Abstracting knowledge formation: a report on academia and publishing.

Warburg, James Paul ; McQueen-Thomson, Douglas

Considered across the long reach of history, it is evident that the dominant formation of knowledge is becoming more abstract. More recently, this process has been super-charged by a changing culture of inquiry that puts a hyper-intensified emphasis on rational codified investigation with commodifiable outcomes. This is to argue that the dominant processes that frame knowledge formation are fundamentally changing, not that all the content of knowledge is necessarily becoming more abstracted or distanced from the object of inquiry. The key distinction here, for the purpose of our argument, is between form and content. To put it as precisely as is possible at this early stage in the exposition, the dominant form of knowledge production is becoming more abstract, even if the dominant content of knowledge follows a strangely contradictory path of an abstract obsession with technical application to 'concrete' outcomes. Content moves between an emphasis on 'innovative' knowledge that breaks with once taken-for-granted understandings (an outcome of the abstraction process) and an obsession with the application of that knowledge as a technical, practical and commodifiable act (what might be called a 're-concretization of pure research'). For example, the difference between the traditional-modern cataloguing of nature in Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) and the late-modern mapping of the human genome provides an extraordinary but complicated comparison of different levels of abstraction. In one sense, they are both abstract taxonomies of nature, siblings in common purpose across the centuries attempting to organize our understanding of the relationship between things. Old Doctor Linnaeus is still with us as we survey the animal and plant kingdoms. However, in another sense, the historical shift from the dominance of the first taxonomy, based on details of what things look like, to the second, based on theories of the constitutive foundations of biological life, symbolizes an incredible change in the cultural frame. This difference is graphically signified by the gradual disappearance of the dominant metaphor of knowledge in Linnaeus's time--the now archaically concrete metaphor of the 'tree of knowledge'.

Stark evidence that the nature of knowledge was changing across the course of the late-twentieth century was provided by the publication of two very different books. The first, by the American liberal-conservative and Harvard academic Daniel Bell, was called The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1976). It went into numerous reprints and, for at least a decade after its publication, became one of the most influential books in the social sciences. The cover of the Peregrine edition signalled the thesis of the book. It depicted an industrial green-painted brick wall carrying the graffiti 'Knowledge Rules, OK'. Playing off the contemporary phrase 'The Economy Rules, OK', the graffitied words suggested the continuing importance of the market in knowledge production, but it made the more startlingly original claim that the very nature of the market, indeed of social life in general, was being remade by codified knowledge itself. Knowledge was not only being increasingly commodified in an expanding market, it was becoming the axial principle of all market relations. Interestingly for our purposes, in his preface Bell saves his most fulsome note of gratitude for the non-university institution, the Russell Sage Foundation. (1)

The author of the second path-breaking book of that same decade offers a very similar gesture. In his preface he writes with portentous self-effacement: 'Such as it is, I dedicate this report to the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Universite de Paris VIII (Vincennes)--at this very postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end, while the Institute may just be beginning'. The author of these words is the French radical Jean-Francois Lyotard, and his book is The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1986). (2) Again, an academic writes under the profound influence of a non-university institution: this time the book was commissioned by the government of Quebec through the Conseil de Universities. It is telling that the sixty-seven page exploratory essay that so casually wrote off one of the original mediaeval universities as nearing its end went on to become one of the defining scholarly books of our time. In the excitement about its pronouncements on a new age of scepticism towards old truths and grand narratives, most readers overlooked the substance of its subtitle--'A Report on Knowledge'. Just as Bell's interest in the changing nature of knowledge was translated into a related interest of his (namely, the coming post-industrial information society), Lyotard's focus on knowledge was also read in terms of his broader claim: in his case, a general treatise on the coming of the condition of the postmodern.

The publication of these two books provides a point of departure for a consideration in this essay of knowledge formation in contemporary Australia. In the first place, they are relevant because while both books were very influential here they did not signal an outpouring of local academic research into the area of knowledge formation. Secondly, they need to be addressed because the books popularized analytical approaches that are both partial and politically partisan. Against Bell, we will be arguing that 'post-industrial society' does not reinstate the norm of free inquiry nor bring with it an ethic of communality. Against Lyotard's emphasis on language games we will be arguing that the change is structured and systematic. Dubiously, both Bell and Lyotard--the liberal and the postmodernist--considered the change to be an exciting break with the modern, ushering in a world of free movement and post-ideological openness. In Australia, where the concept of 'knowledge' is now attached to every report on education and training or research and development, mainstream writings still carry the rhetoric of open inquiry and everywhere it is chained to the future of the market.

A politically critical consideration of the structures and transformations of knowledge production is yet to be conducted. Even in the seemingly more manageable sub-field of publishing-and more specifically scholarly publishing--the subject remains thoroughly under-examined except in terms of technical issues. The focus of analytic work has been pointed to elsewhere. Recent decades have witnessed the rapid expansion of academic fields and methodologies committed to examining the interrelationship of material practice, economic conditions and textuality, especially within cultural studies, sociology of the media, and literary theory. However, such developments have not translated into analytical work on publishing itself. When the publishing industry is written about directly, it is usually approached within a fairly narrow set of concerns. Most existing accounts in Australia describe issues of foreign ownership, British cultural imperialism and import protection. (3) Michael Wilding is the exception in asking some broader questions about the qualitative impact of mergers and takeovers upon Australian literary publishing. (4) Meanwhile, ironically, postgraduate fee-paying vocational courses on the practices of publishing have flourished, and much technical and instrumental material is written in this context about information management strategies and new library technologies.

