Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Organizers of the last session on the last day of the 2010 Annual Meeting, “New Emerging Business Models in Journal Publishing,” joked about the difficulty of rounding up a crowd to talk about journals in such a time slot. However, a good number of dedicated attendees put off their final happy hour and heard presentations on some of the innovative approaches their colleagues are taking in journals publishing. One of those innovations is coming out of Amsterdam University Press, where they are extending a commitment to open access to journals. Business Director Martin Voigt shared with the audience how working with partners has made this a feasible model.
An international member of AAUP, Amsterdam University Press (AUP), does not have a formal journals program: its journals are currently managed by the press’s editors. Five of their journals (one forthcoming) are open access, a continuation of the AUP’s commitment to exploring feasible models for open access monographs through the OAPEN program. The press decided to explore the possibility of open access journals for a variety of reasons. In addition to the desire to make scholarly work accessible, they feel it may be an answer to the serials crisis in journals, which has been slowing the development of new journals and has led to a shrinking audience. The obstacle in the way of this ideal was, of course, funding.
While many presses would like to make their content more accessible, all are aware of the costs required to develop and maintain a journal. AUP’s solution to this problem was to work with partners – libraries, faculties, institutes– to create a “financial basis” for any new journal. Working with scholarly partners ensures the quality of the content, as representatives from all of the partners constitute the journal’s advisory board. Collaboration makes sense for the partners, as they all have a vested interest in the field and the existence of a journal for publishing in that field. The partners also benefit by working together, rather than in competition, with similarly focused organizations. Involving a wide swath of a particular scholarly community also has the very practical benefit of decreasing the contribution for each partner. The cost of supporting the open access journal replaces the subscription fee (and is often less) that these institutions would pay in a traditional model.
As a case study of how this model plays out, Voigt presented on the Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries (JALC). The journal came about when two archaeological institutions approached AUP and asked the press to calculate the costs of an open access journal covering archaeology in Holland and Belgium. After calculating costs, the press collaborated with the original two institutions to find an additional seven partners with interest in the field.
The press has developed a precise calculation of the required yearly costs for the operation of an open access journal. In the case of JALC, assuming a publishing frequency of one article per month, a part-time journal editor, IT development, and overhead, costs total €18,000. This cost is split evenly between the nine partners, leaving each responsible for €2,000 per year in addition to “their investment in time for acquisition, peer reviewing & editorial board.” This formula has been particularly successful for AUP because there is no risk involved – all costs have been anticipated and paid for by the funding partners. In fact, this model has also allowed the press to make a small profit, through subscription-based print-on-demand articles. Print subscriptions are available for € 99,95 a year, for which the subscriber receives two issues, each containing the previous six articles. Voigt reported that as of June, they had a steady 45 subscriptions, surely not a huge number, but an admirable bonus for an already self-sustaining project.
The benefits of publishing JALC online extend beyond the increased access it offers. While “enhanced publication” may sound like a suspect catchphrase to some, AUP, with the advice of its partners, has found ways to take advantage of the additional capabilities of digital in ways that are valuable to scholars. The online format allows the journal to publish the research data along with the articles themselves. Voigt shared an example of how they have been able to integrate technology particularly useful to archaeologists: he showed an image from an excavation of a burial, and subsequent slides displayed the added views provided by an online Geographical Information System (GIS), viewing the image as an X-ray and separating the objects.
When asked by an audience member whether the partners funding model has made publishing decisions political, Voigt said they had not run into problems of that nature. This is certainly a question that would need to be addressed by any press considering a similar model, taking into account the different types of potential partners with different sets of interests. University presses, however, are no strangers to the complexities of partnering with various institutions, something that they are engaging in more and more frequently. Amsterdam’s initiative of collaboration may prove to be a model for the successful merging of open access and sustainability.
View the presentation slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/aaupny/aup-new-emerging-business-models-in-journal-publishing-voigt
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Much like e-catalogs, electronic galleys and review copies have been one of the great promises of electronic publishing. Printing and shipping review and exam copies can represent a large cost in a small marketing budget—even more when reaching an international market. But like most e-promises, digital galleys have taken a hard road to fulfillment, caught between the tricky questions of file security and the stubborn reality of reviewers’ habits.
In 2008, NetGalley, a subsidiary of Firebrand Technologies, was launched to help smooth this road, providing a digital galley platform that would serve the interests of both professional readers and publishers. NetGalley offers speedy transmission of secure, searchable, full-color digital galleys and multi-media press kits as well as options to read galleys on desktops or e-readers such as Kindle and Nook. Publishers can also view real-time reporting on who is reading a title. The applicability of such a service beyond pre-publication review was quickly obvious, particularly in the areas of course adoption and international rights sales.
This June, AAUP was pleased to announce a new discount program for our members, offered in partnership with NetGalley, for their innovative e-galley service. All AAUP members are now eligible for a 10% discount off of the monthly subscription rate, regardless of their level of participation. NetGalley allows publishers to share galleys and digital press kits with their own reader contacts, as well as with new communities of professional readers through the NetGalley reader membership. Professional readers can register and use the site for free.
