Flogging a Dead Book?: Prospects for the Scholarly Book and the University Press in Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores an issue that has been neglected in Australia, the intertwined fates of the scholarly book and the university press. These institutions face two significant threats: the commercialization of the university, which has left academics with less time for the patient research and writing needed to produce a monograph, and the 'tyranny of the journal article' (in contrast to that of the monograph, which has been noted in American debates), which has devalued the monograph and thus reduced some of the incentive for academics to write one. After examining the decline of university presses in Australia, the article concludes that they, and the monographs they publish, will best flourish with increased philanthropic, governmental, and university funding; careful list diversification; creative commissioning; cross-subsidization; and the savvy use of electronic and traditional forms of publishing and dissemination.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".