University Publishing in a Digital Age

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Executive Summary

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This report began as a review of U.S. university presses and their role in scholarly publishing. It has evolved into a broader assessment of the importance of publishing to universities. By publishing we mean simply the communication and broad dissemination of knowledge, a function that has become both more complex and more important with the introduction and rapid evolution of digital and networking technologies. There is a seeming limitless range of opportunities for a faculty member to distribute his or her work, from setting up a web page or blog, to posting an article to a working paper website or institutional repository, to including it in a peer-reviewed journal or book. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing”. Yet universities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. Publishing generally receives little attention from senior leadership at universities and the result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.

As information transforms the landscape of scholarly publishing, it is critical that universities deploy the full range of their resources – faculty research and teaching activity, library collections, information technology capacity, and publishing expertise – in ways that best serve both local interests and the broader public interest. We will argue that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their specific institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship and which scholars deserve recognition, and in some cases reduce costs. There seems to us to be a pressing and urgent need to revitalize the university’s publishing role and capabilities in this digital age.

We began this project with a set of hypotheses and views based on our own experience and prior discussions with people in the community. These hypotheses were tested through an extensive series of interviews with administrators, press directors, librarians, and other stakeholders on campus. We also conducted a survey of press directors to understand better their relationships to their host institutions, progress in getting online, and ability to develop new programs. Some of what we learned through this process confirmed our sense of how the world is changing, but we also heard views that we had not expected, particularly how critical many were of university presses and the difficulties they have had in adapting.

What the world looks like and where we are headed

Formal scholarly publishing is characterized by a process of selection, editing, printing and distribution of an author’s content by an intermediary (preferably one with some name recognition). Informal scholarly publication, by comparison, describes the dissemination of content (sometimes called “gray literature”) that generally has not passed through these processes, such as working papers, lecture notes, student newsletters, etc. In the past decade, the range and importance of the latter has been dramatically expanded by information technology, as scholars increasingly turn to preprint servers, blogs, listservs, and institutional repositories, to share their work, ideas, data, opinions, and critiques. These forms of informal publication have become pervasive in the university and college[1] environment. As scholars increasingly rely on these channels to share and find information, the boundaries between formal and informal publication will blur. These changes in the behavior of scholars will require changes in the approaches universities take to all kinds of publishing.

Universities have traditionally participated in the formal publication of their intellectual output through a network of presses, but most publishing of this output has long taken place outside the university sector, especially in the sciences. For a variety of reasons university presses have become less integrated with the core activities and missions of their home campuses over the years — a drift that threatens to widen as information technology transforms the landscape of scholarly publishing. The responsibility for disseminating digital scholarship is migrating instead in two directions – towards large (primarily commercial) publishing platforms and towards informal channels operated by other entities on campus, mostly libraries, academic computing centers, academic departments, and cross-institutional research centers. While these entities all play a critical role in scholarly communications[2], university presses have developed publishing skills and experience over many years that are also very valuable in this new context and that would be costly, if not impossible, to replicate. We hope to highlight those skills in this report and suggest how they can be adapted to the digital age.

Publishing in the future will look very different than it has looked in the past. Consumption patterns have already changed dramatically, as many scholars have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to get information that is useful to their research and teaching. Transformation on the creation and production sides is taking longer, but ultimately may have an even more profound impact on the way scholars work. Publishers have made progress putting their legacy content online, especially with journals. We believe the next stage will be the creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media.

Alongside these changes in content creation and publication, alternative distribution models (institutional repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals) have also arisen with the aim to broaden access, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content. Different economic models will be appropriate for different types of content and different audiences. It seems critical to us that there continue to be a diverse marketplace for publishing a range of content, from fee-based to open access, from peer reviewed to self-published, from single author to collaboratively created, from simple text to rich media. This marketplace should involve commercial and not-for-profit entities, and should include collaborations among libraries, presses, and academic computing centers.

What will, or should, the future scholarly communications system look like? First, every university that produces research should have a publishing strategy, but that does not mean that it should have a “press”. Much of the content produced in the future will be disseminated electronically, and a new constellation of skills (including some that currently reside in presses, as well as those from libraries and IT groups) will be required to do this most effectively. Second, in the digital environment certain activities and assets (e.g. technology development, marketing) will be consolidated onto large scale platforms. These new digital publishing activities are central to the research and teaching missions of universities, and it therefore seems critically important that the university community be able to influence strongly the development of these platforms to insure that they support long held university values, rather than allowing them to be driven primarily by commercial incentives. And third, as the environment evolves, university presses will no doubt change. Some universities will encourage and enable their presses to grow and take more of a leadership role. Other institutions may decide to open new presses. Others may close their presses or let their presses evolve into more specialized enterprises with a focus on editorial and credentialing services while depending on others for core infrastructure and marketing services. What seems clear is that to succeed presses are going to need to be a more important partner in helping their host institutions to fulfill their research and teaching mission.

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What needs to be done

In our interviews we detected significant detachment from administrators about publishing’s connection to their core mission; a high level of energy and excitement from librarians about reinventing their roles on campus to meet the evolving needs of their constituents; and a wide range of responses from press directors, from those who are continuing to do what they have always done, to those who are actively reconnecting with their host institutions’ academic programs and engaging in collaborative efforts to develop new electronic products. Many press directors have a sense of what needs to be done to jump-start their new enterprises, but lack the financial capital, technical staff, and technological skills to pursue this kind of agenda. Librarians and press directors acknowledge that they have limited experience in collaborating effectively with one another and operate on different business models that make collaboration challenging, but at the same time we found that they have an appreciation for the unique skills and experience that each brings to the table. Finally, there was a strong sense that a new third-party enterprise or at least a catalytic force is needed to: facilitate the investment of capital; lead the community
toward a shared vision of the scholarly communications landscape; help institutions find their place in that new system; marshal the necessary ongoing resources; and help motivate collaboration both within campuses and across institutions.

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Administrators, librarians and presses each have a role to play (as do scholars, though this report is not directed at them). Senior administrators must provide strong leadership and embrace the fact that in this digital era, publishing, broadly defined, is a centrally important activity of any university. They will have to manage university assets and resources strategically if universities are to continue to exert the appropriate level of influence on the assessment and dissemination of knowledge and scholarship. Press directors and librarians must work together to create the intellectual products of the future which increasingly will be created and distributed in electronic media. Their efforts should be closely and intelligently connected to their campuses’ academic programs and priorities in order to ensure their relevancy and institutional commitment. All three parties should work together to create a shared electronic publishing infrastructure that will save costs, build scale, leverage expertise, promote innovation, and integrate the productive resources of universities to maintain a robust, diverse and collaborative university publishing environment.

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Clearly this is too ambitious an agenda for institutions to pursue individually. Creating these sorts of platforms requires scale and investment of substantial capital, and commercial entities are far ahead of the university sector in investing the necessary level of resources. Each institution must determine what it can do locally, and if and when it should combine forces with other institutions. One of the objectives of this study was to gauge the community’s interest in a possible collective investment in a technology platform to support innovation in university-based, mission-driven publishing. This infrastructure could serve as the foundation for new forms of university-centered academic publishing in the digital age.