Publishing Developments

‘Obscenely priced books and journals, glacial timescales and limited formats’

Times Higher Education – It’s time to put the point back into the pen of scholarly writing:

Obscenely priced books and journals, glacial timescales and limited formats are squeezing the life out of academic publishing …The problem is the near-complete disconnection of academic publishing from the rest of literary culture and the monomaniacal focus of the academy on only a limited range of publication formats… academic publications are often self-limiting due to their formats: crazily priced books that will be bought only by libraries; obscenely priced journals that are difficult to access; and protracted publishing timescales that limit contemporary relevance. Whether or not these limitations are economically inevitable (and I cannot for the life of me see why a publisher should deliberately produce books in formats that ensure exclusivity), the result is that academic publications are further ensconced in the ivory tower, regardless of their possible wider interest.