socio-political interests, it actually developed as the result of royal privileges attributed to very few academies to become part and parcel of the book licensing and censorship systems’ (Biagioli 2002: 14). The academies needed to control print in order to sustain themselves and their protection by the royal patron. There were also strong economic interests involved. In addition to controlling publications the academies also needed to promote them in order to build their prestige and recognition to foster continued state support. This was the beginning of a cultural market: ‘Publications, then, became a credit-carrying object, and these ‘academic banknotes’ needed to be printed, not only censored’ (Biagioli 2002: 20). So although it started as an early modern disciplinary technique akin to book censorship, as Biagioli shows, peer review developed in the 18^th century into an in-house disciplinary technique and then began to function as a producer of academic value. In the end it no longer depended on a centre of authority but was internalised where it went from external disciplining (state censors) to internal review (academic reviewers). It thus functioned as a Foucauldian disciplining technique, repressing and producing knowledge at the same time (Biagioli 2002: 11–12).

Seeing the academies as promoting and enabling cultural and scholarly values and the public good in opposition to the economic and political interests of the state and the Stationers can thus be considered a misrepresentation. For this view ignores the priority struggles the academies, the state and the Stationers where involved in as part of the entanglement of political, economical and technological factors and that enabled the rise of the modern system of scholarly communication. As Guédon rightly claims: ‘In short, a good deal of irony presides over the emergence of scholarly publishing: all the democratic justifications that generally accompany our contemporary discussions of copyright seem to have been the result of reasons best forgotten, almost unmentionable. The history of scientific publishing either displays Hegel’s cunning of history at its best, or it reveals how good institutions are at covering their own tracks with lofty pronouncements!’ (2001: 10).

4.2.1.4 University Press Publishing

In addition to the development of the academies, universities increasingly started to set up presses of their own to communicate their scholarly findings. To find any kind of overview of the early history of the university press, however, one has to go all the way back to 1967, to Gene Hawes’ handbook on university press publishing, and even then this is only a narrative that focuses mainly on the United States. Hawes provides a thorough history of the development of the university press in the States, including the rapid growth of the sector until the end of the 60s (especially after WWII) (1967b: 11). The next paragraphs, based on Hawes, will thus mostly concentrate on developments in these regions.

In Europe it all began with Oxford University Press (1478) and Cambridge University Press (1521), both founded shortly after the coming of print. Their early development was anything but stable, however, as it was only in the 16^th century that some form of continuous publishing production was established for both presses. They were integral parts of their universities but also depended on commercial activities, such as bible publishing, to survive. This monopoly on bible publishing, which was disputed in its early days by the Stationers’ Company, supplied sufficient funding to support publishing in other, less profitable areas. American university presses were established in the late 1800s, as part of the rise of the American university itself, modelled on the German research universities. With the rise of the first universities, the need for a university press to accompany the university mission was strongly felt. In the case of Johns Hopkins Press (1878), for instance, it was the university president who strongly believed in the need for a press. As Thompson has noted: ‘the American university presses were set up with the aim of advancing and disseminating knowledge by publishing high quality scholarly work; they were generally seen as an integral part of the function of the university’ (2005: 108). After Hopkins, 1891 saw the coming of Chicago and 1869 of Cornell University Press, followed by the presses of the University of California and Columbia in 1893 (Hawes 1967b: 30–31). The University of California’s press grew out of the interest of the institution’s librarian in creating series of scholarly monographs to exchange with similar series issuing from other universities. These presses arrived at a time when higher education in the States was still in its early stages, operating on a very small scale. From the rise of the university presses onwards, this gradually started to change, in a steadily faster pace.[2] In the States, commercial publishing was already well developed by the time university presses came about. The main mission of the presses was to publish the kind of research that could not find a commercial outlet: specialised scholarly research. Again, Hawes states the importance here of university support: ‘the American presses have depended essentially on funds from university appropriations and from varieties of benefactors, rather than from religious publishing, to help support the dissemination of scholarly research’. This includes their tax-exempt status in the US (Hawes 1967b: 33). It took the first presses some time to establish themselves (in a process that comprised of a lot of failing and reviving) before a new wave arrived in 1905, with the formation of Princeton University Press. Alumni also played an important role in this movement by providing monetary funds in support of the presses (Hawes 1967b: 34). Eleven more universities founded presses by the end of the 1920s, and another twelve did so in the 1930s (Hawes 1967b: 38). Hawes emphasises the individual, organic development of these presses, as related to the specific university and people that ran the press. Eventually, in 1946 the Association of American University Presses was founded—a trade organisation for scholarly publishers—stipulating membership qualifications in 1949 (Hawes 1967b: 65).

