Appendix D: Interview Guides (Press Directors, Librarians, Administrators)
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Press Directors
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Demographics
1. How big is your press (staff, revenues, number of books published, number of journals published, other metrics)?
2. Who are your press’s peers?
3. To whom do you look for examples of future directions for your press?
4. How long have you been director?
5. What are the major issues your press is facing?
Relationship to host
1. Is your press a unit of the university or do you have an independent governance structure?
2. If you report into the university, to whom do you report (provost, library, VP for administration, research, finance, etc.)?
3. What is the history of this reporting relationship?
4. What are the challenges associated with this relationship? How does it affect the way you run your press?
5. What do you see as your press’s role within the university?
6. What does your university (provost, president, faculty) see as your role?
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Collaborations
1. What entities on your campus do you work with directly (library, development, public relations, VP for research, other units)? How often do you meet with them?
2. What is the nature of your collaboration with other units (library, academic departments, institutes, IT, distance learning) across the university?
3. Has your library (or other units of the university) ventured into electronic publishing (e.g., with a digital repository)?
4. Has your library expressed interest in a collaboration with your press?
5. Are you interested in a collaboration with your library?
6. If yes what would you do together? What about this prospect do you find appealing?
7. Have there been any successful examples of collaboration between your press and the library?
8. What are the obstacles to your greater involvement with your library or other units across campus?
9. What cross-institution collaborations are you involved with for products and for services (other presses, scholarly societies, etc.)?
10. What regional collaborations have you been involved with (state and local, industry, museums and cultural institutions, tourism boards)?
11. What model of collaboration would you find most appealing: One led by another press, a new organization, a third party existing organization, a consortium of presses?
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Electronic publishing: general/books
1. What kinds of electronic publishing are you currently involved with (print on demand, short run digital printing, electronic books, electronic journals, etc.)?
2. What kinds of e-publishing would you like to be involved with?
3. What are the main impediments to your involvement in these areas?
(At this point, share a list of university press services)
4. Which among these services does your press require?
5. What services do you wish [your current online vendors] offered?
6. Where are the areas of greatest unmet need?
7. For your books program, what digital technologies are you currently using in your books publishing program, backend (digital production, digital asset management, print on demand, short run digital printing) and front-end (online marketing, electronic distribution)?
8. For your books program, what databases is your content included in? What has your approach been to licensing your content for electronic distribution?
9. What are your views on Google Print/Book Search?
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Electronic publishing: journals
1. Do you publish journals on behalf of societies or on your own behalf?
2. For journals you publish on behalf of others, to what extent are you involved with the editorial side? Are you more of an editorial driver or service provider?
3. What are your distribution channels for journals (print, electronic, licensing, distribution on behalf of others)?
4. When did your press decide to put its current journal issues online? How was the decision made?
5. What vendors do you work with? Do you generally build or buy technological solutions?
6. If you have one, what services does your online provider offer?
7. Why did you choose [your current online vendor]? Which factor was the most important? What importance did you place on…
a. The other journals already distributed by the vendor (same discipline)?
b. The financial terms of the agreement?
c. The specific or unique services offered by the vendor?
d. The vendor’s marketing skills?
e. Reputation?
f. For-profit or not-for-profit status?
8. Have you considered any other online service providers since then? Why? What did you like about the others? Which vendors are most advanced in terms of electronic publishing? Which are the best electronic journals platforms? What distinguishes these?
9. How long have you been at your current platform provider? If you have made a transition recently, what were your decision-making priorities? How satisfied are you with the service your publishing platform currently provides?
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Editorial program and publishing
1. What is your editorial mix of trade, reference, regional, professional, journals?
2. Do you have a focus on any discipline or disciplines? What are they?
3. How did these come to be your areas of focus?
4. To what extent are your books and journals programs integrated or separated? Is your books program growing because of journal relationships? Why?
5. Have you lost any journals recently? Have you acquired any journals recently? Why? Why do the ones you have stay with you?
6. How closely tied are your journals to their editors?
7. How do you decide how to value a journal? How do you decide when to bid on a journal?
8. Are you developing cross-media products that blend journal and book content?
9. Among the various kinds of content you publish where do your revenues/profits come from?
10. Are your editors generally specialists or generalists?
11. What are your host institution’s disciplinary strengths?
12. How close is the match between your editorial program and the disciplinary strengths of your university? Do you think that matters?
13. If you work with scholarly societies, what do you view as the value of those relationships?
14. What are your plans for growth?
15. Why do you want to grow: more titles, more books/journals in print, more revenues, more profit, more prestige, more prizes, more submissions?
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Marketing
1. How do you market your books and journals?
2. Of the marketing you do now, what is most effective?
3. What methods or tools could make your marketing more effective that you currently are unable to do?
4. How has this changed with the advent of the Internet? What are you trying to accomplish with your website? What other web presence do you have?
5. How does this differ from other publishers? Other university presses?
6. How do you research a new market?
7. What are your greatest marketing challenges? Opportunities?
8. What percentage of your expenses are devoted to marketing?
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Access to funding
1. Where do your revenues come from (endowment, clients, licensing, university budget allocations, sales, fundraising)?
2. What is the percentage breakdown among the sources of revenue?
3. What other sources of investment capital do you have?
4. If you had a great publishing idea, are you confident that you could amass the capital required to invest in it and bring it to fruition? Where would that capital come from?
5. What are the major capital investments that you have made in the past 10 years? From where did the funding for these come?
