University Publishing in a Digital Age

III. What is Needed?

We have identified a set of actions to enable universities to play a more effective role in publishing. In this section we describe these actions and explain why they are important. This section will conclude with a brief summary of recommended steps that presidents, provosts, press directors and librarians could take on their campuses.

1. Take a more active role in publishing

There are at least five reasons why, collectively, universities should play an active role in publishing their own research outputs and should take part in a community-wide publishing system:

• As non-profit organizations, universities can make publishing decisions that balance the priorities of mission and profit. Because they are chartered to serve an academic mission, they aim to publish quality scholarship in markets where there may be little or no profit, but great research or educational impact.

• Determining what constitutes important scholarship is a critical aspect of what universities do. Credentialing provides a screening mechanism to let researchers know what is considered high quality and “important” among the infinite quantity of information available on the Web. It also informs critical decisions about tenure and promotion. New mechanisms may emerge that detach peer review from publishing, but there is considerable uncertainty as to when and how this might happen.

• Universities generally share the ultimate aim of maximizing the production of and access to high quality research, not profits or growth. As mission-centered publishers, universities can aim to charge fees that cover most of their costs and sustain the enterprise (albeit usually with some subsidy), and are affordable to as many libraries and consumers as possible. By not extracting profits, non-profit publishers may keep costs lower for the university system. Also, by returning the publishing revenues from university-sponsored research back to the university community, the university can use the fruits of its scholarly activity to invest in new publishing and research activities.

• Publishing operations situated within universities are uniquely positioned to leverage relationships with faculty and other assets. For example, editors located on campus have the opportunity to develop relationships with faculty, exposing them to new scholarship, whether it is being developed by local faculty themselves, by colleagues of local faculty, by departmental or cross-disciplinary research initiatives, or simply by a visiting academic presenting at a seminar. Out of these networks of scholars and authors can arise ideas and publishing opportunities. Co-locating presses and scholars enables scholarly publishing opportunity much as co-locating entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley or Cambridge enables business innovation. Co-location within the same institution also allows for new business models such as joint ventures between content producers and publishing bodies that share the risks and rewards of the enterprise.

• Finally, university publishing operations can provide opportunities to extend the brand of the institution in the world. They can insure that major new programs and centers have global reach and impact. They signal an institution’s commitment to research and scholarship in particular fields.

2. Develop effective strategies for scholarly communications

University leaders should take a strategic approach to the communication and dissemination of the knowledge they produce. This strategy should encompass what services are needed for scholars to create and disseminate content, how these services should be priced, what level of subsidization (if any) is appropriate, and where funding will come from. It should take a coherent position on issues pertaining to intellectual property. It should identify what activities should remain within the university and what should be outsourced to third parties (either commercial or not-for-profit). Finally, this vision should encompass peer review and its relationship to publishing. There should be consistency in the value placed on scholarly publishing (i.e. for tenure and promotion) and the resources devoted to making it possible.

Each institution’s publishing strategy should reflect its core mission and circumstances – i.e. public versus private, large vs. small, research vs. teaching oriented. Some may feel that it is appropriate to be “fast followers”; others may wish to stake out more of a leadership role. Clearly the more a university’s publishing portfolio evolves to mirror and extend that institution’s reputation and intellectual strengths, the more ambitious administrators can be for their presses or other publishing entities. Provosts should develop strategies that enhance the reach and reputation of the institution through its publishing initiatives.

3. Create organizational structures necessary to implement these strategies

As a first step, administrators need to take inventory of the publishing-related activities currently taking place within their institutions. The decentralized organization of most universities breeds inefficient and sometimes opaque investment with a lot of “reinventing the wheel” in the area of publishing processes and services. To streamline these activities one must understand what products are produced, how they are created, what services are provided, who provides them, what funding is going into these activities and where it is being spent.

Next, administrators should identify the leadership, managerial, editorial, and technical skills required to carry out the strategy. The set of skills residing in presses, libraries, faculty, graduate students, and technology departments today is more a reflection of historical roles than future needs. New publishing strategies are likely to involve new configurations of activities on campus, best achieved (at least in the short run) through collaborations between various entities and people on campus, including libraries, presses, academic departments, and individual faculty. Combining skills and assets across these historically siloed units can enable more efficient and dynamic content creation and dissemination.

Administrators will need to be actively involved in encouraging more collaboration and providing the necessary incentives. Press and library directors, for their part, will need to learn to work together effectively. Some universities have tried to encourage this kind of collaboration by bringing the press inside the library, or creating centralized leadership for both bodies in the form of a chief information officer or head of academic information and services. We do not wish to advocate a specific configuration or reporting structure for these activities, but we would argue that these activities must be connected to program strengths of the university if they are to remain relevant to their campuses.

4. Create models that scale / collaboration across universities

We heard a pervasive view that one of the key factors behind the difficulties of university presses is scale. They lack the scale to compete effectively with commercial presses, to take risks with new business models, and even to have the bandwidth to think strategically and boldly about how to deal with the forces of change. One librarian commented: “What’s missing is experiments at scale. Presses cannot remain competitive in the electronic environment given their small size. It is possible to imagine many little presses going out of business and a few large ones getting big enough and sophisticated enough to compete.”

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Experiments must be conducted at sufficient scale to demonstrate their potential value. In the online environment, the value of certain resources rises exponentially with scale due to the network effect. To cite a common example of this phenomenon, fax machines became useful as they became pervasive. Or think of JSTOR, where the full value of the aggregation would not have been evident with a prototype of ten journals. By bringing together a critical mass of both content and users, platforms such as HighWire Press, Wiley InterScience, ScienceDirect, and Project Muse have been able to create great value for both sides. Most presses lack the technological infrastructure for creating, loading, storing, preserving, and distributing dynamic electronic content. They also lack the capacity to market this content effectively. No single U.S. university press (at least at their current size) can justify building this capacity internally, nor would this be desirable from a user perspective. Without a compelling framework for cross-institutional collaboration, most have been stuck in a mode where they can only put a limited amount of content online, and that content is not extensive enough to form a destination in itself, or to justify enhancement through deep linking or interoperability, or to spark excitement that would lead to substantial investment.

