Executive Summary Brian Sheppard says: This relates to an earlier comment, but I find the use of the singular, in terms of techno[...]
Executive Summary Brian Sheppard says: The appeal of the "third-party enterprise" has appeal to administrators who fear the risks[...]
Executive Summary if:book: ithaka university publishing report in commentpress says: [...] Publishing in a Digital Age,” which came out late July and which we noted here[...]
Executive Summary Claire Evans says: In August, the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication released the res[...]
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2 General Comments
Adam Hodgkin
says:
This is an extremely interesting report and the University of Michigan is to be congratulated on producing it in this form. A good sign of the way in which universities and their presses can continue to develop innovative publishing solutions. Bravo!
August 23, 2007
12:49 am
jim Reische
says:
Originally posted this rather lengthy comment on if:book, but I’ve been asked to repost it here:
Speaking from outside the scholarly publishing community (albeit as a former insider and interested observer), it’s hard not to notice the tepid reception that the Ithaka report has received. Everyone seems quite happy that the report confirms the conventional wisdom about the nature of the problem: presses are undercaptialized, and lack access to the kinds of resources for innovation that they would need in order to survive. But despite scholarly publishers’ best efforts to whip up a controversy, there is in fact precious little disagreement about the need for presses to move into the digital domain. I can’t think of three essays I’ve read in the last five years–even counting John Updike’s embarassing attack on Kevin Kelly–which argue that publishers should stay out of digital media.
The real question is how they should pay for the move. And that’s when the room suddenly gets uncomfortably quiet. Laura Brown and company offer some very well-intentioned suggestions for cross-institutional collaboration, but the contortions they have to go through to imagine this solution tell you something about the economic realities that they were up against. The fact is that the money is just not there, and that until someone can come up with not only a creative, but also a realistic and stable source of venture capital for university presses, our little insiders’ discussion will rev on and on in neutral without ever moving an inch.
This may indeed not be a problem for individual institutions to solve, as the Ithaka team reminds us. In fact, it may not even be one that the higher education community can solve on its own. Instead–and please forgive me the heresy–we may need to see a significant investment of public funds (via the NSF, NEH, etc.) before anything changes. This would be the best kind of public investment: a large but limited, one-time infusion of support, a sort of academic New Deal that would enable us as a society to do something that we know will benefit the common good, but which we also know will never happen without external subsidy. Revisionism aside, the New Deal wasn’t entirely a bad thing. If we can give the country rural electrification, then I think we can also help our nation’s universities produce and publish the best ideas, in whatever technological medium is best suited to their dissemination.
So: thanks and congratulations to the Scholarly Publishing Office for posting the report, and to IFB for their timely release of CommentPress. I hope people will mark this document up and generate enough ideas and momentum to move the discussion out of park.
This is an extremely interesting report and the University of Michigan is to be congratulated on producing it in this form. A good sign of the way in which universities and their presses can continue to develop innovative publishing solutions. Bravo!
Originally posted this rather lengthy comment on if:book, but I’ve been asked to repost it here:
Speaking from outside the scholarly publishing community (albeit as a former insider and interested observer), it’s hard not to notice the tepid reception that the Ithaka report has received. Everyone seems quite happy that the report confirms the conventional wisdom about the nature of the problem: presses are undercaptialized, and lack access to the kinds of resources for innovation that they would need in order to survive. But despite scholarly publishers’ best efforts to whip up a controversy, there is in fact precious little disagreement about the need for presses to move into the digital domain. I can’t think of three essays I’ve read in the last five years–even counting John Updike’s embarassing attack on Kevin Kelly–which argue that publishers should stay out of digital media.
The real question is how they should pay for the move. And that’s when the room suddenly gets uncomfortably quiet. Laura Brown and company offer some very well-intentioned suggestions for cross-institutional collaboration, but the contortions they have to go through to imagine this solution tell you something about the economic realities that they were up against. The fact is that the money is just not there, and that until someone can come up with not only a creative, but also a realistic and stable source of venture capital for university presses, our little insiders’ discussion will rev on and on in neutral without ever moving an inch.
This may indeed not be a problem for individual institutions to solve, as the Ithaka team reminds us. In fact, it may not even be one that the higher education community can solve on its own. Instead–and please forgive me the heresy–we may need to see a significant investment of public funds (via the NSF, NEH, etc.) before anything changes. This would be the best kind of public investment: a large but limited, one-time infusion of support, a sort of academic New Deal that would enable us as a society to do something that we know will benefit the common good, but which we also know will never happen without external subsidy. Revisionism aside, the New Deal wasn’t entirely a bad thing. If we can give the country rural electrification, then I think we can also help our nation’s universities produce and publish the best ideas, in whatever technological medium is best suited to their dissemination.
So: thanks and congratulations to the Scholarly Publishing Office for posting the report, and to IFB for their timely release of CommentPress. I hope people will mark this document up and generate enough ideas and momentum to move the discussion out of park.