No Single Solution: Increasing Author Equity in Scholarly Publishing and Library Collections

By Kristen Twardowski (Director of Sales and Marketing, Northwestern University Press) <kristen.twardowski@northwestern.edu>

This is likely a different article than the one Against the Grain imagined I would write. My mandate was both to explore how publishers can elevate marginalized voices and to identify the challenges of getting that content into libraries. This article’s theme is, thus, large in scope. Over the centuries of its development, academic book publishing has become entrenched in inequitable systems that privilege certain voices over others. The vast majority of scholarly publishing today still functions within these systems with all of the benefits and injustices that implies.1 This leaves us with several questions: how do you publish in an equitable way; and how can libraries support that work through their collection development strategies?

This article will not entirely answer either of these questions. I don’t think any article entirely could. It will, however, provide some background as well as guideposts for thinking through how your institution can support equitable publishing.

Because of my own professional experiences, this article largely focuses on US-based university press publishing in the humanities and social sciences. These presses, though less well resourced than their commercial counterparts, do crucial work advocating for their regional communities and ensuring the continued bibliodiversity of scholarly publishing.2 The people working at them care deeply about their authors and hope their books will be read by as many people as possible. In some cases, this means publishing open access (OA), but in the humanities and social sciences, funding to support open research has not been readily available. Because of this tension, open access serves as a good test case for exploring how publishers and libraries can think together about author equity.

The Problem of the Monograph

For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the book is, to misquote Shakespeare, the thing.3 These academic monographs serve as the space where the “book fields” do their work. For scholars in these fields, the book isn’t just the structure of their research; its publication allows them to continue doing that research at all. As William Germano says in Getting it Published, “you need a book to get tenure, perhaps even to get a job, and in some cases even to get the interview … Writing books, after all, is what academics are expected to do.”4 Barriers to book publication can, thus, be barriers to a scholar’s existence as a scholar, and those barriers are not equitably distributed.

Scholars who work within an academic institution often experience a bifurcated employment structure. There are tenured and tenure-track faculty who typically have long contracts and academic freedom protections, and then there are contingent or adjunct faculty who have much shorter contracts, fewer protections, and less access to resources.5 According to a 2022 report from the American Association of University Professors, 17.6% of all institutions made tenure standards more stringent in the past five years, and a whopping 38.7% of large institutions increased standards. 6 At the same time, 53.5% of institutions reported replacing tenure-track lines with contingent faculty ones,7 and the average full professor made over twice what an untenured instructor did.8 Combined, these datapoints indicate that scholars now have to publish more to secure one of what is, potentially, a dwindling number of tenure-track positions. For a humanities or social sciences scholar, this likely means they need to publish a book to move into a more stable, better paying position. For both adjuncts and for independent scholars with no institutional support, publishing that book can be a tricky process.

Open Access, Limits, and Labor

Open access books sit in an interesting place of friction. For under-resourced scholars, being able to read academic books for free is a godsend. They can stay engaged with current research and participate in it regardless of institutional support. The authors of this open research similarly benefit from the increased access and engagement brought by OA. In traditional publishing, scholarly monographs may only sell a few hundred copies worldwide, typically to academic libraries or to a narrow group of scholars.9 Books with limited sales necessarily have a limited audience, but making research open access drastically expands that potential audience. The University of Michigan Press recently published a blog post about the impact of their open access initiative, Fund to Mission, a program in which 75% of their frontlist monographs are OA. According to their post, Fund to Mission’s open access books saw 11 times more COUNTER total item investigations than restricted access titles did, and open access titles were viewed in a significantly greater number of countries worldwide than restricted titles were.10 For scholars who need to prove that their research has an impact on the field, whether for a job application or for a promotion, this increased readership and any conversation it inspires is invaluable.

But the benefits of open access do not eliminate the costs of publishing a monograph, a process that often takes multiple years of work by numerous staff and can cost upwards of $15,000.11 The question of how to financially support this labor — Via author payments? Grants? Institutional support? — has plagued the scholarly community for years with no simple solutions. In the United States in particular, the question of national funding is at a crossroads.

In August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published their Nelson Memo, asserting that federally funded research must be made freely and immediately available.12 However, in July 2023, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives released a bill that, if signed, would prohibit the implementation of the Nelson Memo through the coming fiscal year with section 552 stating, “None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” the Nelson Memo.13 One interpretation of this language is that though federal funds could still support research projects, those same funds could not be used to make those projects open access. Funding for that would have to come from elsewhere.

