What is the greatest threat to academic life today? Most university teachers asked this question will start talking about cutbacks and underspending. They are wrong. The greatest threat is overproduction. A tide of unnecessary publications is rising through our universities and libraries; it is threatening to drown real intellectual life, and nobody knows how to stop it.
This year more than 80,000 new books will be published in this country. In the US, the figure will be more than 160,000. Not all of these are academic, but academic publishing is where the rise in quantity is matched most startlingly by the decline in readers per book. The books are bought by libraries, not readers. This is even more true in the case of academic journals (the form of publishing which, thanks to its resistance to the laws of economics, succeeded in making Robert Maxwell rich). It is estimated that 200,000 academic journals are published in the English language, and that the average number of readers per article is five.
What is generating this uncontrollable flood? Two factors, I think. One is a very long term trend in academia: the increasing specialisation of research as the same fields are picked over in ever-narrowing detail. Where real research is concerned, this is no bad thing, especially in the natural sciences where it leads to a genuine accumulation of knowledge. But most of the books and articles being published today-in the humanities, at least-are not presentations of hitherto unknown facts. They are unoriginal interpretative rehashes of what is already known: go through their footnotes and you will see the same familiar citations being stirred round the bottom of the page like old bones in a much-used stock-pot.
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