In order to redress the lacunae in both theoretical and empirical work, this essay works at two levels, attempting to integrate understandings about the changing nature of knowledge with an understanding of the material conditions of its production and dissemination. At the more abstract analytical level, it provides an overview of major trends in knowledge formation, arguing that we are witnessing the emergence of a new dominant mode of inquiry. Closer to the ground, it surveys some of the institutional and technological conditions that are reshaping the mechanisms, practice and content of contemporary Australian scholarly publishing. Bringing together these analytical levels is intended to contribute to a growing recognition that, as the nature of knowledge production is changing in Australia and worldwide, new forms of analysis and engagement are required to respond to these shifts. Even the term 'knowledge production' used here is used advisedly: it is not intended to imply an agreement with the usual analogy drawn between the supposed transition from 'industrial' to 'post-industrial' society and a movement from things to ideas. Ideas, as part of constitutively different regimes of knowledge, have always been with us; our argument is that the dominant way in which knowledge is framed and disseminated is now as abstract information capital. The process of abstraction that we are describing here is one that dwells in the very material and practical processes of scientific and social inquiry and management. It is embedded in the practices of institutions such as universities, libraries and publishing houses. And, to use Geoff Sharp's concept, it is carried by an emergent class of intellectually trained persons. This category of persons, what other writers have variously called 'the professional and technical class' (Bell), 'the knowledge workers' (Kumar) and 'the technocracy' (Touraine), are in Sharp's terms trained in the techniques of what might be called analytical inquiry (see his essay in the present volume).

Trends in Knowledge Formation

This essay will soon narrow its focus. However, in order to understand what is happening to academic publishing, both in Australia and globally, it is necessary first to provide a general overview of the dominant trends in knowledge production across the turn of the twentieth century. Five key trends can be identified in the contemporary production of scholarly knowledge. These are transformative patterns that pertain as strongly to academic institutions, including universities, libraries and publishing houses, as they do to market-based bodies such as Research and Development (R&D) institutes, commercial publishers and corporate think-tanks. In fact, of the many sites of change, two stand out as

the most extraordinary of all: that once vigorous defended realm of independent scholarship--journal publishing--and that once dusty, subdued institution of knowledge storage, the humble library.

The first trend is that knowledge production has become increasingly rationalized. This is enacted through techniques of abstract 'accounting', from measuring risk (Beck) (5) to setting up calibrated mechanisms for assessing research performance. Questions of what Lyotard called 'performativity'--that is, accounting-style assessment of personal performance--pervade the workplace. Universities have turned to performance management schemes as a way of managing staff, and to activity-based costing (ABC) accounting as a way of managing resources. University councils are now dominated by discussions about fiduciary responsibility and risk management rather than academic excellence or principles of pedagogy. Alongside this, quantification of publishing output is now built in to the core of the performance measures of academics. The publishing industry has, in tandem, had to rationalize its own production techniques and industrial relations in order to survive in an extraordinarily competitive marketplace. This relates to the second major trend, commodification.

It is not just that knowledge production has become increasingly commodified, but that the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an intensification of this second process in a way that was more dramatic than the whole of the preceding ten decades. The reach of abstracted value intensified in every area of social life, and academic research and scholarly publishing was no exception. Most obviously, university education became increasingly treated as an export commodity within the service industry. Moreover, in much the same way as the traditional concept of the 'tree of knowledge' gave way to the more abstract concept of 'knowledge system', the concept of 'the student' was recently overlaid with a new referent called 'the EFTSU', an acronym for Equivalent Full-Time Student Unit. Obviously, despite the renaming, actual students continue to exist, and at one level they continue to be treated as such. Nevertheless, the dominant framing of their time at university is, for the purpose of cost recovery, overlaid by a practice of treating them as units of commodified value abstracted from the particularity of their personhood. Similarly, the research output of academics came very recently to be considered as the commodifiable raw material of the new 'knowledge factories', otherwise known as 'DETYA points'. Over the same period, in keeping with the transition from science as an interpretative activity to the dominance of techno-science, the R&D departments of major corporations experienced massive growth. For example, in 1945 IBM set up its first research laboratory hosted in a renovated fraternity house near Columbia University, but by the end of the century it had far outstripped the research budgets of even the massive new university consortia and left the universities far behind. By the end of the 1990s Microsoft's annual research budget of $A4.7 billion was more than the total of all Australian companies, $A4.24 billion. This was the period in which writers began to talk of "the knowledge economy'.