Regardless of where the United States government lands on their official policy, the fact remains that for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences, federally funded grants simply aren’t available. Even prominent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities cannot support the needs of every scholar or every OA project. According to their 2023 data, the NEH reported a 7% funding ratio with an average of 79 awards and 1,120 applications in the last five competitions.14 To put those numbers into perspective, there were an estimated 157,540 humanities faculty members in the United States in 2015.15 Grants in these fields are competitive to say the least. Asking authors or their nearly nonexistent grants to fund open access books would inevitably privilege the scholars already established in positions to submit impressive grant applications, leaving contingent and independent scholars, once again, unsupported and less able to publish OA.

However, libraries can help fill that gap by supporting publishers who do not mandate author-side payments for open access. Publishers like Lever Press, a library collaborative program, and Punctum Books, with its library membership model, both rely on library support to ensure all authors have the option to publish OA. University presses have also implemented their own library-supported OA programs with Opening the Future from Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, Direct to Open from MIT Press, and Fund to Mission from University of Michigan Press.16

But not every author is comfortable publishing open access. Maybe they’ve heard horror stories of tenure committees not “counting” OA when it comes time for promotion, or maybe OA is not well-established in their field. And not every library has the luxury of paying for books that are already free. Not every publisher has the resources needed to promote and manage library memberships or funded collections. With that in mind, how can libraries decide which open access programs fit their specific institution’s needs? And how can they identify which restricted access programs still support author equity?

In response to these questions, I advocate for leaning on the power of consortia and scholarly societies. In both the cases of open and restricted content, these partners can offer collection development support. To name just a few excellent allies in this space, in addition to its list of restricted content programs, Lyrasis shares OA news through its LYRopen listserv and collates vetted OA initiatives in its list of open access programs.17 The Open Book Collective also enables the support of open access and open infrastructure projects in a streamlined way through their available packages.18 Project MUSE has worked with scholarly societies and academic libraries to provide access to both closed and open content for years.19 The list of possible support partners and recommend programs is long, but alone, their existence may not be enough to help you decide how your institution should dedicate its resources.

For that, you still need a strategy.

Developing Your Strategy

As the complexity of the realm of humanities and social sciences suggests, there is no single solution for increasing equity for authors or for diversifying collections. With that in mind, I recommend something not entirely groundbreaking: that institutions prioritize a manageable number of activities and adequately resource them. The greatest threat to achieving goals is, as organizer Joshua Virasami says in How To Change It: Make a Difference, having no strategy.20

I am no expert in strategic planning but I am pragmatic, especially when it comes to resource distribution. It’s through that lens that I suggest using the following questions to create a strategy that works at your institution.

Questions

• What activities does your institution currently do to support author equity and/or collection diversification? If you are creating a new initiative, what action would be most meaningful to the communities you serve?

• What resources are allocated for these efforts? Are they sufficient for achieving your goals? If not, how could you get access to more resources?

• Who will have to do the work to implement these initiatives? Do they have the capacity in their workload to take on these efforts? Does the work disproportionately fall to one person or one group?

• How will you ensure that your activities have a long-term impact and are sustainable, flexible, and integrated into your systems?

• What priorities will you drop in order to ensure these projects receive the resources and staff time needed to be successful?

That last question is the most important one. Most libraries and small publishers do not have an ever-growing pool of staff and money. Therefore, if a group isn’t willing or able to move resources away from one type of work, then adding a new project simply means fewer resources for every initiative. That’s why projects like supporting author equity benefit from a strategy. Being able to focus on one or two areas that you can meaningfully dedicate time, energy, and money to leads to more successful outcomes overall.

Final Thoughts

As I conclude this article, I want to return to a point I mentioned in my introduction about the systems in which academic publishers and libraries function. Equity for authors and the diversity of library collections is necessary, imperative, and an overall good for the world. But equity work should happen with an eye to our own communities as well.21 As I write, Lee & Low is in the process of creating its updated Diversity Baseline Survey for the publishing community. If the patterns from the 2015 and 2019 surveys remain consistent, we will find that the book community remains largely white, and that the effort to make the industry more inclusive is “a herculean one.”22 Stories from webinars like ASERL’s series on why BIPOC librarians choose to leave the profession, and its sister series on why they choose to stay, similarly indicate that the work to make libraries more equitable is just that; it’s work. But it’s work with hope.23 Both for increasing equity for authors and for ourselves. We just have to find the path that works where we are. That’s why when developing strategies, I return to the same questions. What is our goal? Does it have the resources it needs? Who is doing the work? Is it sustainable? What do we deprioritize to ensure our new goal is a success?

