University Publishing in a Digital Age

Notes

Please note that throughout this paper we use the term “university” as shorthand for both universities and colleges.

In the past, terms such as scholarly communications and scholarly publishing were often used to depict research outputs that met certain criteria, such as certification, selection, and preservation. We argue here that the lines between formal and informal publication are breaking down, and thus the definitions of these terms are in flux. We use them in this paper to refer to the broad spectrum of ways that scholars share their research with one another.

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As John B. Thompson writes, “The decline in sales of scholarly monographs has undoubtedly been one of the most significant trends with which academic publishers have had to deal over the last two decades—more than any other single factor, it has transformed the economic conditions of scholarly publishing. The unit sales of scholarly monographs have fallen to a quarter or less of what they were in the 1970s, and what was once a relatively straightforward and profitable type of publishing has become much more difficult in financial terms." See John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge [UK]: Polity, 2005, pp. 93-94. See also Peter Givler, “University Press Publishing in the United States,” in Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newman, Wiley, 2002. Available online at http://aaupnet.org/resources/upusa.html, accessed April 2007. See also Albert Greco, “The market for university press books in the United States: 1985-1999”, Learned Publishing, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1 April 2001, pp. 97-105.

To cite but one example, Ithaka surveys shows that 86 percent of scholars agree strongly that electronic research resources are “invaluable research tools,” up from 73 percent in 2000.
See http://www.ithaka.org/research/faculty-studies/ for more information on this study.

See Clifford Lynch, “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World,” First Monday, Vol. 6, No. 6, 4 June 2001. Available online at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/, accessed April 2007.

By “back-end” we refer to digitization, printing, fulfillment, and storage.

In a study of scholarly communications in the history discipline conducted in 2006 we heard from several faculty members that, for their students, “if it isn’t online it doesn’t exist.”

We define “publishing platform” as a combination of infrastructure (storage, servers, processing power), software (content creation tools, content management systems, publishing applications), and the business models that support them. The appeal of such a “platform” is often enhanced by the aggregation of content it supports.

Crow, Raym, “Publishing Cooperatives: an alternative for Non-Profit Publishers.” First Monday, volume 11, number 9 (September 2006), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/crow/index.html, accessed March 17, 2007.

ibid.

See Theodore C. Bergstrom, “Free Labor for Costly Journals?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 15, No. 4., Autumn, 2001, pp. 183-198. Available online at: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28200123%2915%3A4%3C183%3AFLFCJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z, accessed April 2007. Large publishers tend to be commercial and small publishers tend to be not-for-profit.

The decline in sales of monographs is caused by a number of additional factors which we will not explore in detail here. Again, see John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge [UK]: Polity, 2005. See also Robert B. Townsend, “History and Future of Scholarly Publishing.” Perspectives, American Historical Association, October 2003, accessed June 1, 2007. http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2003/0310/0310vie3.htm

See “Wiley Completes Acquisition of Blackwell Publishing (Holdings) Ltd.” http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-301452,newsId-2292.html, accessed February 2007.

For a version of this argument, see Paul N. Courant, “Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their Kin) in a World of Google,” First Monday, Vol. 11, No. 8, 7 August 2006. Available online at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/index.html, accessed April 2007.

To provide a sense of how these break down, 2 responding presses had revenues >$25 million, 6 between 8-$25 million, 16 between $3-8 million, and 29 had revenues below $3 million.

See http://www.ithaka.org/research/faculty-studies/ for more information.

While these studies are not currently publicly available, many of the lessons from this work are reflected in our thinking and conclusions in this paper.

Online reference resources such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy have developed new procedures to enable stable citations and reference linking. See http://plato.stanford.edu/.

Based on a survey of librarians conducted by Ithaka in the fall of 2006. See http://www.ithaka.org/research/librarian-study/ for more information on the survey.

Based on our survey of directors of American university presses. Of course, most of the cost of university press publishing is shared by the institutions and individuals that benefit from it, by buying books.

One president we consulted pointed out that very few presidents and provosts of AAU (very large research) universities were drawn from the humanities. And yet we did not sense that senior administrators from non-humanities background were any less sensitive to the importance of their presses and the challenges in monograph publishing than those who came from the humanities.

From an Ithaka survey of faculty conducted in the fall of 2006. See http://www.ithaka.org/research/faculty-studies/ for more information.

82 percent of survey respondents reported that they do not publish any reference works electronically.

See John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, (Cambridge [UK]: Polity Press, 2005).

