The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing

Abstract

A system of scholarly monograph publishing, primarily under the auspices of university presses, coalesced only 50 years ago as part of the final stage of the professionalization of US institutions of higher education. The resulting analogue publishing system supplied the authorized print monographs that academic institutions newly required for faculty tenure and promotion. That publishing system – as each of its components – was bounded, stable, identifiable, well ordered, and well policed. As successive financial shocks battered both the country in general and scholarly publishing in particular, just a decade after its final formation, the analogue system went into extended decline. Finally, it is now giving way to a digital scholarly publishing system whose configuration and components are still obscure and in flux, but whose epistemological bases differ from the analogue system in almost all important respects: it will be relatively unbounded and stochastic, composed of units that are inherently amorphous and shape shifting, and marked by contested authorization of diverse content. This digitally driven, epistemic system shift in scholarly publishing may well be an extended work in progress, since the doomed analogue system is still fiscally dominant with respect to monographs, and the nascent digital system has not yet coalesced around a multitude of emerging digital affordances.