Those who have been reading Vision & Balance for the last year will know that I occasionally post on the theme of “Two an a Half Cheers” — a slight variation on the “two cheers” idea, which usually denotes the discussion of a topic or issue that is unpopular or generally denigrated, but that perhaps deserves just a little more credit than it usually gets. By saying “two and a half cheers” I’m suggesting that while this particular topic or issue may pose challenges or complications, it actually deserves a lot more credit than the conventional wisdom suggests. Previous posts in this series have considered the “scarcity mindset,” meetings, bean-counting, thinking of patrons as “customers,” and other issues.

Today I’d like to look at the concept of “publish or perish.”

Over the past decade or to it seems to me that the library profession has been overrun with easy applause lines — phrases and concepts that are regularly invoked in meetings and essays for the twin purposes of signaling the presenter’s or author’s virtue and generating easy approbation, and thereby, all too often, short-circuiting critical thought. The reflexive condemnation of “publish or perish culture” seems to me to be one such easy applause line. “Publish or perish” is regularly invoked as either the primary cause or a significant contributing factor to just about everything currently wrong with scholarly communication.

And yet, I suspect most of us in academia would agree that publishing one’s work should be expected of researchers and scholars. We aren’t employed by our institutions just so that we can teach students and generate new knowledge for ourselves, but also so that we can create new knowledge and send it out into the world. There is, I believe, a strong argument to be made that those who fail (or refuse) to publish really should “perish,” where “perish” means “not be retained as academics.” And I don’t believe most of the people who decry “publish or perish” culture would actually disagree.

So if we do believe in “publish or perish,” why do we complain about it so much?

I think the problem is that while a few people in academia really do believe that “publish or perish” expectations are themselves unreasonable in principle, many more believe that the “publish or perish” mindset has metastasized in ways that are both unreasonable and unhelpful, leading to both unfair pressure on young tenure-track academics and a global explosion in publications of marginally valid or useful research, exacerbated by new publishing models that themselves create huge financial incentives for journals to publish as many articles as they can. These are, in my view, valid points — but the way to address them is to deal with them clearly and directly rather than using rhetoric that condemns the reasonable expectation that scholars publish their work.

What does all of this have to do with leadership in academic libraries? A lot, I believe, for at least two reasons.

First of all, academic librarians are, in many cases (especially in the U.S.) members of the college or university faculty who are expected to publish scholarly and creative work in order to keep their jobs. Leaders charged with helping them along the tenure track must help them think clearly and cogently about publication demands, and we also have some influence in setting publication expectations.

Second, library leaders have influence over their libraries’ collecting strategies and overall orientation to the scholarly communication ecosystem, which is being shaped by attitudes, policies, and rhetoric around issues including “publish or perish” culture. Attempts to change the structure of scholarly publishing are having and will continue to have wide-ranging effects, some positive and some negative, some intended and some unintended. Library leaders are in a position to help shape and refine these attitudes, policies, and rhetoric, and would be wise to use their influence to help ensure a greater degree of analytical rigor and strategic insight to those conversations.

Of course, all of this begins at home, in the libraries we lead.

Are there any other ideas, concepts, practices, or philosophies that you think don’t get enough respect in our profession, and deserve a couple of cheers? Let me know in the comments.