University Publishing in a Digital Age

I. Introduction: C. Approach

This report is intended to be a commentary on the state of university publishing and a call to action. Because university presses historically played a large role in publishing research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, we have focused a considerable amount of attention on understanding where presses are now and what role they currently play in scholarly communications. We also found it useful to explore the factors that have in many cases hindered university presses from evolving in step with the changes in community life brought by information technology. Finally, we attempted to develop a view of what university publishing could look like in the future, taking into consideration the assets and skills that could be contributed by presses as well as other entities on campus, most notably libraries, individual faculty members, academic departments, cross-disciplinary initiatives, and new entities growing up alongside and across these established units.

We began with a set of beliefs and hypotheses based on our own experience and previous research efforts, and tested these through four months of research in late 2006 and early 2007. Our data-gathering approach was twofold: First, we distributed a survey to the directors of the American university presses. Among the 88 recipients of the survey from presses based at U.S. universities, 53 responded, for a completion rate of 60 percent[15].

Second, we sought the in-depth perspectives of three important constituencies – provosts and presidents, directors of university presses, and directors of academic libraries – by conducting interviews in person and via telephone with representatives of each group. We selected our interviewees for diversity: they included representatives of institutions that have presses of various sizes, and some that do not have a press. At each institution we visited, we attempted to consult with the librarian, the director of the university press (if there was one), and the provost or president of the university, or other senior university administrators (such as graduate school deans or VPs for administration or research) to whom publishing operations sometimes report. For the most part we targeted leaders that are reputed to be forward thinking and creative (as opposed to representative of their peer group), so our findings are skewed towards a bold view of how quickly the world is changing. In these meetings we followed a general discussion guide (see Appendix D), but we also sought to have a dialogue in order to explore certain topics in greater depth and bounce ideas back and forth. A list of our interviewees is included as Appendix A.

It is worth noting that we did not interview faculty specifically as part of this exercise. We have, however, gathered an extensive body of data about faculty needs and behavior through previous work at Ithaka. For example, we have conducted three surveys of faculty in 2000, 2003, and 2006, which provided us with an understanding of how faculty usage of online resources has changed over time[16]. We also conducted studies of scholarly communications practices in economics, history and biological sciences, each of which involved in-depth interviews with 15-20 faculty and graduate students[17]. This past work has helped to inform our current views and hypotheses about the perspectives on publishing from scholars themselves.

Through our research activities we refined our starting hypotheses and developed new ones. Some of what we heard was unexpected to us, particularly the strength of some of the criticisms we heard about university presses, and the optimism expressed by academic libraries. In this paper we have aimed to provide a balanced report of what we heard, taking into account the extent to which our interviewees are representative of their functional peer groups. We do not wish to portray too gloomy a picture of the current state of university publishing, as we see many promising activities and excellent people engaged in this enterprise, but we also do not wish to downplay the more critical opinions we heard. Our aim is to provide an accurate diagnosis of what we see happening and to focus on the future: what should happen to address the publishing needs of faculty and students in the next five to ten years, and how the various constituents involved can create new structures and programs to meet those needs.