Setting the stage

In the metacritical field of ‘publishing studies’ (a non-existing discipline as yet, but one that should soon emerge and maybe absorb the (now) venerable field book historyReference Darnton³) there are roughly two models. One is the ‘Darnton approach’, expatiating the longue durée and thus looking at the present digital revolution in the context of previous changes/revolutions/mutations in the world of mediation (in writing). Robert Darnton, as a book historian, started mapping the field very early with a famous 1999 New York Review of Books article.Reference Darnton⁴ In a recent publication, The Case for Books, collecting some older pieces along with a couple of new texts written especially for this publication, Darnton sums up his faith in the ‘traditional’ Gutenberg book while calling for a rational use of the digital media to enrich books (what he did as initiator of the project Gutenberg-e⁵) and especially to disseminate them. But he also vehemently argues against the ‘either/or choice’, and remains convinced that the printed book should be kept alive alongside new forms of publishing, at least in the foreseeable future, for preservation but also for convenience of use. It is difficult not to agree with him, but is it a feasible route?

The other model is that of the ‘Kuhnians’,Reference Kuhn⁶ more specifically the ‘cyberfaithful’. They know that there is no (road)map to conduct a revolution and, as they sense that a scientific/epistemological revolution is on its way, so they proceed by trial-and-error, or all-out experimentation, boldly invading all forms of publishing by digital means.⁷ They are found all over the world, but one of the hotbeds of this kind of approach is the Institute for the Future of the Book.⁸ Contrary to the Darntonians, they reject traditional categories and question the future of the book on the grounds that it is linked to a given medium (paper) and thus will take on a different meaning in the digital world. This makes sense and is even very seductive as a posture: sometimes the best defence is offense, and occupying a territory first allows it to be shaped it according to one's needs. But does the promise of a paradigmatic shift really respond to the basic needs of scholars. In other words, will it improve their research in a significant way, rather than transform it for the simple reason that a new tool is available, slowly leading to a situation where this very tool becomes compulsory as all previous ones are eliminated.

This ‘world without alternatives’ is all too common in fast-changing times. Recent examples of significant technical shifts abound; let us just quote the move from paper photoprints to plastic prints, and more radically from analogue imaging to digital imaging, moves that have opened up many possibilities (as well as probably saved many natural resources) but in the meantime have almost eradicated the whole area of black-and-white quality images – which are still wanted and needed by some photographers – limiting them to the rarefied world of wealthy creators or museums. For most of us, serious amateur photographers, it is just not an option anymore, even though black-and-white imaging might still be needed.

Faced with this absence of choice, I suggest we shift to a ‘political economy of the book’. The phrase, although pompous, means something very simple. I intend to view books as an economic activity constituting a society and, as such, as the result of choices that are no more natural than they are immutable. There is nothing preordained in the ‘modernity’ of the digital world, and there should not be. In any case, we should not be detracted from shaping it according to the long-term view – whatever it is – about the future we want. We will not all agree, but it should be debated openly and not taken as a mere unavoidable fact. The future I want – and I will make no bones about it – is one that advances knowledge (and at least the artefacts serving that knowledge) to be the common preserve of humanity. In the field of scholarly publishing,⁹ the practical outcome is ‘open access’¹⁰ – a consequence that is both fundamental and desirable for reasons that are entirely political (or philosophical – that is to say conceptual) and not simply pragmatic – an efficient response to a topical difficulty.

A revolution in context

The crisis of social science and humanities writing, and particularly of the book, is deeply embedded in the context of the last decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. The reason very often invoked for the demise of the academic HSS (humanities and social sciences) book is the so-called ‘serials crisis’, a term used to designate the vertiginous rise of the subscription to STM (science, technology, medicine) journals since the mid-80s, which strangled libraries and led to fewer purchases of books/monographs.Reference Cummings¹¹ Such evolution might have been ‘normal’, or simply ‘in the order of things’ if, meanwhile, the book had not remained the main research object in the HSS (for reasons that will be developed infra and are quintessential to our theory). The resulting tension between supply and demand destabilized the whole field of academic publishing. In its heyday, the systematic purchase of academic monographs by most libraries worked as indirect subsidizing. It had its drawbacks – not all monographs were equally good or useful and emulation/incentive was low. But emulation took place in the field of symbolic capital, away from the economics of publication. It allowed, however, for diversity and at least kept the sector alive. The reallocation of library budgets towards the much more expensive STM journals significantly lowered the economic viability of HSS monographs, whose print runs plummeted (from an average 1500 in the 1980s to ca. 400 today), while the publication costs, despite automation and lower printing costs, remained high because publishing – especially book publishing – is a labour-intensive activity.

