Apropos Jeremy Butler's comments on the electronic distribution of textbooks... Firstly I agree totally that the current situation with regard academic publishing has become problematic. Leaving aside the economic issues, it seems to me that publishers are only willing to accept material that is either by an established author or is in a fashionable research area. When my PhD thesis was examined in July I was told that it represented significant new research and was of publishable quality, yet four publishers have now turned it down on the grounds that it is a monograph in a 'restricted' subject area (to quote one rejection letter). If academic publishers (including UPs) have decided that profit margins are their sole criterion, then we have to look for ways of getting our work out in the open that manages to bypass them. The key problem with the solutions Jeremy has suggested is that there is no refereeing system built into them. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can publish a website or a CD-ROM from their home computer. What distinguishes these efforts from formally published work is that the latter has gone through a peer review mechanism: book manuscripts are sent to second readers, whilst journal editors operate their own vetting system. Basically, in order for any form of electronic academic publishing to gain the sort of status that traditional publishing currently has (rightly or wrongly), some sort of refereeing mechanism has to exist. One reason is that the British research assessment exercise (RAE) system, whereby university departments are ranked 1 to 5 depending on their research profile, depends largely on the existence of such a mechanism for establishing the quality of published work. A monograph published by an established UP carries the most weight, a journal article a little less, textbooks a little less still and so on down the line. Someone churning out multimedia monographs on CD-ROMs and then selling them on an ad-hoc basis just wouldn't count, however valuable and professional those CDs were. One immediate possibility which could be implemented with very little infrastructural investment is to set up a means of distributing PhD theses electronically. At the moment it is possible to order photocopied or microfilmed copies of any successfully examined thesis through University Microforms International (US) or the British Library (UK). Supplying the text on CD-ROM would cut costs and enable theses to be distributed more widely. At the moment, a bizarre situation exists whereby someone can write a thesis which is judged to be of an acceptable standard to get a PhD, but cannot really take the credit for it unless a version is subsequently published commercially. That is to say, the fact that I chose to research an unfashionable subject has put me at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to finding a job, even though, formally speaking, my work is up to the same standard as someone who has written about, for example, Hitchcock, or feminism, and have then got their thesis published commercially. If we could get to a situation whereby PhD theses are regarded as having been 'published' as soon as they have passed the examination, this would go a long way to redressing that balance. But this can only happen if there are changes in the way UMI, the British Library &c. distribute and publicise the material they handle. Substantial review sections in established journals covering recent theses would be a welcome development, as would adverts from the likes of UMI detailing their recent acquisitions, and possibly an easily available (as in, no subscriptions or passwords needed) source of abstracts via the Web. All this backed up by electronic distribution of the texts themselves would go a long way towards bypassing the whims of commercial publishers, and making it possible for researchers in minority interest areas to gain the credit they deserve. The beauty of it is that a refereeing system already exists - the method of examining PhDs. If the thesis is NFG it won't pass, thus substandard work can't enter the system. None of this addresses the issue of more established academics who are encountering similar problems, and here three forms of infrastructure would need to be established: the refereeing system, publicity and distribution. Perhaps the way forward is through a University-based initiative such as H-Net or Screening the Past which advises on the production of electronic materials, develops and supplies software for the buyer to read and print the text, and organises publicity, e.g. sending copies to journals for review. Perhaps authors would be asked to pay up front to cover the initial costs, but the fee would have to be kept low enough not to deter the authors of monographs which could only ever expect to sell a small number of copies. I'm sure a figure such as, say, £100 could be found from the research budget of an author's institution, if there was a guarantee that, with favourable reader's reports, the work would formally be regarded as having been published (i.e. with an ISBN number and all the rest of it). L ------------------------------------ Leo Enticknap Projection and Sound Engineer City Screen Cinemas Ltd., London, UK [log in to unmask] ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]