To be sure, presses have been taking up digital production technologies to support their print monographs programs. 83 percent of presses say that they are using print on demand or short run digital printing technology to improve their inventory management and reduce costs. See the Ithaka report, “The Evolving Environment for Scholarly Electronic Monographs,” available online at http://www.ithaka.org/about-ithaka/publications, accessed April 2007. Among those presses that do publish monographs online, the median number of monographs available online was 224, and the mean was 496, according to our survey of press directors.

See “More than 15,000 eBooks,” available online at: http://www.springer.com/west/home/e-content/ebooks?SGWID=4-40791-0-0-0, accessed April 2007.

See “ScienceDirect Will Launch 4,000 Books Online in 2007,” available online at: http://info.sciencedirect.com/content/books/2007/, accessed February 2007.

See http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=162540011, accessed April 2007.

While Google has not made any official announcements of such a product, a Google Book Search representative discussed the company’s plans at a presentation at the 2006 AAUP conference.

23 percent of university press directors reported that they plan to newly deploy electronic monograph publishing in the next 1-2 years, 50 percent plan to digitize out of print books, and 28 percent plan to invest in digital repositories, which are also a potential step toward electronic monograph publishing.

Half of very large and large presses said they aspire to align very closely with their university’s strengths, whereas only one quarter (24 percent and 28 percent) of small and medium sized presses aspire to very close alignment. 9 percent of small presses and 11 percent of medium sized presses say they align “not at all” with their parent university; no large or very large presses reported this. The discrepancy between the larger presses and the smaller ones may be partially explained by the fact that it is easier for a larger press, with more publications and more series, to align itself with a university’s priorities.

See OSO’s online tutorial for an example of how this works. Available online at: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/tour/tour_start.html, accessed April 2007.

See http://www.gutenberg-e.org/aboutframe.html, accessed April 2007.

The networked version of the book is available online at http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory, accessed April 2007.

See “ebrary Signs Blackwell Publishing, Yale University Press, and Columbia University Press,” February 26, 2007, available online at: http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_Blackwell_Yale_Columbia.pdf, accessed April 2007. The deal that these presses struck with ebrary contrasts with the earlier ebrary licensing model, which involved ebrary marketing and selling content. In this model, ebrary is a technology platform service provider to the presses.

See Lorcan Dempsey’s discussion of workflow in his blog entry “In the flow,” available online at http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000688.html, accessed April 2007.

AAUP conference, June 2006.

It is worth noting that the lowest price bracket, for customers with least access to resources, may be free in a progressive pricing model. Free access to scholarly content in poor countries is most feasible online. In the journals world, open access for poor countries has been facilitated by such projects as HINARI, Agora, and OARE.

It is worth noting that this credentialing service is most important when sales volume is so small that market criteria do not generally apply. The exceptions -- scholars whose star qualities are measured by their ability to publish with commercial presses -- prove the rule.

The credentialing process for monograph publications rests on at least three rounds of internal and external review – subject specialist editors at the presses choose the most promising works of scholarship from among those submitted, further refine their selection through rigorous peer review, and finally submit their choices (including the recommendations from the peer reviewers) to publishing boards often made up of faculty specialists at their parent institution who give final approval or rejection.

Joseph J. Esposito, “The Wisdom of Oz: The Role of the University Press in Scholarly Communications,” (Ann Arbor, MI: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan, University Library
vol. 10, no. 1, Winter 2007.) Available online at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0010.103, accessed May 2007.

See James Neal, “Symbiosis or Alienation: Advancing the University Press/Research Library Relationship Through Electronic Scholarly Communication.” Co-published simultaneously in the Journal of Library Administration (The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 35, No. 1/2, 2001, pp. 5-18; and: Libraries and Electronic Resources: New Partnerships, New Practices, New Perspectives (ed: Pamela L. Higgins) The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2001, pp. 5-18.

Which is to say, offering a free version of page images online, with payment required for downloadable PDF files or print. For details on the National Academies Press model, see that press’s FAQ, available online at http://www.nap.edu/about/about_pdf.html#10, accessed May 2007.

See “Current Projects,” available online at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/scholarlycomm/projects.html, accessed April 2007.

In response to our survey question, “If your press felt the need to invest in new programs, infrastructure, or capacity building, what level of funding would you have access to?” 45 percent of presses reported “none” and a further 29 percent reported “less than $500,000”.

See Daniel E. Atkins, et al, “Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure”, January 2003, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp, accessed May 2007; and John Unsworth, et al, “Our Cultural Commonwealth: A Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences”, available online at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/OurCulturalCommonwealth.pdf, accessed May 2007.

See http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html.