What is clear from this short overview, focussing especially on the US, is how the publishing function was seen as directly related to the university’s mission, which resulted in a relationship in which university funding to support the press was essential to the functioning of the institution. As Hawes has argued: ‘Just as relatively high costs and narrow markets typify the publishing economics of scholarly books, subsidy support plays a fundamental role in the publishing economics of a university press’ (1967b: 127).

4.2.1.5 The Monograph Crisis

As Hawes and others have pointed out, the ability to publish specialised, experimental work is not a sustainable enterprise. University presses were brought into life exactly for this reason, as non-profit institutions to publish the kinds of works that are not commercially viable. The objective of university press publishing could therefore be seen as a form of university extension work (Brown 1970: 134, Waters 2004: 5, Adema 2010). This means they depend on forms of outside support and subsidies that lend them an advantage over commercial publishers, enabling university presses to support books which by their nature are not viable because they have a small potential market (Brown 1970: 134). Nevertheless, after the gradual if moderate development of academic publishing in the United States up to the first half of the 20^th century, the 1950s and 1960s saw an extended growth as a direct result of the expansion of universities worldwide following the second world war. Other factors involved in this expansion were the baby boom, the GI bill, the influx of women in academia, economic advancement, and educational investments as part of the Cold War. This rise in student numbers and universities led to increased funds and investments in libraries, which in turn created a demand for more content. By 1967 there were sixty university presses affiliated to universities in the US and Canada, and by 1970 there were thirty smaller presses active outside the AAUP. In the UK there were seven university presses in 1970: Cambridge, Oxford, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Athlone Press of the University of London (Thompson 2005: 108, Brown 1970: 135).

This growth-boom ended rather abruptly at the beginning of the 1970s, followed by the economic recession of the 1980s, which marked the beginning of what we now know as the serials and monograph crisis (Thompson 2005: 98). Greco has analysed a large collection of sources, based mainly on research papers from the 60s until the 90s from the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, that talk about a first crisis in scholarly communication at the beginning of the 70s, extending into the present. He narrates how the rise of commercial scholarly publishing at that time was luring commercially interesting scholars away from university presses, making it even harder for the latter to sustain themselves (Greco et al. 2006: 58). In their description of the start of the crisis, Harvey et.al. note that universities were facing severe budget cuts at these times, which mostly meant that their presses were the first things to be cut, in the form of declining university subsidies. Library budgets were also cut, while publishing (warehousing, distribution etc.) costs went up. (Harvey et al. 1972: 196). This lead to a situation in which presses were—and still are—forced to change the books they publish, to the detriment of specialised scholarly monographs in the humanities (Harvey et al. 1972: 198).

The serials and monograph crisis only became more pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s. Increasingly, the focus of the debate on the crisis in academic publishing became the impact it was having on the tenure review process, and on the future of early-career scholars. This period also saw the growing penetration of commercial market forces into university press practices. Academic publishing was forced to start to adhere to a business ideology more and more (Greco et al. 2006: 62). According to Thompson, a ‘new climate of financial accountability’ arose for university presses around this time, which strengthened their uncertainty towards the nature and purpose of a university press (2005: 109). To a growing degree they were expected to break-even and to reduce their dependence on their institutions (Thompson 2005: 88–89). In a sense the ‘mission’ of the university press was breached in this situation. One of the results of this development was a greater ‘throughput model’, where publishers had to publish more and more titles in order to attain the same level of revenue. The growth in titles over the years did not necessarily mean the presses were doing well, however: they may have been publishing more titles but they were making less profit per title (Thompson 2005: 125). Besides, as Hall has argued, the increase in titles didn’t necessarily mean more ‘new’ research was being published, as many scholarly books were ‘merely repeating and repackaging old ideas and material’, with publishers focusing on more marketable overview publications, such as readers and introductions targeted at students (2008: 6).

As already remarked above, this decline of university press publishing was at the same time affected by the immense growth of commercial scholarly publishing. Since the 1970s the book publishing industry as a whole has been the focus of intensive merger and acquisitions activity leading to a situation in which international conglomerates now rule the business (Thompson, 2005:2). Thompson saw these developments coming about most clearly in: the growth of title output (also in book publishing where as part of the commodification of the sector both paperbacks and hardbacks were increasingly published); the concentration of corporate power; the transformation of the retail sectors; the globalisation of markets and publishing firms; and the influence of new technologies (2005). This progressively corporate concentration of scholarly publishing can, as Willinsky notes, be illustrated by the journal holdings (in 2003) of three of the major players: ‘Reed Elsevier with 1,800 journals, Taylor and Francis with over 1,000 titles, and Springer with more than 500 titles’ (2005: 19). Together, these control 60 percent of the publications that are indexed in the ISI Web of Science, Willinsky states. These mergers with smaller publishers have also led to growth in subscription prices (Willinsky 2005: 19). The excessive use of commercial branding, developed as a technique to cope with information overload, created a form of core science (citation index hierarchy) and with that of core journals and reputable publishers. This creation of hierarchy out of branding has again made it easier to make a profit out of publishing, by creating an inelastic market; it has also made it easier to distinguish excellent from mediocre scholars and researchers (Guédon 2009).