Third, knowledge production has become increasingly codified. Again, computers have facilitated a change that goes much deeper than simply making information quicker to communicate or easier to access. Through technologies of computerized information storage, the dominant understanding of knowledge has become what might be called 'useful information'--namely, that which can be abstracted as data. Older senses of knowledge continue, but they are overlaid by an imperative to break down information into comparable, transferable, applied information bits. Information is resolved into its discrete, constituent parts and then put back together in systematic form. This is what Daniel Bell uncritically calls 'the codification of knowledge into abstract systems'. (6) It is indicative that government reports can quantify Australia's share of the knowledge produced in the world and put it in percentage terms. According to the Knowledge and Innovation White Paper, Australia produces 2.5 per cent of the world's knowledge. With all the pseudo-authority that comes from using codified figures, the

White Paper suggests that the 'benefits of the information age cannot be realised fully unless Australia has access to the 97.5 per cent of knowledge that it does not produce'. (7)

Fourth, knowledge production has become increasingly mediated by technological apparatuses. Writers such as Manuel Castells, attuned at least to the phenomenal sense of this process of mediation--communicative connection through technology--have taken this dimension as the defining characteristic of our age. Hence, they use the concept of 'network society'. (8) The concept of 'mediation' is intended for our purposes to have a deeper constitutive sense, affecting not just the geographical reach of communication, but also the nature of the way that knowledge is generated and communicated. For example, universities have turned to what they call 'flexible delivery' of course content--that is, to the provision of electronic material that replaces face-to-face teaching, either in part or in toto. This is creating a mediated network of students who are no longer bound to the geographical proximity of their institution, but they are also students who have a different relationship to the pedagogical process, and for whom knowledge can be treated more instrumentally. In this process, books and libraries continue to be important as instruments of dissemination. However, as we will elaborate later, their mode of organization is fundamentally changing.

Fifth, the practice of technological mediation relates to technological extension as a dimension of the more general process of globalization. Through techniques and technologies of extension such as computerized communication, the production of knowledge has been linked across the world in a way as revolutionary in our time as the distribution of the printed word became in the time after Gutenberg. New forms of association and connection emerge, with their consequent impact upon self-fashioning and corporate or collective identity formation. Such new configurations are producing radically different social practices and modes of being that far exceed present comprehension.

Taken together, intensification of these five processes of rationalization, commodification, codification, mediation, and extension add up to a more abstract dominant mode of inquiry with globalizing consequences: analytical inquiry. In contemporary capitalist information societies this mode of inquiry can be described even more narrowly as applied analytical inquiry. It can be divided into three key paradigms: (1) the techno-sciences, increasingly channelled as R&D; (2) the socio-sciences or what used to be called the 'interpretative' or 'social sciences'--here it is given a new name to signify that it is now increasingly burdened by status-oriented or return-on-investment imperatives; and (3) the interpretative sciences and humanities, now a residual form, largely confined to Arts faculties in the universities.

With this framework of investigation in place, this essay now turns to illustrating these trends in terms of three overlapping areas of scholarly dissemination: book publishing, journal publishing and library organization. What we will be attempting to show is that Australian and international scholarly publishing is going through a phase of major transformation. This upheaval is not simply an extension of existing structures, or a straightforward enlargement of established modes. Instead, scholarly publishing and academic work are subject to the same forces as those reconfiguring global identities, practices and forms of life. Understanding the new directions these industries are taking requires an approach that engages thoroughly with the changing conditions of the contemporary world. Put briefly, the principal drivers of change in academia and publishing are new technological developments, transformations in the nature and reach of international financial markets, change in the orientation of research occupations, and new ways of quantifying knowledge--in short, new forms of social relations that are carried, in particular, by the intellectually trained, both inside the university and out. Within the industry of academic publishing, with its structural orientation towards innovation and contemporaneity, these changes are especially keenly felt.

Changes in General Publishing

Scholarly publishing in Australia is a comparatively small industry. It only emerged in any substantial form in the 1960s with the growth of academic and general publishing. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures (1999-2000), within a book industry with annual sales of $1,199.6 million, Australia has tertiary education book sales of just $131.9 million per year, or 11 per cent of total book sales. (9) To put this in context, the annual revenue in 1999 for US university presses alone exceeded $US411.70 million. (10) There are approximately fourteen publishers in Australia concerned primarily with tertiary education books. Of the four main book categories used by the ABS, tertiary education books are the most profitable category, with an average profit margin of 14.5 per cent. (11)

The tertiary education sector in Australia is comparatively large, and has been considerably more successful as a product exporter than the publishing industry. The federal Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) recognises forty-eight higher education institutions in Australia. Initial federal government calculations are that there were 726,196 student enrolments in Australia in 2001, up 4.4 per cent from the previous year. (12) This indicates a large, expanding market for tertiary educational or academic books in Australia. DEST reported 29,904 full-time equivalent academic staff in Australian higher education in 2001, down slightly on its recent high in 1996 of 31,256. (13) Nevertheless, this figure indicates a large pool of potential authors and readers within universities. The numbers are greater when non-university researchers are included, with the total number of researchers for 1996-97 in Australia being 90,519, including university, business, government and non-profit organizations. (14)

