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Who wants to stand up for quality? We all do!

Falling standards and a loss of control matter deeply to publishing workers, judging by the number of them who turned out to discuss this issue at the Town Hall two weeks ago.

The meeting on September 24, entitled Stand up for quality in academic and educational publishing, attracted an attendance from across the Oxford publishing sector – Pearson, Elsevier, OUP, Macmillan Education, Wiley (Blackwell) and Taylor & Francis, with some coming from as far away as Wiley Chichester and Pearson’s Harlow operation. It was organised by activists from NUJ and Unite publishing chapels.
More than 70 journals and books editors, designers, production and new media staff and freelances came to hear Steve Ball, field chair for publishing at Oxford Brookes University, speak about how global economic change – and the way multinational publishers are responding to it – is impacting on quality and standards in the industry.
As a founder member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, with more than 30 years of editorial experience in publishing, Steve Ball was well-placed to lead the discussion on how the industry, its products and its employees have been affected by globalisation.

DWINDLING SUPPLY OF EXPERTISE
With routine outsourcing to cheaper suppliers around the globe, not only of printing, but also now of editing, design and project management, Steve Ball argued that quality is becoming harder to control, and that the supply of expertise at home is in danger of withering away.
Accelerating staff turnover across a sector now dominated by a small number of very large players has also led to a shortening of the 'training generation' and a loss of in-house expertise, with fresh-faced employees who have no more than a couple of years' experience now regarded as 'old hands'.
Senior managers under pressure to control costs are increasingly judging that the returns on good quality – typically difficult to quantify – don't add up. Budgets that were traditionally regarded as inviolable (for example, for commissioning and editing) are today being downgraded to 'soft costs', where savings are up for grabs – often at the cost of quality.

NOT AN OPTIONAL SELLING POINT
Steve Ball ended his speech with a call for publishers to recognise that quality is not something that can be disposed of, if they want to survive in today's globalised economy. Quality is the essence of publishing, not an optional selling point. And, he posed the question, 'Who is responsible for quality?'
The answer? All of us. In the lively discussion that followed, a consensus emerged that publishing workers of all categories need to stand up to managers attempting to impose unreasonable demands and slipshod working practices. The quality standard of 'good enough' is simply not good enough – not for directors and senior management, and not for the editors, designers and production workers that make publishing happen.
According to Kathleen Lyle, a freelance editor, 'experience is being outsourced' – a reference to the tide of experienced editors leaving in-house employment to go freelance and hopefully enjoy less constrained working conditions.
The point was made that collective action is often the best way to safeguard quality – recent successes in halting moves at Lexis Nexis to change processes and deskill certain jobs are a case in point.
Following a wealth of anecdotal evidence from the floor highlighting many cases of shortfalls in quality and standards, a consensus emerged on the importance of gathering more information about what is happening to standards within our academic and educational publishing companies. A proposal to set up a website where publishing workers can submit anecdotal information from their own experience received strong support.

Gathering the evidence
Steve Ball agreed to investigate the possibility of setting up such a site under the auspices of the Oxford International Centre of Publishing Studies.
That site is now under construction. The next step will be to involve books chapels, in Oxford, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and all over the UK, in raising awareness about the site and encouraging staff to submit evidence from their own experience.