Inside Higher Education writes that Rice University is closing its all-digital university press (for a brief summary and reflection on the article see AKMA’a post):
Rice University Press is being shut down next month, ending an experiment in an all-digital model of scholarly publishing. While university officials said that they needed to make a difficult economic decision to end the operation, they acted against the recommendations of an outside review team that had urged Rice to bolster its support for the publishing operations
What this means is not that we can all smile wisely and pontificate that the codex has been given a new lease of life, but that the Academy is apparently not a place where experiment and trial of new things can flourish, a project needs to be economically sound to live in the 21st century University.
Yet the idea of Universitas is fundamentally concerned with the creation, preservation and transmition of knowledge. This description (from John Etchemendy, Provost of Stanford University on Philosophy Talk) is unimaginative, ancient, and leaves out the possibility that Universitas may aspire to something more than “knowledge”, but it does describe some sort of highest common factor (or for the non-mathematically literate “lowest common denominator” ;) aspiration of Universitas.
Meanwhile, print academic presses are struggling. Digital dissemination is apparently seen as not economically viable. But how sad that a University (and especially the one that had had the courage to try something new) has to abandon its role as crucible of innovation. It makes the publishing innovations of SBL all the more important, if the Education Industry is failling in its calling to assist the dissemination of complex ideas maybe associations of scholars can help to fulfil the mission of Universitas?