But the deep-seated reasons for the crisis lie elsewhere, in another crisis, that of academia, and of the Humanities and Social Sciences themselves – even those these reasons seem to have been revealed by a technological revolution. Solely blaming the economics of publishing is missing the point by a very long way. The ‘digital revolution’ in communication and information hit academia just as Western societies were under great strains in their development model. The causes are well known: demographic shifts, a new world balance, and global environmental challenges. The practices, however, did not lag behind – as expected – but rather, paradoxically and counter-intuitively (in the mid 1980s, to take a convenient although imperfect starting point), underwent a powerful conversion to liberal economics of the most rabid sort. Academia, which had lived very much outside the world of market economics, experienced conversion – at least of its leaders and powers-that-be – to market forces, toppling in a very few years the social regulation that had patiently and with great difficulty been established since the late nineteenth century in most Western countries, and certainly since 1945 in all of them. This went along with the so-called ‘financialization’ of the economy, i.e. of people's lives.

The impact of such change on the world of research was probably even stronger than in the traditional market-driven activities. The ethos of ‘social utility’ or ‘public service’, which had animated the sciences (and particularly, but not exclusively, the social sciences) since their modern emergence in the latter part of the nineteenth century, exploded under the pressure of the market economy, which took hold of even the smaller research units. In the name of ‘efficiency’, it coupled short-termism (against all the needs of ‘deep’ research) with generalized individual competition (against the ethos of collaboration existing in many scientific practices), ushering in a new subculture in the West, that of ‘performance,’ or even more bluntly, ‘of evaluation.’ This was the ‘managerial revolution’ coming to the campuses and labs, establishing a rat race for publication at all costs, and so – as the promising and highly paid jobs of the future seemed to be in business and finance – the social sciences, the humanities, and later even the sciences themselves lost their best students. The shift was particularly damaging to all fields engaged in reflective activities (as opposed to operational ones, for example engineering versus quantum physics, or finance versus macroeconomics), long-term programs and, in the case of the natural sciences, those having steep learning curves and little financial or symbolic return on investment.

Such an environment could only be detrimental to book reading as well as to book writing. Writing a book takes time, often a lot of it, and academics are now pressured with a growing number of tasks, not only teaching but ‘animation’, administration, politics and management of all sorts of resources, and they often have neither the means nor the skills to do all these. Academic time, which used to be like a loft – free to be occupied and partitioned as each individual saw fit at any given moment – has changed into something fragmented and subject to permanent accountability.

Even when manuscripts do get written, they do not always end up in book form for reasons that are not scientific but economic: the size, format, or topic, are deemed too narrow by publishing entrepreneurs who refuse to take the ‘risk’ for publication. In other words, the final word is not with the peers (who validate the research) but with the ‘market’, or the perception of the market that publishers have.¹²

With the advent of electronic means of publication, and even more with journal platforms (such as OJS or revues.org) that allow the production of high-quality journals with no visible and upfront investment (known as the ‘entry barrier’) other than the intellectual work of the editors, the dream of disintermediation almost came true. The internet seemed to offer professionals a way to retrieve a grip on their own field by setting them free from economic contingencies. In fact, far from freeing scientific publication from economics, it highlighted the dire need for public or semi-public investment in communication infrastructures. The development of platforms and tools for electronic publication was, to a large extent, possible because of direct investment either by a foundation (PKP) or the State (in the case of revues.org, which is financed by CNRS, the largest French public-research operator outside the universities). This happened against the ‘market’, which failed to deliver the goods needed but did manage to collect the golden eggs, organizing itself to siphon off vast amounts of public capital spent by institutions and states to buy back from publishers the knowledge content produced by their own employees (albeit with a certain level of added service).

Simultaneously, evaluators of research (at macro-level at least), became people with little or no knowledge of the nature of research – politicians or (public) managers, top civil servants, consulting firms peopled with MBAs – who argued for ‘performance indicators’. This was a case of making a complex situation simple via a rather simplistic move. Metrics, now the mantra of all boards and committees, was paradoxically the child of quantitative social science itself, the dream of modelling life. It is still defended very powerfully by even the most forward thinkers, such as S. Harnad, who, in long and perfectly cogent and sophisticated demonstrations, preaches for something akin to automatic/machine evaluation of performance. Nothing new here: it is the reinvention of metaphysics by Auguste Comte.

The vital need to be ‘visible’ has led researchers to publish a lot and regularly, as now all research has to adapt to ‘contract time’, anywhere between two and four years, which happens to closely follow political/election times. Almost by mechanical effect, it has forced the HSS, and especially the humanities, to rely more heavily on articles than on books. The article form, which had always been important in the elaboration of the work, as were ‘lectures’ and conference papers, has now taken on a single central value, not that of bringing something new to the field but that of assessing the person's research, with a view to hiring, promotion, funding, and, increasingly, avoiding termination. It is what Noel Malcolm cogently calls, in a brilliant article, ‘tenure publishing’, which he sees as akin to vanity publishing.Reference Malcolm¹³

Be realistic! demand the impossible! (May 1968 situationist slogan)

Those who wanted to erase the past – be they economic liberals or post-situationists – may have seen the advent of the digital paradigm as a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the (academic) book, a costly, musty, dusty form that had outlived its time. And do we really need books? Well, it depends what we mean by books. If by ‘books’ we mean printed folios, the answer is probably that it might not be the most convenient form, at least for research. Despite its yet undisputed ergonomy and simplicity, the printed book lacks some of the possibilities that can now expand its use (to analyse or scan its content quickly for instance). These possibilities are now significantly called ‘services’ because they can be marketed on top of free content. The book is also limited by its fixity, making updating cumbersome and expensive.Reference Odlyzko¹⁴ In short, more can be done with digital than with analogical information.¹⁵

Yet, if by books, we mean ‘a long, organized, structured and developed research form’, then we do need HSS books, and for at least four reasons. Three are internal (or epistemological), and one is ethical (or political).

First, we need books because of the way Humanities and Social Sciences work. Most research in HSS is idiosyncratic and multifaceted, both in its references, and in its outcome. Very often a scholar will actually build a new ‘territory’ for himself, and this mapping out takes time. In addition, the formulation of the argument and the development of the hypothesis are as important as are actual ‘results’.

Secondly, books are ‘spaces’ or ‘worlds;’ they are places of debate and exchange, not packets of verified information.Reference Chartier¹⁶ Research monographs in other words are neither instruction manuals nor the eight o'clock news, and we need those specialized spaces, alongside others but not instead of others.

Thirdly, we need books in order to slow down the process of research. A book epistemologically marks the temporary end of a complete research process and is not a mere accumulation of texts. The aim is to stabilize – for a while – a given idea/set of ideas in a specific context. This process is indispensable to good science, which cannot exist in constant flux and can only move by steps.

Lastly, the question of the need for books eventually boils down to the reasons why social and human scientists write. The answer is simple, but also far-reaching. They write to understand how societies work and change – so far all will agree – but they also do so in order to help members of these societies develop both their independence and their solidarity – a more contentious statement. It explains, however, why there is such continuity between human and social scientists and society, and why their scholarly publications reach far beyond professional readers, as opposed to the ‘hard’ sciences where there is a clear separation between the professional publications, which are clearly inaccessible to the general public, and those specifically aimed at the general public. In HSS, one should write about complex issues in a language that remains accessible to a normally educated person. It is part of HSS's mission.Reference Bourdieu¹⁷ And so is, for this very reason, the ‘open access’ to the results of such research.

Open access (OA) is defined as access to publications that are digital, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA as an organized ‘method’ was first developed in the STM as a means of speeding up exchanges between researchers, of by-passing the economic barriers of access to information in particular for the developing countries, and of returning the results of public research investment to the public, at least symbolically. It also led to new ways of handling (and of mining) vast amounts of information in new and innovative ways (so-called alternatively data-mining, or e-science, and which is already at work in the various Google engines, especially Google Books).

For the HSS, however, open access has other potential benefits. Most of all, it will make the famous ‘administering of proof’ via references, the documenting of statement by evidence, a reality by actually linking context to text and physically connecting primary and secondary sources for the readers. This will be a quantum leap in the quality of scholarly exchange. It will also improve the porosity with civil society. Take the catchwords of EC programs: there will not be any ‘knowledge society’ without a ‘social economy’, that is to say a system of economic/cultural/symbolic goods that fully involves all citizens. Similarly, the notion of sustainability, which is part and parcel of all EC programmes must be interpreted in the ecological sense, and not in the meaning it usually assumes in the calls for tender, where it basically means ‘something that sells enough to be self-sustainable in a market context.’

Here we have come full circle to our original question: that of the HSS faced with the digital ‘revolution’. How can we maintain the objects needed to help us be (more) human today and tomorrow? I have tried to show that we must manage to salvage the fundamentals of our activity in a whirlwind of change. It will not just ‘happen naturally’, and we should certainly view the digital media neither as value neutral nor as inevitable, in a sort of deterministic fatalism that we too often make ours without even realizing it.

The change we want will first require ‘spaces,’ or to put it differently, ‘infrastructures’. These are of two kinds. The first type concerns tools that are acclimatized by certain groups of scholars who get federated through the technology. The second type concerns the initiatives of pre-existing groups, publishers in general, who invest in digital publishing platforms to reinvent their role, and choose to do so with an open access model.¹⁸ Those are often either learned societies publishers or university presses.¹⁹ This is the sign of the re-emergence, through a technological revolution, of an old ‘place of knowledge’, the university, which had tended to be confiscated in the past decades by ‘the economy’. It is not that the university is outside the economy. Nobody of course is. But the university is – or at least should be – in a different time frame from the rest of the world. It is a place where time is of the essence, a time that is neither more wasted nor less useful than the time of the monks of yore (and of today). It simply escapes the short term to prepare the long future.

The new Ulysses: the true revolution of science

The work of the academic publishers who believe in this mission is thus completely reinvented, quite a ‘revolution’ for them. They must go back to another-type-of-profit model, and not simply a not-for-profit one (which still needs to be self-sustaining), as knowledge cannot be simply sustained by the market.²⁰ Many problems have to be solved, first and foremost that of quality standards. They are not really difficult though, and are certainly much less challenging than the resistance to short-termism that I pointed out earlier. Here again, OA and the digital world can help. I am not referring here to metrics – download statistics and citation indexes – which are ways of correlating ‘usage’ to the ‘value’ of content, and are made possible by the digital nature of texts. Despite the great sophistication of their formulae, metrics have been heavily criticized for measuring an outside phenomena in the hope that a model can be built to translate it into evaluation of content, albeit indirectly. The major problem is that usage (whether reading or citing) is in no way indicative of quality, or at least not systematically and in fact rather haphazardly. The most metrics can do is construct a cloud or network of reference around a given work.

Peer review, the traditional and time-honoured basis for first evaluation in the world of academia (followed by reviews in scholarly journals), still does a good job despite criticism, as long as one takes it for what it is: beyond the most basic fact and method checking, peer review is merely a first opinion backing an editorial decision based on many other factors. It can, however, be greatly enhanced by all forms of discussions around books and even by improvement of their content. The various techniques of dialogue and annotation, already used in blogs, and undoubtedly to be perfected in the future, will be a way of making true the idea of books as worlds and conversations.²¹ But it will not suit every book and every commentator or writer, and conversation (just like colloquia) will not replace solitary work and long elaboration. The important point here is that this is just one more possibility added to an already broad panoply of tools. In other words, new avenues should not close off old ones, which are still functional and needed, although they might be not profitable.

The digital nature of publications, their broad and open dissemination through open access, the potential openness of their worlds and of their usage, extending to sophisticated re-use (by virtue of the flexibility of texts), all will deeply impact the symbolic foundation of academia, the combined notions of author(ship) and reward. A legal evolution will be needed not simply in the forms of attribution of ownership (often designed generically and somewhat misleadingly as ‘copyright’). This may take the form of the already famous ‘publishing licences’, the best-known being the Creative Commons licences.²²

The true revolution lies in the deep change of the very concept of authorship in the near future, and with it the whole relationship to their ‘creations’ of those professional scientists working for large research and teaching institutions who style themselves as ‘scholars’. Despite my promise not to make predictions, I foresee the end of the Author in human sciences as it has disappeared in the hard sciences. He or she might still survive in the media, either in the form of an interpreter and mediator, or as a ‘media personality’ (no names needed here, we know quite a few of them already in our respective countries) for those with great showmanship potential. They will be able to cash in on their gift or talent, but that is rather different from ‘creation’. And this may be all the better as long as the others – the true creators – have the means to continue doing their work and do not need the media to exist – and are not jealous of its rewards.

For the core problem is, of course, the rewards. Changing the rewards, however, entails a revolution in mores. It might turn out to be the first step in a reversal of practices, a reaction against the managerial university, which right now is destroying our research potential (at least in Europe) in the name of efficiency, just as the ‘free’ market has abused our common (limited) resources in the name of liberty and efficiency. Scholars could search for rewards according to their talents in the various facets of research without compromising their work in the name of performance indicators other than the true scholarly ones.

We seem to have come a long way from my introductory remarks on the ‘digital revolution’, from computers, screens, e-books, ‘liquid texts’, e-science or creative commons licences. (Language is also an issue I left out and that would need greater attention.) These are important issues involving major political and industrial choices. Yet, they are but the visible part of the symptoms as it were, of the real revolution, which is taking place in the world of science. Digital media give the humanities and social sciences the opportunity to return to a few fundamentals after a long, demanding, and dangerous circumnavigation in which they were almost lost. Digital media might be the Trojan horse of the humanities in the world of modern utilitarianism. It is the story of Ulysses all over again, that of the traveller who needed to see the world in order to reinvent his own.