Faculty Senate President Philippa Levine chairs a panel discussion with representatives of four leading scholarly presses.

Provost Lloyd Armstrong will introduce the panel. In addition to Professor Levine, the participants will be Karen Hunter, Elsevier Publishing; Jay Jordan, OCLC; Niko Pfund, Oxford University Press and Ann Wolpert, MIT.

Junior scholars attempting to publish their dissertations are faced with an increasingly difficult atmosphere today. While the adage “publish or perish” still largely rings true, the eroding economy of the publishing world has resulted in fewer and fewer papers accepted for print. Although online publishing is becoming more common, how will this change academic culture? Will we be able to continue to judge tenure cases on the same basis as these changes bite deeper? Driven by economy and technology as well as innovative conceptualization, academic publishing is poised to undergo radical change in the twenty-first century, change which will affect the institutional measures we have traditionally adopted for judging academic quality. This panel will discuss the intellectual, economic, and technical questions that changes in publishing might bring to bear on the structure of the academy, and in particular on the viability of tenure.

Specific questions to be addressed include:
- What is the future of academic publishing?
- What impact will new technologies have on tenure and peer review?
- What lies ahead for the academic monograph and science and medical publishing?