Australian academic publishing, while comparatively small in scale, must be considered in the context of a wide-ranging set of international transformations. It is subject to the same processes of change being initiated by new global technological, commercial and social developments. Consequently, broad developments within the international publishing industry provide useful indications of more specific changes within scholarly publishing. In the general publishing field, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a series of rationalizing mergers and takeovers both in Australia and internationally, with small publishers being swallowed by large publishers, themselves being incorporated into massive media and entertainment conglomerates. By 2000, five major multinational conglomerates--Time Warner, Disney, Viacom/CBS, Bertelsmann and News Corporation--controlled 80 per cent of all book sales in the United States. (15) Increasing proportions of book sales are held by a diminishing number of dominant publishers or conglomerates. This increasing concentration of ownership has several important consequences, each with serious implications for the way knowledge is produced and disseminated.

The first concern is that publicly listed companies have as their primary obligation the generation of profit for shareholders, and thus treat books like any other commodities. While this imperative may be appropriate in some industries, it is antithetical to the interests of high-quality scholarship. No constraining set of intellectual or ethical ambitions need be structured into the activities of a publicly listed enterprise.

Second, control of the publishing industry by a shrinking group of multinational media conglomerates results in the application of generalized management standards that are less responsive to the specific needs of publishing. In other words, the managerial orthodoxies of the entertainment industry are increasingly being employed in the publication of literary works and academic research. For instance, a former Disney Corporation executive was made head of Penguin Books. Pantheon books, formerly a quality publisher of Nobel-prize winners and acclaimed authors such as Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, installed as its head a former banker known for his lack of interest in books. On being shown less-than-blockbusting print runs for books of some these acclaimed authors, he suggested the company should be 'ashamed to be publishing such books'. (16) Under such conditions, profit margins, print-runs and publicity are increased; duration of writing, editorial attention, complexity of ideas and peer reviewing standards are diminished. Pressure is placed on academics to publish more, and to market ideas to a wider audience. The standards and processes of trade paperbacks are then applied to the publication of scholarly monographs, with devastating results.

Third, authorial and editorial independence are seriously undermined by such narrowly concentrated interests. Authors can be discouraged from pursuing potentially controversial lines of argument or investigation, and in the most extreme cases publication can simply be halted. A much-noted example is the 1998 memoir of former Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patton. It was to be published by HarperCollins, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. However, Murdoch pulled the plug seemingly because he feared the book's statements on regional politics would be detrimental to his own plans for media expansion into China. (Patton's book was eventually published as East and West: China, Power, and the Future of Asia by Times Books, and became a bestseller.) Another vivid recent example is the volume edited by Tony Coady entitled Why Universities Matter. This was to be published by Melbourne University Press, but was dropped late in the editorial process. According to some of the book's contributors this was because Why Universities Matter was felt to be overly critical of new private enterprises being initiated by that university. (17)

Changes in Scholarly Publishing

Scholarly publishing, with its absolute dependence upon up-to-date content, experiences these changes in an amplified form. In Australia, these transformations are of such proportion that John Houghton, in a long report on scholarly communication in Australia, concluded that without drastic countermeasures, 'Australia's position in the developed world may be at risk'. (18)

Academic appointments, promotions and funding allocations are all highly dependent upon the codified system of publishing new research in refereed academic journals, and to a lesser extent scholarly books. In days gone by this was a simple process of submitting articles to any of a small group of journals within an established field of study. Manuscripts would be peer reviewed, either published or not, and then journal issues would be distributed to university libraries and researchers at a price that reasonably reflected the costs of publication. The process was collegial, good-willed and commercially unambitious. Researchers were generally happy to give away their findings in order to encourage wide distribution and to enhance scholarship. Subsidized, not-for-profit university presses--often set up in the early twentieth century before the academic disciplines underwent rationalizing professionalization--were vital facilitators of this enterprise, with commercial presses playing an increasing role over the next fifty years. In 1947, the director of Harvard University Press, Thomas J. Wilson, stated assuredly that 'A university press exists to publish as many good scholarly books as possible short of bankruptcy', and at that time many commercial scholarly presses would have concurred. (19) However, by the end of the century, both academic and commercial presses were overtaken by the imperatives of a globalizing and commodity-driven market.

As with books, so it was with periodicals. Over the past few decades, most journals were subsumed into large commercial enterprises, such as Sage, Routledge, Blackwell and Elsevier, or sought the distribution-publishing strength of globalizing university presses such as Cambridge and Oxford. Moreover, mergers and takeovers concentrated the commodification-effect. In recent years, a small number of transnational conglomerates--Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer, Springer Verlag and Wiley--have been cornering the journal market, precipitating enormous change for researchers, universities and libraries. For instance, in 2000 Reed Elsevier purchased major science journal publisher Harcourt for $US4.5 billion, giving this conglomerate control over 1,700 journals and 42 per cent of average university spending in this field. (20)

During the same period, universities made themselves doubly dependent upon journal and commercial monograph publishing, for it became the evidentiary basis used to determine distribution of resources. For example, one key indicator of purchasing directions is the statistical knowledge of citations provided by the Institute for Scientific Information, but the index is itself owned by Thomson, a transnational publisher. Universities were thus left completely vulnerable to commercial exploitation. This has been exacerbated as the commercial publishers now find themselves under increasing pressure to generate greater profits more rapidly. Costs are minimized at every opportunity: peer review processes are expedited and editorial attention is reduced. Having effectively sold off their quality control processes, universities are left without recourse or immediate alternatives. Academic publishers, often driven by a range of non-academic imperatives, thus become the primary decision makers over university appointments and promotions. These changes converged to precipitate what came to be labelled as a 'crisis' in journal publishing. This is the subject of the next section.