AAUP member Island Press has been using the NetGalley services since early 2009, attracted by both the economic and environmental savings that might be realized through e-galleys. Jaime Jennings, publicity manager at Island, shared some insight into their experiences. The Press never has more than 20 new trade (or trade-crossover with professional and academic markets) titles offered in NetGalley. If a title has significant course adoption potential, they will keep it in the system for a longer time.
For course adoption, as with traditional reviewers, Jennings reports that there are some hurdles to surmount with readers. Some professors balk at downloading the Adobe Digital Editions software, and many readers simply still prefer the hard copy. Island is using a number of strategies to work through this reluctance, primarily by pushing the digital galley as an initial step in the review decision. A professor might be pleased to view a pre-publication digital galley and make a more informed request for a print exam copy down the line. For review outlets, Island has found that more are now willing to use the digital galley to the point of deciding whether to assign the title for review and only at that stage requesting a hard copy be sent. Online reviewers, Jennings notes, have been naturally more accepting of the files.
Jennings stresses that the Press has needed to be open to experimenting with the platform and NetGalley features to make the most of the service. Island has found the widget feature—the widget can be copied directly into emails for publishers to invite their contacts to view a title—to be easy to use and of increasing value. They have recently worked closely with the NetGalley team on a title with a complicated 4-color layout and a significant international market—where a print galley would have been ruinously expensive to produce and ship.
There have been unexpected rewards as well. Jennings has listed all Island titles in the “public” NetGalley catalog, so they are discoverable by all readers who have registered with the service. (All requests for digital galleys are sent to the Press for approval.) For a small press, Jennings says, this has been a boon in reaching new audiences, particularly booksellers and small academic and public library buyers who might not have been on the Press’s sales radar before this. Jennings is always looking at which file restrictions, additional marketing material, or title profile will make the most of the service—tweaking and experimenting along the way.
AAUP-NetGalley Discount Program: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/epub/netgalley.html
On July 27, AAUP and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Center (SPARC) co-sponsored a webcast entitled “Innovation, the future of e-books, and the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative.” Hosted by SPARC’s Jennifer McLennan, the webcast featured a presentation by Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, which explored the Mellon-funded initiative, how the AADMI had evolved from the original proposal, and what the participants were learning. The initiative partners have shifted their goal from technical innovation to business innovation, and see promise that their results will be scalable beyond the original presses, and perhaps beyond the original discipline as well.
With close to 100 participants from both the publishing and library communities, the presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Asked how the initiative would remain sustainable beyond the duration of the grant, Pratt answered that the most important factor would be partnerships in every phase. Thus far, the presses’ partnership has been a rewarding experience for all involved. Despite all of the presses publishing in the same field, Pratt has found that competition has not been a problem. Instead, collaborating on such a forward-looking project has been energizing.
The university press e-book consortium project, led by NYU Press, Temple University Press, Rutgers University Press, Penn Press, and the University of Nebraska Press, has received a second grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will run from August through January, and will allow the partners to move forward in developing their business model and formally involving other university presses.
Krista Coulson
Electronic Publishing Manager, University of Wisconsin Press
As university presses are increasingly integrating digital publishing into their programs, new staff needs have arisen. Some presses, like the University of Wisconsin Press, have addressed this by creating the position of Electronic Publishing Manager. As this is such a new role, and an ever-evolving one, AAUP thought it would be valuable for me to share my own experience as one example of what the role might entail. I should first say that the digital publishing job description at any particular press is going to vary considerably. There are no firm boundaries yet to the job duties. To an extent, each position description is crafted to fill the holes in the existing expertise at a press. While there may be some overlap in job responsibilities, there are just as likely to be differences. My position is in administration and reports to the press director, but similar positions at other presses are assigned to marketing or production departments.
The Press’s e-book program is out of its infancy, but still very young. We sell PDF-based e-books with most major institutional vendors and have, in the past year, begun selling to individual customers via Amazon’s Kindle store, Ingram Digital’s retail e-book program, and our own website. We are also in the process of adding additional vendors like Sony and Barnes and Noble.
Wisconsin’s Electronic Publishing Manager (EPM) position was created last February. Before that, I worked for the Press on an annual contract basis for two years. In the contract position, I assessed the scope and viability of an e-book program for the Press, evaluating the need for an EPM position and, it was hoped, giving the Press a better sense of the eventual scope of any such position. This ended up being an excellent exercise. For example, the Press’s initial attempt to create a job description included work related to establishing vendor contracts and e-book production, but severely underestimated the time and labor needed to evaluate and amend author contracts and book permissions, an oversight which was corrected in the final EPM description. I also requested position descriptions from Electronic Publishing Managers at other university presses, asking for their candid feedback on restrictive or unrealistic parts of the description. Lastly, the Press Director assessed the current expertise of the UW Press staff and customized the position to best help the Press. Since the long-time Rights Manager was retiring, the new EPM description includes significant contract review, permissions, and copyright oversight.
Broadly speaking, as the Electronic Publishing Manager, I am in charge of leading our digital publishing business—for both frontlist and backlist titles—while strategically planning for future innovation. On a day to day basis that takes many shapes. On any given day I may be doing work that falls into any of the Press’s departments.
