Publishing for a Technical Community
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Publishing for a Technical Community A.W. Kenneth Metzner Publishing has been much in the news recently. Two dominant thèmes hâve been the takeovers of publishing companies by média giants and the huge advances paid to brand-name authors. Both are thèmes of "trade publishing" (fiction and nonfiction sold in bookstores), and neither has much relevance to scholarly and professional publishing in science and technology. Trade publishers, under corporate pressure to improve profit margins (5-10%), look with envy at the margins in textbook and professional publishing (10-15%) and only dream of those earned by the canny publishers of research journals (15-25%). And that is where we hâve the number one publishing problem facing any technical research community today: How to keep the rising prices of monographs and journals from overwhelming library budgets. It is a problem that has been escalating inexorably since about 1945. Recently, physicist Barschall1 demonstrated trie enormous range of journal prices, with society publishers generally at the low end and commercial publishers ranging ail the way out into the prohibitive. And he made a solid contribution toward defining measures and criteria of value. It is urgent for the societies that represent the various technical communities to get together with libraries and their consortia, such as the Association of Research Libraries, to develop legally sound procédures for applying such criteria. At the research level, the authors who need archivai récognition, the library users of journals and monographs, the library advisory committee, the grant seekers perturbed by high indirect cost rates, and the editors, editorial boards, and advisory committees of journals and book séries (whether commercial or society) are ail essentially one and the same. Talk about "interlocking directorates"! Each research community must face this responsibility itself, in its own enlightened self-interest. It is inadéquate, and also unrealistic, to set
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up commercial publishers as the sole villains, because the décision makers in that world are responding to an entirely différent imperative. Take note, however, and emulate, the very sound and cautionary practice of commercial publishers having expert lawyers présent at ail rimes. Another publishing problem, or source of publishing opportunities, is the constantly changing dynamics of research fields and technical communities—the "twigging" phenomenon, the rise and fall of interdisciplinary and mission-oriented areas, and the sudden émergence of methods, philosophies, movements, and even fashions. Strong personalities and brilliant minds are often the key factors in such developments. Some societies manage to be flexible in accommodating thèse changes, both organizationally and in the design of their publishing programs. In others, success has led to ossification and bureaucratization, so that the innovative group can only split to form a new society or quit to work with an eager commercial publisher. And hère is where the entrepreneurial agili
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