Inside Collection (Report): The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture
During the focus group with art and architectural history editors held at the College Art Association conference on February 22, 2006, the editors in attendance agreed to participate in a follow-up survey to gather more specific information about art history publishing at their presses. A six-page survey was developed, requesting information from editors on the following topics: the subject area(s) in which they work, the volume and nature of the titles published by their press in art and architectural history, submissions and the review process, publication costs, sales and print-run trends, and electronic publishing.
Surveys were sent by email to 22 editors. A total of 17 completed surveys were returned – 12 by editors at university presses, 5 by editors at trade presses. The twelve university press editors who responded represent most of the larger academic publishers of art and architectural history works. The aggregated responses of these 12 respondents can be taken as generally indicative of the editorial practices at university presses with significant commitments to publishing in the area of art and architectural history, but they should not be considered representative of university presses in general.
Because the number of surveys returned by editors at trade presses was too small to permit meaningful generalizations, they were not included in the analyses carried out for this report.
A copy of the questionnaire with aggregated findings, based on the twelve university presses that responded, can be found on the following pages. For questions that can be answered with numerical answers [such as question 4: “How many new titles have been published in your subject area (art history-related titles only) during the past five years?”], the arithmetic average of all valid responses is provided (in this case, 85). To illustrate the amount of variation present in the responses to particular questions, the range of responses to each question (from lowest to highest) is also provided.