Endnotes

1. Several excellent meditations on the continued inequities in higher education can be found in Clelia O. Rodriguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018); Complaint! by Sara Ahmed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); and Anti-racist scholar-activism by Laura Connelly and Remi Joseph-Salisbury (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

2. For more on bibliodiversity and how university presses help perpetuate it, read Dawn Durante, “AUPresses 2023 Recap and General Themes: Accessibility, Bibliodiversity, and Community,” Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications, The H-Net Book Forum, accessed, June 21, 2023, https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/12883010/aupresses-2023-recap-andgeneral-themes-accessibility

3. From Hamlet, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” For humanities and social sciences scholars, it could well be said that the book’s the thing that catches the attention of the hiring committee. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library), https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/

4. William Germano, Getting It Published, 3rd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.

5. Notably, many historic protections provided by tenure are no longer in place at some institutions in the United States. When looking to Florida, one report found “the threat from authoritarian politicians who use phrases like “Stop WOKE,” “DEI bureaucracy,” and “indoctrination” to limit academic freedom while imposing their worldview upon institutions of higher education cannot be overstated.” Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida, “Preliminary Report of the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida,” American Association of University Professors, May 24, 2023, https://www.aaup.org/file/Preliminary_ Report_Florida.pdf

6. Hans-Joerg Tiede, “The 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices,” American Association of University Professors, May 2022, https:// www.aaup.org/file/2022_AAUP_Survey_of_Tenure_Practices.pdf

7. Steven Hurlburt and Michael McGarrah, “The Shifting Academic Workforce: Where Are the Contingent Faculty?” TIAA, TIAA Institute and Delta Cost Project at American Institutes for Research, February 2017, https://www.tiaa.org/content/dam/tiaa/ institute/pdf/full-report/2017-02/shifting-academic-workforce.pdf.

8. IPEDS Faculty Salaries: Full-Time Faculty Salary, by Academic Rank, AAUP Data, accessed June 12, 2023, https://data.aaup.org/ ipeds-faculty-salaries/.

9. Germano, 14.

10. In the interest of full disclosure, I want to acknowledge that I oversaw the team doing this study when I served as the Director of Sales, Marketing, and Outreach at Michigan Publishing. Zhenkun Lin and Kelsey Mrjoian, “Visualizing the Impact of the University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission Initiative,” Tiny Studies (blog), University of Michigan Library, May 23, 2023, https://blogs.lib. umich.edu/tiny-studies/visualizing-impact-university-michigan-press-fund-mission-initiative

11. Nancy Maron and Kimberly Schmelzinger, “The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs: A Preliminary Report,” Humanities Commons, Association of University Presses, 2022, https://doi.org/10.17613/pvek-7g97

12. Alondra Nelson, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” The White House. Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, August 25, 2022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/ uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf

13. U.S. Congress, House, Fiscal Year 24 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill , 118 Cong, 1st session, introduced July 14, 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP19/20230714/116251/BILLS-118--AP--CJSFY24CJSSubcommitteeMark.pdf

14. “Fellowships,” National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed June 30, 2023, https:// www.neh.gov/grants/research/fellowship s

15. “Number of Faculty Members in Humanities and Other Fields,” Humanities Indicators, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, accessed June 3, 2023 https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/number-faculty-members-humanities-andother-fields

16. For an overview of OA book publishing models, see the excellent article: “Business Models for Open Access Book Publishing,” OA Books Toolkit, OAPEN, June 13, 2023, https://oabooks-toolkit.org/lifecycle/article/10432084-business-models-for-open-accessbook-publishing.

17. “Open Access Programs,” Lyrasis, accessed June 14, 2023, https://www.lyrasis.org/content/Pages/Open-Access-Programs.aspx

18. “Support OA Initiatives,” Open Book Collective, Open Book Collective, accessed June 14, 2023, https://www.openbookcollective. org/packages/

19. “The MUSE Story,” Project MUSE, Project MUSE, accessed June 14, 2023, https://about.muse.jhu.edu/about/story/ .

20. Joshua Virasami, How To Change It: Make a Difference, (London: Merky Books, 2020), Kindle.

21. I want to acknowledge the incredible work that many, many people have contributed to in exploring equity in scholarly communications via C4DISC (the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications) and particularly would like to shoutout resources like its Toolkits for Equity. “Toolkits for Equity,” C4DISC, C4DISC, accessed June 4, 2023, https://c4disc. org/toolkits-for-equity/

22. “Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey Results,” The Open Book Blog (blog), Lee & Low Books, January 28, 2020, https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/

23. To explore the numerous webinars in this series, see ASERL’s archive of event recordings at: “Archive of Webinars & Materials,” ASERL, ASERL, accessed June 25, 2023, https://www.aserl.org/archive/ .