Changes in Journal Publishing

By the 1990s, a group of developments, especially the creation of market monopolies and introduction of new publishing technology, had converged to create what some described as the 'serials crisis' or 'journals crisis'. Discipline-based journals proliferated, prices skyrocketed, journal issues appeared more frequently with more pages in each, intermediate services (such as sales consortia, document delivery, indexing services, citation quantifiers, format aggregators and collecting agencies) multiplied in number and expense, and libraries were forced into devastating subscription cancellations. Thus, more information has become available than ever before, just as access is becoming increasingly exclusive, rationalized and commodified.

In the area of scholarly publishing, journals have become more important than books, and are the preferred form for presenting the vast majority of new research. Exceptions to this trend are humanities disciplines, where the monograph, or stand-alone book, is still significant. The international science, technology and medicine journals market is worth approximately ten billion US dollars. (21) Australian university libraries now spend over twice as much on periodicals as they do on books--$94m on the former compared to $44m on the latter in 1998, with another $12-15m spent on copying. (22) Libraries are spending an increasing proportion of their budgets to buy a diminishing number of periodicals. Consequently, less money is available for purchasing monographs, and overall, research facilities decline significantly. In Australia, the total combined budget of university libraries for purchasing information resources, books and journals in 1999 was $136m, and Australian university library budgets are 'declining in real terms'. (23) University libraries are now much more selective in what they purchase, and depend upon external advice for guidance through ever-expanding information outlets; including computer-generated statistics of how often a journal is taken off library shelves. No librarians have time any more to assess whether or not the journal is read by actual persons: they only have time to read the statistics on how often the journal is transferred to the photocopy rooms and then re-shelved.

This dual emphasis on codifying use-statistics and ascertaining cost-efficiency has created a market for an increasing number of subscription consortia such as Swets Blackwell who market bundled subscriptions and supply purchasing advice to libraries. There are over 200 consortia for subscriptions in the United States alone. (24) Again, being included within these distribution networks becomes a criterion for academic publishing success. Libraries experiencing tight budgets are often forced into buying slightly discounted, bundled subscriptions. This compels libraries to purchase journals they would otherwise find irrelevant, and also means that libraries in close proximity find themselves, in their terms, 'inefficiently duplicating resources'. Universities are beginning to respond by forming their own buying consortia in an attempt to elicit discounts from publishers, although again this reduces the diversity of available research material.

A sample of rising journal costs reveals changes of a scale intolerable in most business sectors. In the top 110 North American research libraries, the median journal unit cost increased by 175 per cent between 1986 and 1998, an average annual increase of 8.8 per cent. Consequently, the median number of journal subscriptions purchased declined on average for these libraries by 0.6 per cent each year. (25) The managing director of major journal publisher Carfax presents even more dramatic figures, noting that between 1970 and 1997 journal prices increased thirty-fold at an average annual increase of over 13 per cent. (26) The Council of Australian University Librarians has demonstrated that between 1986 and 1998, journal subscriptions in Australian university libraries decreased in number by 37 per cent, while expenditure increased by an enormous 263 per cent. Combined, this means that the average cost for each journal unit increased by 474 per cent, over half of that increase occurring from 1996 to 1998. (27) Over recent decades, student numbers, and consequently demand on libraries, have been steadily increasing, thus further exacerbating this shortfall.

As prices have skyrocketed, subscriber profiles have changed. First, students stopped subscribing; as subsequently did individual researchers. Small to medium-sized libraries then dropped off, leaving only the major research libraries that were compelled to subscribe at any cost. For an indication of costs, browsing through the 2002 Elsevier science price lists (available at www.elsevier.nl) reveals that one can receive an annual subscription to Biochemistry and Physiology (thirty-six issues per year) for $US10,796, while a combined annual subscription to five separate Tetrahedron journals comes in at $US25,758. Journal pricing is now related to the upper purchasing limit of a captive market, rather than being a reflection of genuine production costs. The practice of setting prices at the upper limit of market tolerance was pioneered in science journal publishing by Robert Maxwell and his company Pergamon, which was taken over in 1990 by Dutch conglomerate Elsevier (now Reed Elsevier). Periodical publishing displays very little price elasticity in relation to demand. Combined with poor communication channels between journal purchasers and journal users, this means that prices can be modified drastically with very little impact on demand. (28)

In Australia this crisis has been exacerbated by the significant decline in value of the national currency, since 80 per cent of Australian university library material is purchased from Europe or the United States. (29) Australian university library purchases are forced to fluctuate wildly each year according to the fortunes of the Australian dollar. Journal subscriptions are haphazardly initiated, then discontinued, then recommenced. Subject purchasing coherence is undermined by such instability of purchasing, This problem of currency values combines with publishing industry transformations to create enormous obstacles to quality Australian scholarship. Taken together, the evidence that we have presented is damning. Academic publishing has become a thoroughly commodified industry organized along rationalized accounting lines, with purchasing strategies and dissemination--whether through market conglomerates or academic libraries--based upon increasingly codified, abstract information about usage.