Like acquisitions, I select titles that merit investment and/or seem likely to produce revenue. I answer author questions about e-book distribution and negotiate royalty rates. Mirroring the work of the production department, I manage conversion, ensure that we are working with the text used in the most recent printing, and implement appropriate author requests for changes. I track delivery of book files to vendors and assign EISBNs. I develop standards for, and do a final quality check on, new and unfamiliar formats like EPUB. As do rights managers, I review new author contracts and permissions statements to double-check that we are getting the necessary rights for electronic publication. I review and amend author contracts and update permissions to clear backlist titles for an e-book life. Like sales, I create and maintain relationships with e-book vendors—negotiating contracts, establishing discount rates, and seeking out promotion options. I assemble and send out metadata to our vendors. I enter price, EISBN, and format data into our website shopping cart system so we can sell e-books directly from our website. I work with publicity to encourage e-book press releases and special promotions and with our marketing manager to try to figure out how e-book marketing can be done most effectively. Lastly, I work with our business office to set up new accounting lines, pass on royalty information, and to track sales across widely divergent distribution streams.
I also manage special projects. For example, I work with our campus library’s digital collection and with the Google Books Partner project/Google Books Settlement (and author inquiries, objections, and confusion about both). I review tech and legal websites and blogs to stay current on emerging technology, sales trends, and copyright issues. While all of my colleagues find that their work is changing, the Electronic Publishing Manager is a position that is particularly in flux. Each industry update in metadata delivery, e-book format, electronic reading options, or newly registered lawsuit may mean reinventing workflow, or a change in my position description. Firebrand’s recent update to their metadata software meant that I had to entirely restructure the workflow for e-book production and deal with all the new problems that followed. The Google Books lawsuit has added massive contract review and author correspondence to my job.
One of the most difficult parts of my job is to integrate e-books into the regular workflow of Press. There are many parallel processes, where e-book workflow naturally mirrors print book workflow, while other tasks are entirely divergent. I have been working with acquisitions, marketing, and production to figure out how best to integrate e-books into their processes, and we seem to be constantly tweaking our procedures to account for changes outside of our press. Thinking about how all of these procedural and technical changes accumulate into a “future” that my press is ready to address is also part of my job description.
Though I think about the future of e-books and digital reading all the time, it is harder to say exactly how it will affect my position. The process of winnowing through the backlist will wrap up at some point, freeing a lot of time and attention. I expect that as the e-book market grows up and stabilizes, many e-book production issues will be absorbed into their related departments as a normal part of workflow. However, new formats for digital products will continue to call for re-evaluating rights and economic models. The distribution of e-book workflow throughout the press will mean that we will need a digital publishing group to coordinate changes and innovation in workflow processes. I am also likely to be kept busy searching through our content, and looking for opportunities to re-purpose it into new combinations, delivered through new distribution models. Finally, as my position is located in administration and parallels the rights department, it also seems likely that as current tasks are moved into other departments, new work will take on a narrower focus—perhaps increasing my time dealing with copyright, contracts, and piracy.
For more on how different presses are handling the evolving staffing requirements of digital publishing, check out the “Staffing for Digital Initiatives: Transition to Sustainable Models” session at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, from 3:30-4:45 on June 19.
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager, ROTUNDA, University of Virginia Press
Kenneth Reed, Digital Production Specialist, The University of North Carolina Press
Any university press considering an XML-based workflow for monographs (whether from start to finish or as an archival format) has likely discovered that the first question may also be the knottiest: what kind of XML? Or to put it in more technically accurate terms, which XML language? The answer is far from obvious. The book markup language developed by the Association of American Publishers as long ago as the 1980s (originally in the ancestor of XML, SGML) is an international standard—ISO 12083—but to our knowledge it has been adopted by no university press other than California, and even then it required extensive modification. DocBook is well established as an authoring and archival language for books and serves publishers like O’Reilly as a natural format for “one source, many output” workflows, but it is highly optimized for technical documentation and lacks native markup elements for many structural features common in humanities and social science texts. (The University of Michigan Press has adopted it for production of some of their monograph titles, however.) EPUB/XHTML is perfectly suited to its purpose of encoding books for presentation on a wide variety of mobile devices, but its relatively impoverished set of structural and semantic tags may limit its value as an archival format for scholarly works.
An alternative increasingly being investigated is the markup language developed by the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, designed for the ambitious goal of creating machine-readable versions of texts in virtually any genre, from any historical period, and in any natural language. Following organizational work in the late 1980s, the first version of the TEI Guidelines was released in 1990, and was quickly adopted as the markup standard for a wide array of projects housed within university libraries and research departments engaged in digitizing books, manuscripts, drama, correspondence, and even mixed collections of text and images. Today there are literally thousands of texts encoded in TEI and in many cases published via the Web, often accompanied by a variety of full-text and data search tools (see http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ for a list of over 100 such sites). The TEI Guidelines are actively maintained and developed by the TEI Consortium, with an international group of directors and editors from a variety of scholarly and professional backgrounds.
Clearly TEI-XML can be used to produce archival machine-readable versions of published books; existing off-the-shelf tools can be used to convert those files to HTML, PDF, and EPUB, although achieving results satisfactory to a professional publisher will usually require more or less customization. But is TEI-XML a viable answer to the XML workflow question? Can a publisher develop in-house procedures for converting existing books to an archival TEI format, or find a vendor capable of doing so? Alternatively, is it feasible to insert TEI-XML into the authoring workflow, so that it becomes the underlying source of both print and digital versions of a book? Over the past year or so, members of both the TEI and the university press communities have been meeting online and in person to address such questions.
