Dear Colleagues
I’m giving a 20-minute paper next Friday (27 Nov) at an
ESF Humanities conference in Budapest. The conference title is Changing
publication cultures in the humanities, and it has the following four sections:
1.
The new horizon of
electronic publications
2.
Monographs as an
endangered species in the humanities
3.
Publications and the
problems of ‘lesser used’ languages
4.
The changing rationale
of editing in electronic publications.
My paper is in the section on ‘Monographs
as an endangered species in the humanities’ and its title is ‘Academic
publishing at academic institutions: new solutions to an old problem’.
(If anyone wants to see the programme for info, let me know and I can attach it
but I know the discussion lists don’t accept attachments.)
I’d be very grateful for
any points you’d like to raise about the situation in our fields at the
moment. I am speaking both as an academic – who has always taken time to
place my monographs, even though I’ve been in this game quite a while now
– and as someone running a new publication project, see below. The main areas
I intend to touch on are:
a.
The increasing
difficulty in placing monographs, especially in MFL and especially interdisciplinary
in field & approach, with commercial publishers;
b.
The contradiction between
RAE/REF expectation of monographs in the humanities, yet less and less
opportunity of publication;
c.
In relation to MFL in
particular, the difficulty in keeping quotations in the original language, at
least with commercial presses;
d.
The current rise in
publication based in academic units (I don’t mean university presses, but
series such as my own Institute’s igrs books, the series of our
sister institute ISA, or similar specialist ‘NGO’ series such as Bithell,
MHRA, Legenda, Tamesis, Boydell & Brewer [the latter pairs overlapping
somewhat] – please let me know of others); these sometimes do
allow original-language quotation, often with English translation;
e.
Their use – this is
certainly true of igrs books, ISA and MHRA – of print-on-demand,
which cuts thru the commercial publishers’ issue about small print-runs.
f.
However, I must admit
that igrs books has not yet sent its first titles in to the printer, so there
is still much to learn; the system is: the pdf text is lodged with the printer,
marketing is in the hands of the publisher (ie the ‘NGO’), but
distribution is through Amazon or similar.
g.
A few practical issues:
o Camera-ready copy and who takes responsibility for it – we
are finding with our series that it can be a problem leaving it in the hands of
authors, careful as they generally are – Peter Lang has recently taken
back responsibility for CRC, but other presses (especially on the continent eg
Rodopi and, I believe, l’Harmattan) still leave it to the author;
o Subsidies, & lack of HEIs’/funding bodies’
support for them (Susan Harrow has recently sent out a query on this, and I
have her replies);
o Similarly, lack of external funding for illustrations and/or
CRC;
o NB re funding: I recall in 2000 getting British Academy grants
for illustration costs on one book and CRC on another – both these
options no longer exist, I believe, in either BA or AHRC, our main funders.
I’d be really grateful for any points – amplifications,
corrections, general thoughts – that you can give me on any of the above,
and I will of course credit whatever I use in my talk. (I am intending to write
the paper next Tuesday the latest.)
Many thanks!
Naomi
Prof Naomi Segal
Director, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Senate House, Malet St., London WC1E 7HU
tel: 020 7862 8739
fax: 020 7862 8762
sec: 020 7862 8677
website: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk