you should consider turning up the volume even further in this section, suggesting that the crisis is not just around scholarly communication, but more generally around higher education in general and liberal arts education in particular. By making this link, you are more apt to capture the attention of presidents and trustees who worry about such things, while not necessarily worrying so much about the details of the tenure system. But the problem is not something that a single college can solve all by itself; there is a way in which you need to differentiate between individual schools that are institutions, and the industry/institution of higher ed. The issues you are grappling with are industry issues that no school all by itself can come to grips with.

So I’ve attempted to do that as I revise, moving from the local issues to that larger significance:

In the end, what I am arguing is that we in the humanities, and in the academy more broadly, face what is less a material obsolescence than an institutional one; we are caught in entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs. But because we are, by and large, our institutions, or rather, because they are us, the greatest challenge we face is not that obsolescence, but our response to it. Like the novelists I studied in my first book, who may feel their cultural centrality threatened by the rise of newer media forms, we can shore up the boundaries between ourselves and the open spaces of intellectual exchange on the internet; we can extol the virtues of the ways things have always been done; we can bemoan our marginalization in a culture that continues marching forward into the digital future – and in so doing, we can further undermine our influence on the main threads of intellectual discussion in contemporary public life. The crisis we face, after all, does not stop with the book, but rather extends to the valuation of the humanities within the university, and of institutions of higher education within the culture at large. We tend to dismiss the public disdain for our work and our institutions as a manifestation of the ingrained anti-intellectualism in U.S. culture, and perhaps understandably so, but until we take responsibility for our culture’s sense of our irrelevance, we cannot hope to convince it otherwise. Unless we can find ways to speak with that culture, to demonstrate the vibrancy and the value of the liberal arts, we run the risk of being silenced altogether.

And we will be silenced, unless we can find a way to create new ways of speaking with that culture, and amongst ourselves. We can build institutional supports for the current undead system of scholarly publishing, and we can watch as the profession itself continues its decline. Or we can work to change the ways we communicate and the systems through which we attribute value to such communication, opening ourselves to the possibility that new modes of publishing might enable not just more texts but better texts, not just an evasion of obsolescence but a new life for scholarship. The point, finally, is not whether any one particular technology can provide a viable future for scholarly publishing, but whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the systems that will make such technologies viable, and keep them viable into the future.

Monica McCormick:

I welcomed this project as a chance for NYU Press to pragmatically test new methods of scholarly communication. We are invested in exploring new ways to sustain scholarly publishing as our authors and their practices evolve. Admittedly, the evolution of print book publishing can seem very slow. Even as we maintain our current cost-recovery business model, because that is what we’re paid to do and because our products have real cultural value, we must also begin to test new tools and implement procedures that will help us gain the skills to work with new technologies, develop new business models, and support scholars who are committed to working in new ways.

Working in new ways will require some new tools. It’s also worth considering the virtues and affordances of previous practices. Most serious readers I know often read with pencil in hand, to engage directly with the text — one reason that paper continues to be a satisfying medium. In CommentPress we have a fascinating new-media tool that enables the age-old practice of marginalia. It supports communal annotation and discussion in a very practical way, and is an excellent tool for the kind of open, vigorous conversation that Kathleen wants to have with her readers. We will continue to assess how it worked for this project, how else it might be implemented, and how CommentPress and other tools for networked reading and commentary might be developed.

This dual mode of review also encouraged me to reflect on the multiple reasons for peer review–not only to help publishers decide whether to invest in it and mark it with their imprint, but also to give the author useful advice and suggest improvements, and to support the system by which scholars are rewarded (or not). What would happen, I wondered, if the Press’s readers (and possibly the editor) disagreed with the self-nominated readers (and perhaps the author)? Peer review, like any mode of scholarly engagement, often engenders at least a few contentious questions, and the author/editor/reviewer relationship can be complex, as Kathleen’s work makes clear. And the stakes are high–if disagreements are not resolved, the work may not be published or the search for a publisher begins anew. In this case, we were confident in the quality of Kathleen’s work, and welcomed the potential for improvements that multiple readers might offer, so this was not a significant cause for concern. But it seems clear that adding more voices to the mix risks more opportunities for disagreement, and we have few existing models for resolving them, beyond the good will of the parties involved. The up side is that the debate can be conducted with great transparency and the work is already available — albeit in a form that may not be deemed worthy of tenure.

In short, we are all engaged in a long transformative period, as technology and scholarship and our measures for evaluating it evolve. I appreciate the opportunity to take a small evolutionary step with these colleagues.

This time, things are different; I’ve had my hands in the manuscript (and in the code for this site) since I finished it, and I’m hoping to be actively involved in discussion of it for a while.

Breaking that silence could be really useful, I think.

In addition to participating in conversations in the margins of the text, I’ll be posting some here as well, more meta-thoughts about the process, as well as larger thoughts about revisions and the road from here.

I look forward to seeing how things go; may there be lots of chatter!