Signs of Dissent

These enormous changes have provoked angry responses from some academics, especially in the sciences. The long-term feasibility of research dependent upon the easy exchange of new findings has been threatened by the exploitation of what are effectively market monopolies. Researchers have been forced to coordinate themselves internationally to form professional lobby groups with the aim of wresting control over knowledge out of the hands of corporate profit-makers. One of the largest of these groups is the Public Library of Science. By January 2002 an imposing figure of 29,144 scientists from 174 countries had signed an open letter opposing the monopolistic exploitation of academic publishers. The signatories to the Public Library of Science's open letter have pledged to:

 publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only
 those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant
 unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original
 research reports that they have published within 6 months of their
 initial publication date. (30)

The proposal is that after initial profits are reaped, all science publishing should be made freely available through independent public websites such as Pubmed Central. In other words, publishers are regarded as leasing information for six months, after which time ownership reverts backs to the general public. A significant number of major publishers have agreed to this demand, including the British Medical Journal. Other major organizations with similar ambitions are Create Change (which represents library interests), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC (which aims to encourage greater competition and lower prices), and the dramatically named (Refereed) Literature Liberation Movement, run by Stevan Harnad. In September 2000, SPARC was involved in persuading Wiley to reduce the institutional subscription rate for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from $US2085 per year to $1390. (31) Such downward price adjustments, while encouraging, are very unusual.

In July 2001, the World Health Organisation announced that it had persuaded the world's six biggest medical and science journal publishers to provide online journal access for medical schools and research institutions in developing countries at reduced rates or no cost (according to levels of gross national product) for an initial period of three years, beginning in January 2002. (32) While this announcement has been greeted positively, some have noted that such a computer-oriented access system will only be successful when expensive electronic infrastructure is in place. It will take many more measures of this kind to allow developing countries to participate fully in international research.

There can be no doubt that the kind of monopoly conditions which commercial academic publishers have enjoyed, especially in scientific fields, are not indefinitely sustainable or ethically justifiable. Over time, academics and researchers will increasingly reorganize their information distribution networks and processes of quality evaluation, making sure they are no longer held to ransom by multinational publishing and media conglomerates. (33) However, unfortunately this does not mean that commercial scholarly information provision will become subordinated to collegial exchange and public debate. To the contrary, the indications are that there will be increasingly rationalized demand for highly customized article searching and retrieval from codified information storage services. While it is likely that emerging markets for academic publishers will be based less on holding possession of research, and more upon flexible, high-standard delivery of information according to the shifting requirements of research and teaching, even this may not lead to the exciting new world of Bell and Lyotard. Rather, it seems more likely that this new world partly leaves behind older modern forms of capitalism, only to overlay it with more abstract forms of exploitation of knowledge, or what John Hinkson calls 'postmodern capitalism'.

New Technologies

While altering market conditions are contributing to the increasing commodification of scholarly publishing, new technological developments are facilitating the rationalization and codification of knowledge production. One such major instance is the development of 'social filtering systems'. These gather information on researchers, their interests, and articles they have read, possibly with ratings of these articles. Cluster analysis is conducted and personal profiles constructed, which then lead to the automated production of recommendations on other new articles that may be of interest. Publishing in indexed journals becomes increasingly vital, since targeted publicity will increase the frequency with which such articles are cited. One such system is SARA, or Scholarly Articles Research Alerting. It sends by e-mail on request, tables of contents for any issue of journals from Carfax, Martin Dunitz, Psychology Press, Routledge, Spon Press or Taylor & Francis (http://www.tandf.co.uk/sara/). It can also conduct more complex keyword and subject searches. Another related innovation is CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/), which describes itself as 'a collaborative reference linking service'. It was founded in 1999, and states in January 2002 that it draws upon over 5600 journals, totalling around 3.8 million academic articles. It allows researchers to search for material, then uses Digital Object Identifier (DOI) technology to link to existing websites, where material can be purchased or used. While these services are undoubtedly useful for researchers, they will transform the way academic information is circulated and accessed.

According to Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, there are currently about 18,400 refereed journals out of 240,000 periodicals worldwide, although the global ISSN register of serials records three times as many as Ulrich's, although without identifying which are refereed. (34) Being among the much smaller number of journals included in these new rationalizing market services will be crucial for future success. Large conglomerates such as Taylor & Francis or Carfax can guarantee their own success and the failure of their competitors by supporting such initiatives. Scholars will find their interests and research directed increasingly by electronic alerting systems. Modes of research, key categories of analysis and even disciplinary frames will be reconstituted via the practices of a shrinking group of information corporations. In the short run many academics will find the services an attractive way of saving time, and in the long run it is likely to contribute to a meta-capitalization of knowledge.