6. Is the lack of investment capital a barrier to innovation at your press?
7. Are you currently in the process of fundraising?
8. Do you have a staff person devoted to development?
9. What is your relationship with your university’s development office?
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Closing questions
1. Where do you see your press being strong?
2. How would you say your press is branded?
3. How much of the content you produce has close brand ties to your press (e.g., the XYZ dictionary of ABC)
4. What do you view as your press’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
5. What are the obstacles to your achieving your mission in the very broadest sense (e.g., funding, capabilities, ability to persuade your administration/host university, other factors)?
6. What are the specific obstacles to your participating in electronic publishing?
7. What are your concerns about the future? What could be done to help assuage these concerns?
8. Are there any other questions we did not ask that we should have?
9. Whom else should we consult for this study?
10. Do you have any questions for us?
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Library Directors
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Collaborations within the university
1. What is going on at your university in the area of online scholarly communications? Who is leading these projects? What is your library’s involvement in these areas?
2. Has your library ventured into electronic publishing (e.g., with a digital repository)?
3. Have there been any successful examples of collaboration between your library and your university’s press?
4. Have you expressed interest in a collaboration with your press? And they interested in a collaboration with your library?
5. If yes what would you do together? What about this prospect do you find appealing?
6. What are the obstacles to greater involvement between your library and your press?
7. What consortia or regional collaborations are you involved with?
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Open Access
1. Do you sympathize with the open access movement?
2. Why should access be open?
3. What do you think the impact of open access will be on your library and your press?
4. What is your view of the sustainability of open access publishing?
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Closing questions
1. Are there any other questions we did not ask that we should have?
2. Whom else should we consult for this study?
3. Do you have any questions for us?
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University Administrators
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Mission
1. How would you like to see the university publishing industry change?
2. What are your concerns about the future of the scholarly communications system? What are the opportunities?
3. What should be done to address these concerns?
4. Why is it important for universities to have presses?
5. What is the mission of your university press?
6. What you see as your press’s role within the university?
7. How does your university support its press in that mission?
8. How does your press support the mission of your university?
9. Do you see the mission of your press more in the context of your university or in the context of the wider world?
10. How do you measure the performance of your press?
11. What are the main obstacles to your press’s achieving its mission in the very broadest sense (e.g., funding, capabilities, ability to persuade your administration/host university, other factors)?
12. What are the major issues for your university press today?
13. How satisfied are you with the performance of your press?
14. What would you like your university press to do differently?
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Press-university relationship
1. Do you expect your press to be subsidized, break even, or earn a surplus?
a. If subsidized, how much funding does your university provide the press per year?
b. If break even, how do you define break even? What costs does the press cover and what costs does it not cover?
c. If surplus, how much surplus?
2. To whom does your press director report – you, an independent board, or another person?
3. Why does your university have the governance structure for its press that it does?
4. What is the history of this reporting relationship?
5. What are the challenges associated with this relationship? How does it affect the way your school’s press is run?
6. How often do you think about press-related issues?
7. How often do you meet with your press director?
8. Is your press something your president worries about?
9. What do your faculty think of your press? Do they tend to publish with your press?
10. Do faculty play a role in shaping your press’s program?
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Collaborations within the university
1. What is going on at your university in the area of online scholarly communications? Who is leading these projects?
2. Have there been any successful examples of collaboration between your press and other units at your university?
3. Have you tried to encourage greater collaboration between the offices at your university (library, academic departments, institutes, IT, distance learning) and your press? How did this go?
4. Would you find this prospect to be appealing?
5. What are the obstacles to the greater involvement of the press with other units?
6. It seem that on many campuses, libraries are taking over some of the traditional functions of university presses. Is that true on your campus? Why?
7. Would you like your press to be more involved in electronic publishing?
8. Are you willing to invest in electronic publishing experiments by your press? How much do you think it would be appropriate for your university to risk?
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Collaborations across universities
1. One influential provost recommended a massive consolidation of university presses. Do you agree?
2. What models of consolidation or collaboration would you find attractive? (We can test specific models at this point).
3. How would you assess the attractiveness of a potential collaboration with another press, institution or other organization?
4. What are the barriers to greater collaboration and scale economies for university presses?
5. Have you discussed the future of university presses with your peers at other universities?
6. What regional collaborations has your university you been involved with (state and local, industry, museums and cultural institutions, tourism boards)?
7. Are there natural collaborations your university is involved with, e.g., University of Cambridge and MIT, that you think it would make sense for your press to leverage?
8. If there were to be a collaborative model of university presses, which one would you find most appealing: One led by a press, a new organization, a third party existing organization, a consortium of presses?
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Open Access
1. Are you familiar with the open access movement? Do you sympathize with it?
2. Why should access be open?
3. Did you sign one of the two provosts’ petitions on open access that are currently circulating?
4. What do you think the impact of open access will be on your press? Do you think it will aid or hurt the financial footing of your press?
5. What is your view of the sustainability of open access publishing?
6. Is your university prepared to provide more subsidy to your press to make up for revenues lost to open access? How much more money would you be willing to budget for your press?
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Closing questions
1. What is your university’s research output? How do you measure this?
2. How concentrated is this output among certain journals?
3. Are there any other questions we did not ask that we should have?
4. Whom else should we consult for this study?
5. Do you have any questions for us?
Posted by kimballs on August 9, 2007
Tags: Uncategorized