Journal publishing thus turned into a very lucrative business, affecting the system of scholarly communication directly. As Thompson points out: ‘The rise of powerful corporate players in the fields of STM publishing and journal publishing has squeezed the budgets of university libraries with dire consequences for academic publishers’ (2005: 62–63). Furthermore, university presses have increasingly been forced into commercial trade and textbook publishing to survive, while they are faced with strong competition from the conglomerates. This development, Thompson argues, led to the development of new publishing strategies for university presses including more paperbacks, more textbooks, and a bigger focus on disciplines and subjects that sell: strategies that were seen as being inevitable if they wanted to survive.

4.3 The Neoliberal University and the Marketisation of Academia

The serials and subsequent monograph crisis was a topic of hot debate during this period, particularly where it concerned the function and future of the university press and its relationship to the university, something which would have direct consequences for the further development of monograph publishing. As Lindsay Waters has argued with respect to the continued commercialisation of university presses: ‘Academic books are not a sustainable or profitable business. The idea then that university presses should turn into profit centers and strengthen the university’s budget is ludicrous’ (2004: 5). Waters emphasises the role played by the market in this development. He makes clear that there is a direct connection between the university’s marketisation and the crisis in publishing. Where the universities were increasingly focused on growth in productivity—i.e. more publications—this meant, in Waters words, ‘the draining of all publications of any significance other than as a number’. As with journal articles this meant books increasingly turned into ‘objects to quantify’ (Waters 2004: 6). Here there are larger problems that need to be addressed, connected to issues of accountability in university systems, the managerial/bureaucratic revolution, and forms of what Waters calls ‘cognitive rationality’.[3] This turn towards an increasingly economic rationality in both academia and publishing took place after WWII. As Waters puts it: ‘the university was made over on the model of the American corporation’ (2004: 11). Readings argues that the natural cultural mission that determined the university logic in the past has been declining and has been replaced by the idea of the ‘University of Excellence’ (1996: 3). From a connection to the nation state, producing and sustaining an idea of national culture, it has become a transnational bureaucratic company following the logic of the discourse of excellence and accountability: a ‘relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation’ (Readings 1996: 11). Consumerism replaces nationalism here, where ‘culture no longer matters as an idea for the institution’ (Readings 1996: 91). The emerging issue of the demand for publications was one of the factors, in addition to a more widespread social shift generated by neoliberalism’s reliance on managerial and consultancy techniques, which has led to the emergence of an audit culture within universities. Here quality is no longer assessed but credentialing happens by counting up publications (what Waters refers to as ‘Fordist production’), with the effect that decisions about tenure have been increasingly outsourced to the presses (Waters 2004: 24). The corporatisation of the university, as well as the administrative revolution and the search for excellence, thus all play an important role in the commercialisation of publishing as well as in the development of the serials and the monograph crisis (Hall 2008: 11–12, 42).

It is important to emphasise the role the corporatisation of the university played in this development, as this lays some of the responsibility for these developments on a shift in academia as a whole towards marketisation, as well as on our own institutions embracing this market logic, and ultimately on ourselves as scholars within these institutions. What is our role as scholars in this development? How can we create an alternative to the University of Excellence? Although market forces are in some sense abstract, is there a way for us to start changing our practices in order to battle these abstract movements? I will come back to say more about this in the next chapter. Here, however, I want to argue that, as I already set out in the introduction to this chapter, it can be highly problematic to perceive academia and publishing as different ‘fields’, one operating via a cultural logic and the other via an economic logic. In a way this points the finger of blame towards publishers or even towards the publishing function, seeing it as a separate entity, something outside the university that is outsourced and ‘othered’, instead of envisioning it as a function that could, and should (and has!) been an integral part of the development of the university. The crisis in scholarly publishing is deeply entangled with the crisis of academia, with the waning of the humanities and the increasing lack of subsidies for these fields hitting hard on the HSS and on not-for-profit book-focused university presses. The developments in scholarly publishing are directly connected to both the commercialisation and globalisation of the book publishing business, but more importantly, they are integrally related to the neoliberal marketisation and managerialisation of the university (Hall 2008, Readings 1996, Waters 2004).

