For any researcher or aspiring author, announcing oneself in print — whether in the form of a book, a book chapter, a journal article, a poem, or a piece of fiction — must be an experience that sends goosebumps up one’s spine. I often wonder what led so many people to write the countless books and pamphlets that triggered the explosion of Bengal’s print culture from the nineteenth century onward. It seemed that anybody and everybody, not only in large cities like Calcutta and Dhaka but also in the small towns of mofussil Bengal, had a say on the myriad issues of the time, including social and religious reform, English education, women’s education, ideals of family life and, of course, that big elephant that forced its way into the room, nationalism. Before he pledged his support for the Indigo Rebellion, the good Reverend James Long wrote, as early as 1855, A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works, containing a Classified List of Fourteen Hundred Bengali Books and Pamphlets, all of them published in the previous six decades! The Catalogue of Printed Books in Bengali Language, printed separately by the British Library and the erstwhile Imperial Library in Calcutta (now the National Library), ran into several volumes. Hundreds of journals and periodicals also came to dot Bengal’s literary landscape from about the last third of the nineteenth century. Undoubtedly, such fecundity wouldn’t have been possible without the pan-Bengal aspiration of the bhadralok to go into print.
This lasted through most of the twentieth century, when people continued to write, across 1947, in all sorts of fora — neighbourhood bulletins, school and college magazines, little magazines, autumn annuals, literary periodicals, news magazines, and the like. I have seen pre-teens aspire to write in Sandesh, their prodigiously talented collegiate elders in Desh, Ekshan, or Anushtup, and their ‘English-medium’ equivalents in The Illustrated Weekly or The Caravan, with the really ambitious ones firing long shots at Granta or The New Yorker. Even in a small town of Burdwan district, where I grew up through the 1970s, a college professor who mentored me proudly showed me thick, leatherbound volumes of the Times Literary Supplement that he subscribed to. In a throwback to more than half a century earlier, my grandfather’s unpublished memoirs talked about his days as a school inspector in rural Barisal and Faridpur in the 1910s and 1920s, spending much of his meagre salary in buying subscriptions of The Illustrated London News, Punch, Time, and Life, among other publications.
All this is just to reflect on the standards of good publishing that even a slightly older generation of our educated classes were accustomed to. These include the literate professions — academics, authors, journalists and so on — and also white-collar professionals with a taste for reading. This is the class that read their Bengali classics in Signet, M.C. Sarkar or Mitra & Ghosh editions and their English classics in Everyman’s or Wordsworth or Penguin versions, subsequently learning to enjoy the different flavours of English translations of the great Russian novels by Constance Garnett (Modern Library editions) and David Magarshack (Penguin). These were also the days when an adda in the Coffee House could still come alive with thriller-like stories of corporate takeovers in the publishing world, like the US-based Random House buying up the British publishing powerhouses, Chatto & Windus, Virago, Bodley Head, and Jonathan Cape, in one fell swoop in 1987.
Such stories had traction because these names were iconic among a reading public that valued top-quality publishing. It was usual for early-career academics needing to get published to make a shortlist of publishers and approach them one by one in keeping with the pecking order of preference. Rejections and Plan Bs were, and still are, an integral part of the process. But a good monograph in the social sciences had a reasonable chance to crack the peer review process — involving anonymous referees and ‘double-blind’ evaluations — of one of the many respectable options available from among the major university presses as well as Sage, Permanent Black, Orient Longman, Macmillan, Manohar, Munshiram Manoharlal, Motilal Banarsidass and many others, including Calcutta’s Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay and K.P. Bagchi, which published many titles that went on to become classics.
However, for more than a decade now, this bedrock of good-quality academic publishing — defined primarily by a respectable peer-review process — has been ambushed by publishing houses catering to the burgeoning demand for a quick turnaround time in publishing. This emanates from academics vying for jobs or coming up for promotion, too desperate to go through the slow grind of peer review and frenetically seeking to rustle up a bankable balance of that decisive numerical metrics, the ‘Academic Performance Index’ or API. Nothing is fundamentally wrong with a numbers-driven system, which is what most of the world follows. The problem, however, lies in the Indian API system’s quality-blind, undiscerning — indeed, robotic — approach to research publications where a high numerical value is reserved for “Text/Subject or Reference Books published by International / National publishers / State and Central Govt. Publications with an established peer review system and ISBN/ ISSN numbers.” A caveat about book chapters — “Chapter in self-Edited volume should not be considered” — seems especially nonsensical, with the framers seemingly unaware that edited volumes published by respectable publishers are proposed and rigorously peer-reviewed in the first place, with the editor’s own contribution/s subjected to the same standards as the other contributors’.
When such ignorance and insensitivity are compounded by the absence of good gatekeeping in maintaining academic standards, it is only natural that predatory publishers will move in to claim the custom of careerist academics trying to rack up their scores to clinch selections or fast-track their promotions. It’s disconcerting to see faculty (often senior ones) in premier universities and institutions publishing their books from a European (international!) publisher that regularly spams scholars, offering to publish their doctoral dissertations as books — often within a few weeks — without peer-review or editing, with the author typically signing away the rights to publish their work in legitimate academic journals. The general lack of awareness among selection committees — or, more cynically, the urge to route ‘preferred’ candidates through a dark, subterranean tunnel of patronage and favouritism — helps normalise a devaluation of standards and leads to the gradual reification of a system that thrives on cheating the long-cherished practices of ethical publishing.
Of late, this fast-growing landscape of predatory publishing has widened to include invitations to what seem to the unsuspecting eye to be large international ‘interdisciplinary’ conferences where one can even pay one’s way to be a ‘keynote speaker’. I suspect that AI-powered bots deployed by these predators constantly scour the internet for the Digital Object Identifiers that are assigned to publications and — based on the broad-spectrum keywords — shoot their email solicitations, like a splinter gun, toward a market teeming with unsuspecting, ambitious, or desperate academic aspirants.
I apprehend that this grey market, reinforcing a systematised culture of mediocrity and substandard publishing, will only rise in response to the dangerous synergy developing between robotic evaluation criteria and impatient academics keen to ace the system. It’s a self-defeating system that can — and must — be countered by good gatekeeping against inferior-quality publishing, whether exercised by NAAC, Internal Quality Assurance Cells, or the selection committees at various levels. Admittedly, the conventional scholarly publishing industry is not what it used to be. Yet, it’s important to call out the ‘author-pays’ model of fast-track, open access publishing as counterfeit. In this post-truth universe of subpar everything, including scholarly publishing, there is something still to be said in favour of an unhurried, well-constructed, footnote.
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com
