Abstract:
The technologies, economics, and politics of scholarly publication in the humanities
look set to change rapidly in the near future. Even if the market for
print publication were to remain relatively buoyant, national governments
(the main direct and indirect funders of research) are increasingly questioning
the efficiency and cost of traditional means of dissemination. The academic
humanities book market is an unusual sector in publishing because
the producers, the academic authors, comprise also the largest sector of the
consumers, either directly or through their institutional libraries. From the
perspective of those who pay for research, publishers appear to have created
and plugged themselves into a circuit of knowledge dissemination (from
academics to publishers and back again) to which they do not contribute as
much value as they extract. With new electronic publication technologies
that do not require large investments of capital (printing presses, warehouses,
transport), there are powerful forces directing academic authors away
from traditional print publication.