The TEI Guidelines in their current form (version “P5”) are incredibly rich and comprehensive (over 1,400 pages in PDF form!), so approaching them can be quite daunting. The TEI Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were created to allow individuals to share ideas and develop much more focused uses of TEI. For the most part, these SIGs have been based in the academy, and centered on humanities scholarship, but they are open to anyone. The Scholarly Publishing SIG was created in June 2009 in order to explore the use of TEI in original scholarly publication. One of the aims of this SIG is to make TEI an attractive choice when deciding upon which XML language to use. XML is a costly investment: there will be a lot of time and resources devoted to its implementation. The university press community needs to collaborate on this front, and this SIG would serve as the starting point for progress. It will enable presses interested in using TEI to share developments with peer institutions as well as with the wider TEI community.
It is quite common to hear that TEI is a standard that is not implemented in any standard way. The SIG maintains a Wiki page that has a section on recommended practices. This document is still in its inception, but the purpose will be to create, through a collaborative process, a set of encoding guidelines that presses can use, either in XML-first or XML-last workflows. These guidelines could be used for in-house composition, or they could be supplied to encoding vendors for conversion after print publication. If enough presses adopt these guidelines, they could be used to set up common encoding practices and offer advantages when approaching vendors for XML encoding work, in much the same way that TEI Tite is being developed. These guidelines may lead to a specific customization of TEI for publishing, across books and journals.
The SIG will also focus on the XML workflow itself, and the tools required for such a workflow. There exists already a roundtrip transformation from Microsoft Word to TEI that could be improved upon through real-world use cases. Similarly, there are transformations for TEI to HTML and to EPUB. These need to be investigated and refined as well.
Another benefit that could be derived from a collaborative effort among university presses is the creation of a set of quality control rules using the rule-based validation language Schematron. Having well-formed and valid XML is only the first step—the XML needs to be checked with the same care and attention given to the print version. Having high-quality XML for use as the archival format for our content is vital. Presses need to be assured of this quality when they use the XML version to generate other formats, such as HTML or EPUB—or even for later editions in print. Creating a set of rules that every press can use to test their content would greatly aid in this effort.
A symposium was held at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin on 28 April 2010 (see http://dho.ie/node/673) in order to discuss the growing interest in the use of TEI in scholarly publishing. The TEI community discussed their possible emerging role in scholarly communication and publishing. While the symposium ended with the question very much open, it was clear that coordination of work through the SIG was required. The TEI community has yet to decide whether they should focus their energies on tool development in this area, or on a specific customization of TEI for publishing, or even if they should engage in the publishing process directly. The university press community should take this moment to work together with the TEI community in order to make the transition to digital publishing.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) began in 2007 when digital writing scholars Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe saw shrinking opportunities for scholars in the field to publish their work, and limitations that were becoming an increasing hindrance to the scholarship that was published. What was needed was a press that would publish “pieces that couldn’t be represented in the two-dimensional spaces of print,” said Selfe, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Importantly however, these publications would also need the intellectual authority that came from peer review in order to hold value in the academic world. These frustrations sparked the idea for CCDP, and Hawisher and Selfe soon recruited other scholars in the field to help get the project off the ground. Selfe described the initial questions they had to address as the project began to take shape: “what kind of a press would publish these digital projects” and “what it meant [for the projects] to have the same specific gravity as a book.”
Finding a publishing partner that exemplified “the same values as tenure and promotion committees,” would be crucial – there would be no incentive for scholars to take advantage of new technologies to publish avant-garde texts if their work would not be accepted by the larger academic community. Coincidentally, Selfe’s home campus, Ohio State University, was in the process of revising its tenure and promotion guidelines, with one of the goals being “to strip out print biases.” Going through this process at her own institution, Selfe was able to outline the key criteria that would be necessary to make CCDP projects viable and competitive: peer review, university presses as preferential publishers, and a continuing value placed on intellectual reach, scope, and excellence. This is where Utah State University Press came in. Having published with Michael Spooner at USU Press and elsewhere beforehand, and familiar with the strong reputation of the press’s existing composition and rhetoric list, the editors felt that the press would be the perfect publishing partner. Spooner’s previous work, and the stature of Utah State University Press ensured them that this imprimatur would provide the project the “academic legitimacy” they were seeking for CCDP. Hawisher, Professor of English and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, described the confidence they had that USU Press would give young scholars, whose work she feels is not always recognized by traditional outlets, the attention they deserved.
Spooner explained that the press decided to present CCDP as an imprint because “the idea of CCDP was created with an identity separate from USU.” Despite its all-digital output, “editorially, the project operates very much like a standard university press series.” Selfe and Hawisher handle the acquisitions and peer review process. Completed manuscripts are then sent to USU Press’s editorial board for a final vetting.
