Open Access News

Three years ago, all members of the Modern Language Association received a letter from Stephen Greenblatt, then the group’s president, warning of a crisis facing language and literature departments. Junior faculty members were unable to publish the books that they needed to win tenure and cuts in library and university press budgets left open the possibility that higher education “stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a generation of young scholars.” He called for academic departments to rethink the way they considered publication as a tenure requirement, and his letter set off considerable debate. Thursday night, a special panel of the MLA [Modern Language Association] offered the first glimpse at its plan to overhaul tenure — and in many ways the plans go well beyond the reforms Greenblatt proposed. As he suggested, the panel wants departments — including those at top research universities — to explicitly change their expectations such that there are “multiple pathways” to demonstrating research excellence, ending the expectation of publishing a monograph. But the panel does not appear likely to stop there. It plans to propose that departments negotiate “memorandums of understanding” with new hires about what factors will go into their tenure reviews. It wants departments to end a bias that favors print over online publications....The panel, which has been meeting privately, surveying departments, and interviewing administrators about their receptivity to changes, has still not released a final report and probably will not do so for months. There may be changes along the way. But panel members last night indicated that key recommendations had been agreed upon, and that they were ready to start sharing them....Donald E. Hall, who holds the Jackson Chair in English at West Virginia University, was the panel member who focused on alternatives to the monograph as a tenure requirement. Hall said that in the committee’s discussions with provosts and deans, one concern was whether administrators would permit such a change. Hall said that the uniform reaction was that “the fetishization of the monograph” was a product of departments and that if they made a case for change, administrators would not object....A candidate’s chances for tenure “should never depend on the vagaries of the scholarly publishing market,” Hall said. Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, said that departments need to recognize that scholarship — good, bad and everything in between — is being produced online and needs to be evaluated without any media-based bias.

Comment. There are two OA connections here. First, skyrocketing journal prices in the sciences have caused most research libraries to cut into their book budgets, which has greatly reduced the demand for monographs, which has greatly reduced the number of new book manuscripts accepted by university presses. If spreading OA can help libraries rebuild their book budgets, then humanities departments will be freer to return to the monograph standard for tenure. Second, the old bias in favor of print publication was a major disincentive to publish in OA journals, and one not justified by any considerations of quality or impact. Deemphasizing monographs and print publications for tenure are both long-overdue recognitions of reality. Kudos to the MLA.