In the journals world, this problem of scale and the spread of investment over a large infrastructure has been overcome for not-for-profit publishers through the emergence of third party aggregators and service providers such as Project Muse, HighWire Press, and JSTOR. But there is still no clear model or end-to-end not-for-profit solution for presses that enables them to produce and market eBooks effectively, much less new forms of dynamic content. A shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities could allow them to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, unite the resources of the university (e.g. libraries, presses, faculty, student body, IT), extend the brand of American higher education (and each particular university within that brand), create a blended interlinked environment of fee-based to free information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors. This platform would be designed to meet the specific needs of scholars. It would also enable the community to speak with a more unified voice with powerful entities, and could coordinate the identification and adoption of standards for technology and metadata.

5. Develop online publishing capacity

There are six reasons why this is crucial:

1. This is where the scholars are going;
2. there is an opportunity for universities to have more of a voice in the dissemination of their output;
3. there is an opportunity to publish more low demand but significant scholarship by lowering costs of publication;
4. online publishing can generate new revenue streams by tapping into unmet demand for monograph content (following the experience of journal backfiles);
5. publishers can make current products more exciting and can make publishing spaces that are capable of delivering the scholarly products of the future; and
6. there is an opportunity to increase access to scholarship through new pricing models.

Presses and libraries cannot do everything at once, but they should immediately develop a plan to move forthcoming lists online (much as journals developed a transitional print plus electronic model). This plan should envision ways for material conceived for print publication to become more accessible and newly relevant to scholars in electronic form. Presses should also develop plans to bring their backlists online (much as JSTOR has reinvigorated the historical journal literature), although this will take time and a sizable amount of capital.

Looking ahead, presses and libraries should work together to build publishing environments and develop skill sets that enable the creation and dissemination of innovative types of scholarly products and tools now beginning to breed in the electronic environment. These new virtual laboratories – created on campus and built together by libraries, presses, and faculty – can assemble and interlink a variety of content types, from traditional peer-reviewed formats such as monographs, journals, and reference works, to conference proceedings, newsletters, wikis, subject matter repositories, preprints, interdisciplinary centers, large primary source collections, gray literature, datafiles, multimedia products, and other new and hybrid formats.

6. Invest capital strategically

Universities have always directed portions of their budgets to publishing activities, whether through subsidies to their own presses, underwriting faculty publications, support of on-campus journals, digitization of library collections, or a variety of other initiatives. In allocating funds to various enterprises on campus, administrators should do so with a strategic vision for how publishing-related activities fit together. In the recent past, libraries have been able to find room in their budgets to launch institutional repositories and to digitize local collections. We heard a concern by many, including librarians, that this money has not all been well spent, as institutional repositories mostly have attracted limited content of uncertain value (“the attic”). Most presses, however, have such small and constrained budgets that there is no room for experimentation, let alone for making the kinds of transformative investments that are needed to reinvigorate existing programs or launch new ones[45]. Coordinating spending would enable the money to be used more effectively.

The transition from print to electronic scholarship requires investment capital in order to develop new infrastructure, build new capabilities, and repurpose existing assets (whose value can be enhanced considerably by being put online). Funding is required to link resources together and maximize their value to scholars. Funding is needed to create the tools and infrastructure needed to support the kinds of research and collaboration environments described above. Over time, initial funding should lead to cost savings through greater efficiency, economies of scale, less reinventing of the wheel, more transparent understanding of how money is being used, and through recapturing some of the publishing space from vendors with high profit margins. One would also expect to see higher productivity among researchers, though this benefit may not be translated into financial gain.

Developing a compelling strategy for scholarly communications can also lead to new sources of funding. For example, in raising money for a major new program or center, development campaigns can build in funds to support publishing activities that disseminate the research outputs of that initiative. Presses and libraries could work with development officers to create scripts for potential funders about how dynamic publishing helps to accomplish their goals, have global reach and impact, and brand campus initiatives. Furthermore, universities can tap into the current focus among foundations and governments on the need to build cyberinfrastructure following two influential reports (one on the sciences and engineering, another on the humanities and social sciences) to seek support for building the tools and infrastructure required for new forms of publishing[46].

7. Provide leadership

None of these elements is likely to materialize without leadership from the three constituents discussed here, particularly from presidents and provosts. Due to the siloed structure of universities, real collaboration is difficult to enact without impetus from the top. A good illustration is the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) initiative, which represented an innovative new form of university publishing and could never have been so successful without strong leadership from Chuck Vest and Bob Brown, the president and provost of MIT at the time MIT OCW was launched[47]. At the very least, provosts need to encourage leadership from their reports and empower them to act.

Summary of Recommendations

• Recognize that publishing is an integral part of the core mission and activities of universities, and take ownership of it.
• Take inventory of the landscape of publishing activities currently taking place within your university.
• Develop a strategic approach to publishing on your campus, including what publication services should be provided to your constituents, how they should be provided and funded, how publishing should relate to tenure decisions, and a position on intellectual assets.
• Create the organizational structure necessary to implement this strategy and leverage the resources of the university.
• Consider the importance of publishing towards an institution’s reputation, especially when associated with core academic strengths.
• Develop online publishing capabilities for backlist and frontlist content and for new emerging formats.
• Develop a shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of U.S. higher education, create an interlinked environment of information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors.
• Commit resources to deliver an agreed strategic plan for scholarly communication.