Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press

Abstract

The laptop-sized cellulose-based artifact that has for so long symbolized academic life is losing its place at the center of scholarly life. The scholarly book, particularly the singularly focused work known as the monograph is not being done in so much by the new digital publishing medium, but by its long-standing junior companion, the journal. What has long played a supportive role for the book is now becoming the principal measure of academic achievement in most disciplines, assisted certainly by how adeptly the journal has moved online (if after an initial awkward period). But before the rise of online access, the journal was increasingly displaced the monograph in university library budgets though both growing numbers of titles and steep price increases (Steele 2008). As publishing monographs has become less attractive from a university press perspective, from where the scholar sits, so does laboring away on a book-length project, and more’s the pity intellectually speaking. While much of the concern today over the monograph has to do with the consequences for university presses and scholarly publishing, we should not forget that the monograph alone, among scholarly works, provides researchers with a stage for sustained and polished acts of inquiry and thought. The monograph is the single-most means of working out an argument, marshaling evidence, calculating consequences and implications, and confronting counter-arguments and criticisms. It might well seem, to risk a little hyperbole, that any decline in the ability of scholars and researchers to turn to this particular device for thinking through a subject in full, both as writers and readers, speaks to a troubling reduction in the extent and coherence of what we can know of the world. In response to the threat of this loss, with more on its exact dimensions below, I am proposing a most un-book-like device, the components of which are presented here while they are still, as we once said, on paper. This device, a piece of software really, is intended to that might address a number of the issues that pertain to at least the near future of peer-reviewed book-length projects. I say near future because article and book, so clearly print artifacts, are both bound to be reshaped by this new medium. This device I am calling Open Monograph Press is a system designed to further the presence of the monograph as we move into this transformation process, ensuring that the scope of the such work is not lost to sight. Yet I do not see the issue as one of print versus digital publishing models (as fetishly fond as I am of the printed and bound monographs that sit on shelves). For what I propose here is an online publishing system that may be able to advance the development, management, and publication of monographs in print and electronic editions. Such a system will hardly be a solution for all that currently troubles university presses and traditional forms of monograph publishing. But it does hold out the