As we began to argue earlier, libraries are also using increasingly sophisticated techniques for measuring the use and value of research material. A major new sub-field of librarianship has emerged based upon measuring the number of times electronic journal articles are accessed, read or distributed. (35) Citation indexes are becoming more significant, with the Thomson Corporation-run ISI Journal Citation Reports now the main quantitative measure of science and technical journal effectiveness, covering 3700 international scholarly science and technical journals (see http:// www.isinet.com/isi/journals/). Computational categories such as the 'impact factor' (assessing journal importance), 'immediacy index' (indicating speed of article citations) and 'cited half-life' (showing article citation-rate peaks) are being used to measure scholarly success for purposes of professional appointments and promotions. Such indices are also gaining prominence in humanities and social science fields. Libraries are also using usage statistics to help estimate value and quantity of their potential purchases. (36) Likewise, publishers are using collecting agencies to gain income according to estimated levels of journal article use or reproduction. The work of these agencies has the effect of journals receiving more income from each issue produced, and, despite a potential drop in subscriptions, large publishers are maintaining profitability. (37)

Increasingly precise codification methods are used to evaluate research output. For instance, it has been estimated that Australian researchers produce approximately 25,000 journal papers per year. Likewise, between 1981 and 1994, Australian scholars produced 2.14 per cent of the world's scientific articles. (38) In extreme form, such calculations are used, as mentioned earlier, to quantify Australia's knowledge output as a statistical portion of a putative global total. This means that knowledge production is now measured in a circular fashion by manifest indicators chosen in terms of the dominant trends of rationalization, commodification, codification, mediation, and globalized extension. Just to take the process of globalized extension, it means that the indicators stress global reach over national readership or local production. Alternative forms of knowledge that may not fit this hegemonic paradigm are disqualified. Such narrowly conceived intellectual practice comes to affirm its own enabling conditions, and thus it 'resembles the commodity logic with which it has increasingly become fused'. (39)

Electronic Publishing

Many technological utopians have invoked a dream future where information will be freely exchanged across a worldwide network of like-minded scholars. Such hopes have not been realized in the contemporary age of digital information. One technical problem is that it has become apparent that the cost of publishing quality scholarly research online is comparable to the costs of publishing on paper. (40) Unless the initial stages of editorial production are utterly rationalized, with attendant problems in quality, the vast majority of publishing costs are in editorial, administrative and technical labour, with paper and printing expenses proving comparatively small. Publishing online has its own costs, such as constant upgrading of computer equipment, purchasing software and paying highly trained computer consultants. In addition, scholars have been relatively slow to trust the authority of electronic refereed journals. Many academics use online resources primarily for database and information-location purposes, or else use online journals only when they replicate issues of respected print journals. Despite the anticipated growth of online or electronic subscriptions as a stand-alone development, there has been no substantial take up of electronic-only subscriptions. Electronic versions are usually subscribed to as an additional service within the hard-copy subscription. This should not, however, be taken to suggest that the processes of change that we have been illustrating are being substantially slowed down. Publishing houses are now incorporating electronic publication costs into the normal subscription, and printing costs are being pushed down either by new computerized photocopy publishing or by pushing typesetting and printing activities off-shore, particularly to Asia. Libraries are now offered the online subscription to the journals as a 'free' additional service. Given the way that students are accessing more and more library materials through closed web access, the libraries as customer-driven institutions are increasingly turning to electronic access as central to their acquisition and storage policy. Students are still using libraries heavily, but not by coming through the doors. Thus libraries are being locked in to a series of changes that are driven as much by the culture of student and academic use as by technical change.

Change is also pushed by a self-confirming culture of technological excitement. Parallel paper and electronic publishing creates the potential for new, complementary multimedia academic scholarship. However, these tendencies mean that 'both publishers and librarians are locked into a multiple-media environment for the foreseeable future', thus increasing the overall cost of journals to libraries. (41) Demand for access to full-text databases of print journals has created a demand for print-electronic conversion services, otherwise known as aggregators. These intermediaries also convert journal or database content (either printed or electronic) into formats acceptable to the front-end interfaces used by individual libraries. These include enterprises such as Blackwell's Navigator, SwetsNet, Dawson's Information Quest, EBSCO Online, Ovid, UMI, and EBSCO Publishing and Information Access. Contrary to popular conception and IT industry hype, these conversion services are not simple or cheap. Thus online publication is merely exacerbating the serials crisis, while it is often imagined to be a solution. (42) Users are demanding that research information be supplied more quickly. In response, document delivery services have become more sophisticated--often using electronic reproduction and distribution rather than physical inter-library loans--and also more expensive. It is becoming more common for users to purchase articles per view, rather than the traditional method of using a full journal issue purchased by a library. (43)

The new possibilities of electronic access are having a secondary effect. While journals carry intellectual cultural capital as 'sites' through which articles are accessed, there is developing a trend away from journal-by-journal subscription base towards a publishing house offering online article-by-article access. (44) The huge Dutch company Elsevier, for example, has just signed a five-year consortia contract in the hard sciences for general access to all articles published in their stable of journals. This signals a whole different economy of information, one that appears to open up intellectual knowledge to a new public sphere. However, the conditions of participation in that public sphere have now also changed. Easy access depends on already being located within an institution such as a university, with that institution paying for the privilege of your participation. This shift is amplified by broader transformations in modes of communicative connection, as indicated by notions such as 'virtual communities', which themselves are altering modes of identity and subjectivity in ways that will impact significantly upon the form and function of knowledge.

