The July 4th holiday is over and this is the heart of the scholarship-production season, so perhaps it's time for a serious post.
Ok–look–the news is really starting to trouble me. We've spoken already this spring about University of Michigan Press' shift towards e-publishing and the budget cuts at one of the great history presses–LSU Press. Here, by the way, is the Virginia Quarterly Review blog's fabulous in-depth treatment of LSU's grand history and the problems with LSU's journal Southern Review, as well. It's possible this will be the end for LSU Press.
Over at prawfs Kelly Anders is talking about cutbacks at Yale University Press. Anders links to a Yale Daily News article, "Yale University Press Faces Setbacks," about plans for smaller press runs and more e-publishing. Oxford University Press laid off 60 people in New York in January–nearly 10% of their staff. This news comes from this New York Observer story on Nikko Pfund. (We linked last year to Pfund's very helpful discussion of what OUP editors are looking for in a manuscript.)
All of this sets up perfectly the shift towards what Lindsey Waters is calling "slow writing"–which includes a shift towards essays. Of course the crisis in publishing is hitting journals, too–we need to talk about this at some point.
I'm really starting to worry–which is my nature to begin with–about university presses. The Virginia Quarterly Review essay I linked to above turns around a question: how closely related are university presses to the mission of the university? I'd say very closely–and (no surprise here) the QR thinks so, too. At the Chronicle's job blog, there's a very reasonable question: when will this affect the publish or perish culture of our universities. I think a lot sooner than we'd like: as teaching loads increase and opportunities for research leaves plummet, schools may lower publication expectations. However, this is going to happen in the context of restrictions on tenure. We're going to see fewer tenured positions and more teaching and less writing. The magic eight ball's predicting that with certainty.
Want to get even more worried, think about the plight of trade presses. Over at The Nation Elizabeth Sifton in an article entitled "The Long Goodbye: The Book Business and Its Woes" (this is too serious for me to even crack a smile at the title–though it's a good one) is surveying the carnage in trade presses.
And here's some more sobering news from insidehighereducation.com.
For those of you who are thinking about publishing a book, here's some discussion of Brian Leiter's rankings of academic presses in law.