Generally, the imprint relies on its authors’ own technical expertise for the production aspects of these digital works. The press negotiates specifications for handling layout with the authors and editors. The ability of the imprint’s authors to provide projects ready for online publication is related to the demands of the field: “this isn’t a process that I’d attempt with just any series or imprint,” said Spooner, “It happens that scholars in this field have a higher than average expertise with document design, web design, programming, etc., and because of their academic appointments, some have regular access to new publishing and design software.”
Marketing efforts for the imprint have come from both the press and the editors. USU Press provides visibility on its web site, Facebook page, e-catalog, and email blasts, as well as a presence on exhibit tables and in occasional space ads. The editors and their colleagues do a great deal of old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, promoting the imprint at conferences, on email lists, and through other venues of scholarly exchange. In keeping with their born-digital roots, reviews by bloggers are featured in sidebars on the book web pages. Spooner added that the value of having such well-regarded editors cannot be underestimated: “the informal buzz created by the editors, their students, and colleagues is the most effective marketing presence.”
The editors were also pleased to find that Spooner and USU Press were amenable to their commitment to open access for the imprint. A commitment to open access is something that many presses and institutions feel is valuable, but financial pressures often make it difficult to implement in reality. CCDP has been able to maintain their policy of accessibility through the support of USU Press, USU Libraries, partner institutions, and the scholars who assist the imprint in various capacities. The editors, their colleagues, graduate students, and the imprint’s authors (as described above) all contribute their time and skills. For a digital imprint, technological resources have been essential; Selfe describes CCDP as “building on the technological infrastructure and margins of universities.” The site was originally hosted by Miami University of Ohio, then moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology, and will now be moving to Utah State.
The publication of a report from an MLA Task Force, as well as more recent letters from current MLA president Sidonie Smith, are factors the editors see giving the profession a push to move towards acknowledging this sort of work. Of course, the “availability of different kinds of technology” is another impetus, as the possibilities for digital work continue to expand. Said Hawisher: “When we had the support of a university press, we believed that we could publish these books and that colleagues could use these books in their tenure portfolio.” She sees the increasing move to e-publication as inevitable (and beneficial for the field), and believes that this project is one facet of learning how to “make this [shift to e-publishing] work for all of us.” The editors face the challenge of acquiring work that is, as Selfe described it, “conventional enough to be recognized as scholarly projects in terms of historical and genre expectations, and yet interesting enough to push those boundaries that require digital environments to be understood.” The real test comes in putting these ideals into practice: an upcoming CCDP project will be , Selfe believes, “the first native digital text for tenure at a Big Ten institution.”
In addition to the Press and its university partners, CCDP also has an association with the Institute of the Future of the Book (if:book), which Selfe described as providing a “philosophical template,” as well as some of the necessary software infrastructure. Having worked with members of the staff previously, the editors felt the partnership would also encourage authors to produce books in different environments, like Sophie, an if:book-developed platform they hope to utilize in future projects.
As for the future of the imprint, both editors envision projects including an increasing variety of media, as they truly become something that can be published only in an online venue, and “push the envelope for what is [considered] a book.” Just in the two books published so far, and two forthcoming projects, they have seen an increase in the amount and variety of digital media that has been incorporated – a trend they expect to continue as technological advances widen the realm of possibility. They had originally anticipated that it would take five years before producing works that were challenging boundaries, but feel that their second book, Generaciones’ Narratives, has already moved in that direction, with its inclusion of video interviews. An increasing variety of digital components is particularly important Spooner explained, “because this is the very stuff that needs to be legitimated before the [promotion and tenure] process.” There has been discussion of adding a print-on-demand component to the imprint. Such an idea remains theoretical at this point however, due to the obvious challenges of transposing the digital aspects of the projects. Another trend the editors see increasing with the proliferation of born-digital work is that of collaborative authorship, to an extent that can be rare in the humanities. The evolving demands of these projects necessitate drawing on the resources of multiple scholars: “authorship often has to happen in teams,” said Selfe, “different people contribute different skills.”
Spooner emphasized the importance of CCDP’s evolving online presence as they learn about the best ways to build their publications: “it’s important to us and to the scholars/authors/readers in this part of the field to have things accessible now, even knowing that formats will evolve in future.” The partners are continuing in this collaborative and innovative spirit as they work towards the mission encapsulated in CCDP’s tagline: “Open access. Peer-reviewed. Online.”
Penelope Kaiserlian
Director, University of Virginia Press
In March 2010 a distinguished group of people involved in digital humanities gathered in Charlottesville to review the state of the field and to look ahead to future prospects. The conference, entitled “Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come,” was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has given generous support to many of the major online humanities projects of the last two decades. It was organized by Professor Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and creator of the Rossetti Archive, one of the earliest projects to show the promise of online humanities scholarship. Jennifer Howard reported on the conference in the April 4, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “New Forms of Scholarship in a Digital World Challenge the Humanities.”
For those interested in the full proceedings, Rice University Press has published the conference papers and formal responses via online open access and print on demand (http://rup.rice.edu/shapeofthings). A court reporter was present to take down the discussion, and these informal remarks will be included later in the free online version of the publication. A sign of the times, several people in the audience were tweeting about the papers as they were being given, inviting comments from interested observers. These tweets may also be included in the online version.
