So, here is my little thread on the role of publishers in the Humanities. To be clear: I am very positive about open access in general and have worked hard with colleagues at @AbdnDivinity to ensure that as much of our research is freely available as possible.

But I share the concern that future policies—even if well intended—might not accommodate the distinctive needs of the Humanities, particularly in relation to minority interest research. This thread is simply about illustrating the role of publishers in the research process.

My current project examines two works of debated origin and the connections between them. One or both may go back to ancient Judaism and may be connected to the environment from which specific New Testament books emerged, but they are preserved only in late medieval manuscripts,

in Slavonic and Ethiopic. The project will involve comparison with works in Syriac and Coptic, as well as Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. So, there will be seven primary languages and the different alphabets used in each. While I will transliterates the texts, the project will still/

...involve the original scripts, because that is an important part of research. Often, we look for explanations of particular elements in the confusion of visibly similar glyphs.

And, of course, it can be taken for granted that I will need to interact with scholarship in German, French and (for this) Italian. That just goes with the field.

When the draft is finished, the publisher will first have to find peer reviewers. For the established publishers in our area, that won’t be too difficult: the editors work hard to maintain networks and relationships with scholars. They will know the best fit reviewers

and the reviewers will probably help because of their immense respect for the editors and the jobs they do. For a project like mine, the list of potential reviewers is fairly short. The peer review process is massively important and usually identifies multiple points that need

to be addressed more carefully. Once it moves through the several stages of peer review and is (hopefully) accepted, it will then go to a copy editor, who will check matters of style. Some of these are simply about house style, but others are about communication.

I think my grammar is quite good, but I have lost count of the times that a copy editor has saved my blushes and ensured that I do not say something that I don’t actually mean. Good copyeditors are invaluable. Here, of course, the copy editor has to be competent to deal with the

range of languages involved. There has been a trend towards outsourcing both copy-editing and typesetting to low cost providers, especially with journals, and this creates multiple problems. The publishers who support our monographs know that they need to use highly competent

and highly qualified staff. Once the copy editing process is done, the manuscript goes to typesetting. Again, under economic pressures, some of the journals are trying to outsource much of this and one of the results is that some journals now refuse to use non-Latin characters.

This is disastrous and our monograph publishers know it. They continue to use well trained, competent typesetters who are capable of dealing with the various alphabets and the issues that arise from text direction, etc. They also know the problems connected to transliteration.

If a transliteration symbol gets flipped around, either by autocorrect or by a well meaning typesetter, it can change a word completely, which is a big deal with characters like Aleph and Ayin, often represented using symbols that correspond to single quotation marks.

These are easily corrupted at the typesetting stage.

If an error like that is introduced and not corrected (I had to kick up a fuss with a journal because of this not too long ago), it actually distorts the research and it can damage the career of an academic who looks like they don’t know their primary languages.

So, the monograph publishers that we trust ensure they have competent staff involved in this. All of this is before we even get to talking about the work they then do in ensuring the work is publicised, which is another topic for another time. From peer review to typesetting,

the good publishers have invested a lot of time and quite a lot of money in the process. Often, they do this at a loss, with the research side of their work subsidised by the commercial side (textbooks and trade books, etc). They do this because they value research and recognise

the reputational value it has for their commercial activity. But their margins are minimal. Some survive only because they have historical reserves to draw upon, others are subsidised by the Universities that they are associated with.

In biblical studies and theology, we have seen an increasing number of independent publishers being taken over by big multinationals, because they can no longer survive independently. And those multinationals aren’t always interested in maintaining areas of niche interest and

limited market. Here is where the open access reality creates challenges. Many publishers (especially the smaller ones) are nervous about their sustainability as margins become ever tighter. They need models that will allow them to recoup as much of their costs as possible.

If the models work against them, we could see the unfortunate situation in which they are absorbed by the multinationals that are often railed against in open access conversations. That would hit niche research hardest: scholars in these would be reliant on publishers

who don’t have the profile of the historical publishing houses. The result could well be the decline of those areas, as they are effectively marginalised. That might sound like scare-mongering, but we have seen areas of the curriculum that we once considered

absolutely vital to our work being marginalised, with courses and departments being closed (even in the last few weeks ...).

So, yes, let’s do everything we can to make open access happen (though let’s also look at other avenues for making our research available), but let’s not lose sight of the incredibly important role played by publishers in the research process itself, at least in Humanities.