The Business of Scholarly Communication and Publishing

Listen to this interview of Joe Esposito, Senior Partner of Clarke & Esposito. We talk about the space between academic research and consumer markets, and we travel in space to the metaverse! Joe Esposito : "The thing that's at issue when a field of study begins publishing more in journals and less in books is another aspect of the audience. If you're a scientist, you write short articles because this is what gets you tenure, this is what gets you a promotion, this is what allows you to go to grants-making bodies and get money to hire postdoctoral students and to build out your laboratory. So the aspect of audience I'm talking about here is broader than just your fellow experts in your field — it's broader than just the readers of your communications, because it includes, too, the business model that these communications are placed into. There is money in articles in the sciences. There is very little money in books in the sciences. But switch over to history, anthropology, literary criticism, and the whole situation gets turned on its head. There the tenure promotion committees are looking for books, preferably published with a university press. So, when we talk about questions like where the book is going, where text is going, or whether digital or print, we can't escape the fact that all these things live within an environment of people pursuing their own personal interests, which itself has a economic basis as well." Clarke & Esposito have an excellent newsletter on scholarly communication and publishing. You can read and subscribe here. Joe is also a regular contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen, which you can read and subscribe to here.