Nine people were invited to give presentations on their Mellon-funded digital projects to a group that included senior Mellon Foundation officers, representatives of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, scholars from humanities disciplines, information technology experts, librarians, and publishers. I was asked to speak about Virginia’s experience with establishing our digital imprint, Rotunda, which publishes original digital projects and develops digital versions of some of the great documentary editions published by university presses. A few others from AAUP member presses were in attendance (Frank Smith, Cambridge; Fred Moody, Rice; David Nicholls, Modern Language Association; and Wendy Queen, Johns Hopkins). Paul Courant of the University of Michigan and Mike Keller of Stanford, who both have dual responsibilities as University Librarian and Publisher of their university presses, responded to my paper and reflected on the issue of perpetual stewardship and who should have responsibility for the preservation of digital projects. Of all the papers at the conference, I expect the presentations of most interest to AAUP members will be those by Robert Darnton, Paul Courant, and Mike Keller, as well as Chuck Henry’s reflections on what would be needed for university presses to work together to adopt a common digital platform for scholarly publications.
Most of the major digital humanities projects of the last two decades have been developed without participation by traditional scholarly publishers and have been supported by grant funding, university digital humanities centers, and a great deal of effort on the part of faculty and students. Various ways to sustain digital projects have been carefully examined in a November 2009 Ithaka report, “Sustaining Digital Resources,” but the issue of sustainability inevitably recurred here. McGann titled his introduction, “Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room.” (“Love will find a way,” as one of the participants said). Many of the projects presented have become crucial tools for their disciplines, such as Greg Nagy’s Homer Multi-Text Project, Roger Bagnall’s Integrating Digital Papyrology, and Kenneth Price’s The Walt Whitman Archive. Other more recent projects use digital tools for a fresh look at familiar materials, such as Alison Muri’s The Grub Street Project. Alan Burdette’s EVIA Digital Archive Project sets out to annotate ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research, using contemporary tools to address the problem of organizing and preserving several decades of audiovisual documentation that is “now in danger of being lost forever.”
Kenneth Price, current president of the Association for Documentary Editing, discussed an idea for a Civil War Washington project that had grown out of his team’s work on the Whitman Archive. He writes, “More than most types of humanistic scholarship, editing has been significantly altered by the digital turn, though perhaps even editing has not been sufficiently altered. The monumental scholarly edition, our marvelous inheritance from print culture, still tends to focus on individual figures.” He advocates “topic-based approaches that employ a tightly integrated combination of editing, collecting, interpreting, and tool building. We might even end up producing scholarship that could restore the standing of editing in English and History departments, whose faculty, paradoxically, often use and admire scholarly editions even while they are unwilling to hire, tenure, or promote a scholar who produces that work.”
The published report will give links to the nine featured projects as well as some that were developed by respondents. Most of these projects could not have been published in print, and some take advantage of tools that were not available even six years ago. My vote for the coolest project is Todd Presner’s Hyper Cities Project: Berlin and Los Angeles, developed at UCLA in collaboration with USC. Some time ago the University of Chicago Press took a look at the possibility of publishing a historical atlas of Chicago showing the various townships with developments over time—could we do overlays, or would the atlas need to have dozens of repetitive spreads that a reader would flip through, looking for points of change? We abandoned the idea as impossibly costly. Now the problem is imaginatively solved by the use of Google Maps and Google Earth. The Hyper Cities Project uses these tools to provide historical layers of city spaces. UCLA has prepared a narration through time and place for Berlin and Los Angeles. Other developers have been able to adapt the tools to add to the Hyper Cities collection. Presner said that more than 90% of the material in the project is on external servers and was not originated by UCLA.
While much of the conference dealt with matters that are not on the current agenda of university presses, there was also much useful discussion that will give us some insight into the “shape of things to come.”
For more on digital humanities and scholarly publishing, check out plenary session “Digital Humanities is not an Oxymoron” at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City (Saturday, June 19, 1:45-3:00).
In April 2010, AAUP hosted its first Web seminar, “XML Workflow Case Study: The University of Michigan Press.” The seminar was organized by members of the AAUP Professional Development Committee and moderated by Kristin Harpster Lawrence (Wayne State). Presenter Karen Hill took attendees through Michigan’s implementation of an XML workflow, from the decision to undertake the shift to its effect on different press departments. There were approximately 70 registered seats for the workshop, with many registrations including groups of participants.
View the presentation slides here: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/seminars/xml2010.html
Cornell University Press, partnering with Cornell University Library and Cornell faculty in the departments of German Studies, Comparative Literature, History, Music, and Philosophy, have been awarded a new grant from the Mellon Foundation to support Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. The new English-language book series will cover the literature, culture, criticism, and intellectual history of the German-speaking world. Works in the series will be published in electronic format and in short print runs backed up by trade-quality bound books produced on a print-on-demand basis.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
University press marketing and advertising staff are expanding their ventures into the realm of online advertising. With an ever-expanding variety of options, from Facebook ads for dollars a day to leaderboards on the websites of renowned print publications, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. AAUP spoke with staff at three member presses to get an idea of how member presses of various sizes are evaluating and investing in these new opportunities.