Nonetheless, there are others, such as sociologist and book scholar John Thompson, for instance, who, based on his reading of Bourdieu’s field theory, make a clear distinction between different publishing fields and the ‘social fields’ to which they are related, such as the field of higher education (which in Thompson’s vision includes the world of university libraries). In his model, Thompson disconnects the publishing function from the ‘social field’ of the university. According to him different interests and logics shape these fields: ‘These fields are not the same, they have different social and institutional characteristics, but they are locked together through multiple forms of interdependency’ (Thompson 2005: 7). For Thompson, then, there is a distinction between culture (the university) and commerce (the publishing field) which gives rise to tension, misunderstanding and conflict.[4] What he neglects here is the fact that this tension is already part of the university system and has been so from its inception. Likewise, this tension has been part of apublishing system in which cultural values and struggles have always played an important role.[5] Thompson also overlooks the fact that the logic of commerce within scholarly publishing is closely related to the neoliberal logic of our current university system, which is getting an increasingly tight grip on academia. Here I would like to argue that they are not separate fields, but that the logic of commerce, or the growing monopoly that economic values have in our neoliberal institutions, is turning both the university and the university press increasingly into commercial businesses. Academia as a whole, to which I include the publishing function, is structured by internal, entangled and clashing economical, cultural, technological and political logics, not by logics that are subdivided into fields that are necessarily opposed to each other. Publishing, or the publishing function, is not to be blamed in this respect for the increasing commercialisation. The root cause of this problem should be located in the larger struggle for the future of the university, where at the moment it seems economic interests are winning.

In what ways are these functions then entangled? How do developments in (book) publishing relate to developments within universities? In addition to the examples already mentioned above, another connection can be found in the hyper-specialisation in scholarship—increasingly countered now by the need for inter- and trans-disciplinary studies. This urge to specialise within academia is connected to the demand to produce ever more research to increase one’s ‘research impact’ (which as Collini has shown, chiefly refers to economic, medical and policy impact (2012: 171)), based on research that at the same time needs to be original and new. This kind of highly specialised scholarship is however increasingly hard to market by university presses who are supposed to break-even or make a profit on their endeavours (Hall 2008: 43, Thompson 2005: 177). Another related problem is the creation of ever more PhD students, as well as academics on zero-hours and temporary contracts, who are to a growing degree working as cheap labour and replacing contracted full-time staff.[6] PhD students are also, following the accountability logic of the university, expected to publish their dissertations, which are again supposed to contain highly original and new research, in order to apply for increasingly fewer fulltime positions. All this while ‘at the same time (…) the market for the scholarly book has collapsed’ (Thompson 2005: 175), making it increasingly hard for these early career researchers to attain tenure positions in their fields (Darnton 1999).

Thompson argues that it has been the clash between the different field logics that has created a situation in which the ‘field of academic publishing and the field of the academy are being propelled in opposite directions’ (2005: 177). Instead, I want to emphasise here that this is a result of the internal contradictions structuring neoliberal marketisation, where both the publishers’ need to be more selective in what to publish according to market needs, and the demand on scholars to publish more for research impact, are based on principles of market competition. Credential inflation means that there are increasingly less positions available for scholars, which leads to a stronger selection based on more and better publications, just as more publications and less market demand means more selection and increased competition for publishers.

In the next chapter more attention will be given to alternatives to the present publishing system, focussing on those alternatives that take into account a variety of entangled factors that intend to change the way we publish, but that also have the potential to change the university and academia as a whole, taking into consideration material, technological, politico-economical, cultural and institutional structures. These initiatives intend not only to increase access to books to battle the monograph crisis and the object formation and commodification of the book, but also ask important questions on the material nature of books, authorship, copyright, originality, responsibility and fixity—issues that lie at the basis of our modern system of scholarly communication.

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[1] Not unlike blogposts today, Kronick mentions that in the 17^th century the journal was probably not accepted as a formal, definitive form of publication. Frequently these articles were collected by publishers and published in a book afterwards (1991: 61).

[2] Hawes gives the following numbers: in 1870 there were only 560 colleges and universities with 5600 professors and 52000 students, which grew in size to some 24000 professors and 240000 students by 1900, and to 950 institutions, 36000 teaching faculty, and 355000 students by 1910.

[3] For a summary of what this ‘neoliberal turn’ in HE consists of, see Hall (2008: 1–2).

[4] In Thompson’s vision, academic publishing, i.e. university press publishing, finds itself somewhere in between these two competing logics of the university and commercial scholarly publishing (2005: 175).

[5] Whereas according to Thompson the market logic structuring the publishing field ‘would tend to override any obligation they might feel to the scholarly community’ (2005: 97).

[6] See among others Swain (2013), Couvée (2012), and Anon. (2010).

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