New Directions

New directions in scholarly journal publishing will most likely continue to recognize the strengths of well-respected print periodicals, although the status of these journals will be increasingly tracked and codified into a hierarchy of 'academic worth' that benefits those few inside and at the top of the new hyper-rationalized system of dissemination. At the same time, complementary and increasingly sophisticated versions of the new post-paper technologies, such as hyperlinks, animation, multimedia and data retrieval will be demanded increasingly. This will mean that different pools of readership will develop. The divide between the 'information rich and poor' will be not so much about amount of information available but the nature of delivery and the quality of support for critical inquiry and research. In the developing countries accessibility will become a major issue.

The same issue pertains in book publishing. It is not the number of books that count but the direction of publishing towards a divide between scholarly publishing and trade publishing. In recent decades, university presses have been diversifying their publishing lists, moving out of solely academic publishing into popular "trade' genres such as biography, fiction, self-help and even cookbooks. (45) Scholarly publishers are positioning themselves not as the carriers of arcane or deep research, but as potential conduits for academics to write differently for a more general market. This trend goes against the expectation that emerging technologies and information delivery systems would facilitate the dissemination of all kinds of knowledge, including more specialized, particular knowledge. Instead, the commercial structures that have been enabled by these technological developments--such as sophisticated inventory, distribution and sales monitoring--have placed financial pressures on conventional scholarly monograph publishing. Wider markets, new demographics and broader reading publics must be found to accommodate this deeper commodification. Many scholarly publishers that previously concentrated on monographs now earn more money from textbooks, reference books and popular nonacademic genres. In Australia, academic publishers such as Allen & Unwin and University of New South Wales Press have gained a reputation recently for publishing cross-over books aimed at wider markets, such as popular cultural history, biography and industry-relevant material.

University presses are earning an increasing amount of revenue from undergraduate markets, sales direct to consumers, and sales in general retailers (or non-university bookshops). Decreasing proportions of revenue are being gained from library and institutional markets, with around one-quarter of total US university press revenues coming from this source in 1999. (46) By 1999, general readers were the largest fraction of the total sales of university presses, overtaking libraries and institutions, and college sales. Predictions are that this component will continue to expand. As Greco puts it, 'the general reader component will remain the dominant channel in the total, hardcover, and paperback university press markets between 2000 and 2004'. (47) While electronic publishing possibilities are transforming the scholarly publishing process, online book sales of Australian books are yet to become significant, with the latest ABS figures (1999-2000) revealing that only 0.1 per cent of total books sales were conducted via the Internet. (48) Online book sales are expanding, with Amazon.com recently posting its first ever profit in the final quarter of 2001. (49)

Conclusion

The challenges for scholarly publishing are fundamental. Global shifts are occurring across the whole gamut of scholarly knowledge production and dissemination. The transnational journal and book publishing houses are getting larger and more powerful, enhanced by a series of takeovers and mergers, and small university-based or independent publishers are facing competitive pressure for their previous readerships as the new conglomerates offer more and more sophisticated electronically enhanced support services. The subscription costs of journals are going up and the number of institutional subscriptions in the social sciences is going down inexorably. In deciding where their purchasing should be directed, libraries are locked into a self-reinforcing system of codified measures. Thus, paradoxically, in a technologically mediated world in which, in theory, avenues of debate and knowledge dissemination are being opened up and extended along both global and local lines of collegiality, information is becoming more centralized, commodified and instrumentally managed. Of the tens of thousands of journals in the world, as few as 150 journals account for half of what is cited in the academic literature, and in most fields these are published by the world's transnational giants: these are the journals that are being sold at obscene rates on the basis of their corporately sustained cultural capital.

Independent, critical and searching scholarship will undoubtedly continue. However, it is under increasing pressure to conform. In this article we have documented the comprehensiveness of the abstraction of knowledge. None of the processes of abstraction--rationalization, commodification, codification, mediation, and extension--are necessarily bad in themselves, or even in combination. However, what we have been arguing is that they have been interwoven into a dominant logic that is taking over universities, libraries and publishing houses. These processes also go much deeper and broader than academic knowledge formation, and despite continuing claims that the universities are ivory towers separated from the 'real world', it is increasingly clear that both are part of the same architecture of a new one-dimensional tyranny. As Simon Cooper argues, through all of this the 'capacity of the intellectual to stand "outside" is reduced by a globalizing logic where social life is increasingly remade in the same abstract and mediated terms that have enabled intellectual activity'. (50)

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