While presses are experimenting with different approaches, one common theme was their initial reason for moving into online advertising: following their customers. Dafina Blacksher Diabate, Advertising Manager at Duke University Press, described Duke’s use of online advertising as “a matter of meeting the readers where they are.” Figuring out exactly where those readers are online, however, is a less obvious matter. One of the biggest challenges for presses just entering the online realm is the seemingly infinite venues well beyond online versions of the print publications they have traditionally advertised in.
Particularly when advertising scholarly titles, Diabate has found that a good amount of research time is required to evaluate the various options, although she has found it worth it in the end. Duke has advertised in a variety of online formats, but one that Diabate feels is particularly effective is the e-newsletter. As such newsletters are opt-in forms of communication, readers have chosen to receive it and have a confirmed interest in whatever the targeted subject matter might be. She especially prefers ad placement at the top of these newsletters, which ensures that the ad is seen even by those who do not scroll down to read the whole message.
Baylor University Press, which Associate Director and Product and Sales Manager Nicole Smith Murphy says began to think more strategically about online advertising in the summer of 2009, has found success with small, targeted campaigns. Baylor focuses particularly on “pay-per-click ads within Facebook, Google AdWords, Twitter promotions and announcements, and blocks of advertising within [their] own e-newsletters.”
Murphy described a shift away from their original tendency to view books with wider general reader appeal as the best candidates for online advertising. She has found that as scholarly societies, institutions, and publications have become more web savvy, targeting specific groups has become more feasible and beneficial. The press recently ran a Facebook ad for Liberalism without Illusions: Renewing an American Christian Tradition by Christopher Evans, targeting “users who identified a likeness for or an affiliation with several key liberal to progressive divinity schools and seminaries.” Spending under $400, the press has received 742,986 impressions of the book’s cover with brief copy and received 865 click-throughs – results Murphy classifies as “hard to match in print publications.”
Florida has pursued online advertising since 2006, and has used a variety of formats including web sites, newsletters, Facebook ads, and Google AdWords (which they found to not be adequately targeted for their purposes). This year, they will also be trying a regional take on web advertising, participating in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s “Circle of Sites” promotion, which will place their ad on the sites of “approximately 45 independent bookstores for a week.”
The possibility of targeting advertising to ever more granular groups of readers is an aspect of online advertising where presses have taken different approaches. Florida “consistently seek[s] the most targeted media and placement for our advertising,” only opting for generalized placement when dictated “by the media itself.” Diabate however, is sometimes wary of targeting that can be too narrow, in the cases of niche sites, which might have fewer general visitors.
On the design side, production of online ads brings its own challenges, particularly when ad design is done, or brought, in-house. Amy Harris, Advertising and Direct Mail Manager at the University Press of Florida, explained that when the press moved to designing web ads in-house last year, some challenges became evident, as “most of the process—from image management to layout to proof—is slightly different from print design and may require knowledge of a separate suite of design programs.” When Duke added an in-house ad designer, they made sure to include banner ad design as part of the hiring criteria.
The increased restrictions on design for the web in comparison to print are a concern that can add to the work of creating an online ad, as designers must use web-safe colors, fonts, and formats, and ensure that the ad will display correctly in an array of browsers. At Duke, size limits on some banner ads have caused the press to alter their approach.
Diabate noted that she found the shorter lifetime of online ads to be a drawback, in contrast to print ads, which she finds more “researchable,” as readers are able to refer back to a publication long after its initial release.
Among the presses interviewed, there seems to be a consensus that while online advertising is inevitably becoming a larger portion of the overall advertising budget, they do not see print advertising disappearing in the near future. At Florida, Harris has found that directly attributable sales were “roughly the same” for print and web ads when tracked through discount codes. The challenge at the moment, Duke’s Diabate says, is “finding a happy medium.” Harris explains that she sees “the butter being spread ever thinner on the bread…the truth is, we reach our customers through both formats. The key will be to judiciously choose our outlets.” This is, in a sense, a balancing act that advertising departments have been dealing with for years, but the pool of possible venues continues to grow.
While the data-gathering potential of online advertising, such as tracking views and click-throughs, has its appeal, presses say it is not generally a driving choice behind their advertising choices. Harris explained that the most important reason for moving to web ads is “following our customers,” but metrics like click-throughs do offer a “measure of the audience’s engagement with advertising, so they should be taken into account in any well-run promotion.”
Murphy believes that online advertising can work for even the smallest of presses, and advises those considering testing the waters to “just set aside a little money and start doing it.” The small scale of some options allows for close monitoring and tweaking when necessary – she found that two of the most important components were having a “good landing page” for links (your website or another retailer) and ensuring that those links are functional. Baylor typically “set[s] an initial limit of $20 per day” for their campaigns, and after a few days either refines the message or ups the per diem, a process that Murphy describes as “quite helpful on-the-job education.”
The field of online advertising is still very much in development, and for this reason Diabate sees an opportunity for publishers to play an important role in the way it develops. Saying, “we’re forging into uncharted territory,” she feels that marketing instincts still play an important role, and that for university presses, it is “worth being in on the conversation,” helping publications to understand where scholarly publishers are coming from.
Harris advises presses: “Don’t be (too) afraid. With careful planning, the right tools, and a little training you’ll find that online advertising is manageable and worthwhile.” As Murphy emphasized, “With online ads, your potential readers are only one click away from being able to make a purchase.”
