ANALYSIS AND NEWS
be undertaken in understanding better the requirements and implications of this idea, it is clear that it surfaces a renewed desire on behalf of universities and libraries to both play a greater role in the scholarly communications process and support innovative business models and approaches to the scholarly monograph.
A very different idea was the development of a knowledgebase (or ‘monobase’ as it was christened) enabling institutional libraries to have data and intelligence on what other libraries currently hold in their collections. The primary focus of this idea was to address the challenge of space for universities and their libraries, and the continued presence of low-use, legacy book collections in libraries. If libraries knew what others hold then they would enable the development of a national collections policy, and local decisions could be made about collections in the context of the UK’s research collection as a whole. The knowledgebase would enable the development of new shared services, such as document delivery and digitisation services. We might imagine, for example, that it could be the basis for something like a ‘Netflix for books’: providing instant access to the digital version
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
with the print version following a few days later in the post, if required.
As we’ve seen, these ideas are part of a much wider conversation about the future of monographs, both in the UK and internationally. Those of us with an interest in the future of the academic book must take advantage of this moment in the sun. There are also other developments in publishing that will affect the future of the book – new digital platforms for sharing research findings, and the mid-length publications that fall between a monograph and a journal article are just two examples. But findings from the current research projects must be used to understand better the challenges that face publishers, librarians, authors and readers, and how best to solve them.
My own opinion is that it’s difficult to talk about a single ‘future’ for the academic monograph. The survey didn’t give a big enough sample to break down results by subject (as opposed to discipline), but it’s clear from previous research that not all humanities scholars think alike when it comes to communicating their findings. Indeed, even within a single subject, there can be considerable variation – archaeology is a classic
example, with researchers at the data-driven end of the subject influenced very strongly by cultures in data-intensive subjects within the science, technology and medicine disciplines, while archaeologists with a more traditional background prefer to publish monographs. I hope that researchers in different disciplines will find their own ‘best’ way of communicating their research outputs. We’ve got into the habit of thinking of ‘the book’ as 500 pages between two hard covers, and indeed this physical object is very important to many researchers. But fundamentally it’s a collection of ideas and arguments – just because historically they have been contained within the physical book doesn’t mean that they always must be in future.
Changing the way we think about ‘the book’
won’t be easy – it’ll require significant cultural change, particularly given the privileged role that the monograph plays in recruitment and promotion decisions. And I hope that this diversity in outputs will be echoed by diversity in business models – that different types of output can find their own ‘best’ way to support themselves. The best thing that funders and others can do at the moment is to encourage that diversity.
DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015 Research Information 5
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