ABSTRACT
Scholarly publishing emphasizes the goals of learning rather than the mechanism of transmitting data. Scholarly communication involves multiple, or at least dual, "bottom lines". Publishing is an industry in which the linkages between "economic infrastructure" and "ideological superstructure" are anything but direct. The rising costs of scholarly publishing, coupled with the financial difficulties of so many universities, could require a reconceptualization of the role of publishing in tenure and promotion decisions. Scholarly publishing concerns less the type of book produced than the substance of what is produced. Making money may be a shared objective, but in scholarly communication trouble brews when poor books are published. Scholarly communication has been subject to a set of contradictory pressures to create organizational forms that will give shape to its professional substance. The ultimate value of the medieval, capital, and social factors, and of cultural and organizational vectors, what makes them work, is their coexistence.
