Just to be awkward a moment, isn’t the reason for publishing something because people really want to read it? I mean peer review is a pre-publication qualitative validation, but I’m not interested in just impressing peers (nice though that is) but laying out a ’story’ I hope is of interest to others, pushing knowledge around to anyone prepared to invest a bit in reading it. Rather than counter-point scoring in an ivory tower with the three others in the ‘field’. But then I’m not an academic; I just have one at home.

For us rapacious villains here in the commercial world, a major motive for publishing something as a book is, unfortunately, to sell it – for academia above the “university set text” level, libraries become significant buyers. Libraries are always strapped for cash (and space) and usually don’t pay the laser printer bill themselves, so will probably not be very eager to buy costly tomes when they can direct readers to PDFs. This bodes rather ill for getting anything in print at all (or making a pile in academic publishing) unless there’s a factor I’m missing.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the more equation-heavy material on arXiv is the material to which a often publisher does least work and yet has traditionally extracted very good money from, which has always seemed a little iffy to me when so much of it is publicly funded. On the other hand, even in some of those areas an awful lot of editorial work is needed to make a book, and it would be a big loss if it were to go (such as when the authors write in a second language). I’ve never worked in academic humanities publishing, but am under the impression that an editor and professional indexer are still considered pretty vital – long may that last.

Though I guess one difference is, what value does publishing a thesis add to it? When a journal publishes a paper which was already available on arXiv, it’s adding peer review and the legitimacy that confers. But a thesis has already been peer-reviewed, so (aside from the opportunity to revise it further) the main point of publishing it as a book would be to make it available to a wider audience (or indeed to any audience at all!) So if theses are going be automatically PDFed and put on the web, that function becomes much less attractive.

(…and we’re talking about the 2000s here, I’m a young ‘un)

Seriously, this is wonderful stuff, apart from the publisher worry.

I know there was a wave of publishing contracts that specified no internet content, but it also seems that publishers are having to get over that now in most fields, so surely academic publishing will have to catch up. (I’m not an academic – I work in publishing – but I don’t work in scientific any more so I don’t know what they do about things that have been on arXiv… )

More seriously, I do wonder if academic publishers might be more reluctant to publish books from PhDs if the latter are easily accessible online …

Neat thing though!

This fiance can safely report that equality has finally arrived in that area.