In this two-part blog post on The Scholarly Kitchen titled “The Monograph: Keep on Keepin’ On,” Richard Fisher takes on the argument that the monograph is in decline. He argues that, in fact, the rhetoric around the death of the monograph is overblown, and that there is no lack of supply for monographs nor are the major commercial academic book publishers under threat. Fisher relies heavily on Geoffrey Crossick’s HEFCE report on the vitality of monograph publishing. As such, much of Jannake Adema’s critique of that report can be aimed at Fisher as well: Fisher does not acknowledge that the crisis in monograph publishing stems from the fact that first books and more esoteric books are not being published; he focus on a small number of major, UK-based presses rather than considering the international ecosystem; and he conveniently leaves out the reliance of commercial academic publishers on their journal bundling practices to subsidize their book publishing arms. (Journal bundling, of course, has been a significant factor of the subscriptions crisis for libraries around the world.) He claims that no great disruption has happened in the world of monograph publishing—the changes have occurred primarily in distribution and sales. Perhaps this is true; but it elides the fact that, as Adema astutely points out, maintaining the status quo for major commercial presses is not necessarily a positive thing for scholarly communication broadly considered.

 

Work cited

Adema, Jannake. 2015. “The Monograph Crisis Revisited.” Open Reflections. https://openreflections.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/the-monograph-crisis-revisited/.

Crossick, Geoffrey. 2015. Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE. HEFCE. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2015/monographs/

Fisher, Richard. 2015. “Guest Post: Richard Fisher on The Monograph: Keep On Keepin’ On*.” (Parts 1 & 2) The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/11/10/guest-post-richard-fisher-on-the-monograph-keep-on-keepin-on-part-one/; https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/11/16/guest-post-richard-fisher-on-the-monograph-keep-on-keepin-on-part-two/.