A number of publications within the AAUP Cooperative Advertising Program have begun offering discounted rates on their online advertising rates to AAUP members. Learn more here: http://www.aaupnet.org/members/advertising/index.html
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
In recent years, the idea of e-catalogs has taken hold in the publishing industry. The reasons for this are many, and start from the observation that more book communications— involving buyers, readers, reviewers, authors—are in the digital space, and catalogs should be, too. Moreover, digital technology should be able to provide the most accurate and up-to-date sales metadata to all users. As marketing and sales managers face tightening budgets, cutting down on the expense and waste of printed and mailed seasonal catalogs is also a major goal.
But print catalogs are a universal ‘technology,’ and independent bookstores were particularly concerned that e-catalog formats and features would proliferate, spreading more confusion than convenience. Then Ann Arbor-based Above the Treeline launched Edelweiss, an open, multi-publisher standard e-catalog service, in May 2009, with the endorsement of the American Booksellers Association. Major trade publishers such as HarperCollins and Random House were quick to add their catalogs to the system. Several university presses, beginning with Cambridge and Columbia, and followed by NYU, Fordham, and Georgetown, also signed up.
In January 2010, AAUP was pleased to announce an agreement with Above the Treeline to offer the Edelweiss service to AAUP members at a significant discount. Along with a special first-year incentive to upload backlist titles for free, the new benefit program has already attracted more than 40 member publishers to Treeline-hosted web demonstrations of the Edelweiss service.
Many of the initial Edelweiss tools were designed with independent booksellers in mind. Bookstores who use Above the Treeline’s POS (point of sale) and inventory data streams can incorporate that information into the catalogs they view on Edelweiss, examining sales of comparable titles, and streamlining their ordering. Sales reps can mark-up publisher e-catalogs with notes for particular booksellers, and highlight specific titles and local connections.
As the service grows, Treeline is constantly developing new tools for other book industry communities. With the AAUP program attracting more scholarly publisher users, Treeline is looking to develop features specific to academic book marketing, particularly course adoption tools. The existing ability to create customized subject catalogs for particular contacts has great appeal for academic and regional publishers, and the possibility of handling exam-copy requests through the service was a matter for discussion at a September 2009 meeting between Treeline and AAUP members. To serve publicity needs, Edelweiss will launch a partnership with NetGalley in the spring. Being able to provide e-galleys for reviewers complements the existing “Buzz” feature, which tracks the appearance of book titles and authors’ names in blog and Twitter feeds.
Two AAUP members, Fordham University Press and Georgetown University Press, shared some of their early experience with using Edelweiss. While cutting the print catalog was a major goal for both presses, neither Georgetown Marketing & Sales Director Gina Lindquist or Fordham Director Fredric Nachbaur foresee a time when they will not also produce a print seasonal catalog. Nachbaur points out that the print catalog is used as more than simply a sales tool for a list of titles, but is also a key promotional piece for the press on campus and at academic meetings.
Fordham and Georgetown publish similarly sized lists, averaging approximately 20-30 titles per season. While larger colleagues such as Cambridge have been selective in loading titles with specific trade potential into Edelweiss and leaving out more specialized monographs, Fordham and Georgetown have both chosen to upload the entire catalog for the Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 seasons. Fordham is considering creating a regional catalog on the platform with both front and backlist titles.
A motivating factor for Fordham in using the service is that the press is part of the Columbia University Press Sales group, along with NYU Press. As Columbia was an Edelweiss early adopter, Fordham’s sales representatives were already in the field using the system. In contrast, Lindquist reports that Georgetown’s main goal right now is to convince the press’s regional commissioned sales reps of the value and capabilities of the e-catalogs.
She is pleased with the possibilities of the Edelweiss platform and the extra tools it offers reps, such as customizing catalogs for individual accounts. “You’re never selling the whole list” at an independent book store, Lindquist notes, so the “tailoring is really great.” She admires the support and training that Treeline offers reps and buyers getting used to the system, but believes that success will ultimately rely on the system reaching a critical mass of publishers, rep groups, and buyers using it. The new AAUP program gives her optimism that the moment of reaching that mass may be closer than ever.
Readers can check out all the catalogs on Edelweiss for free, registering here: http://edelweiss.abovethetreeline.com/
AAUP members can learn more about the discount benefit program here: http://aaupnet.org/programs/epub/edelweiss.html or contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org to inquire about future web demos.
Nearly 80% of AAUP members offer some form of free content on their web sites, and 35% offer full text of books. More than 90% work with the Google Books Partners program. Almost 44% are incorporating XML into some point of the production workflow. And approximately 83% of AAUP publishers find the lack of proven business models to be a serious concern in pursuing e-publishing, but 63% find the specter of online piracy to be at most a mild concern.
These are just a few items we learned from a survey of members in late 2009 on digital publishing. The survey had two goals: 1) to update and expand AAUP’s online directory of e-publishing projects; and 2) to gauge the extent to which various digital strategies are being adopted in members’ book publishing programs.
The report from the latter part of the survey has now been released and is available for download.
The parties to the Google Book suit submitted a revised version of the settlement to the court on November 13. After the submission of the amended settlement agreement, supplemental notice was issued, and an extended comment period was opened.
The Department of Justice filed its Statement of Interest regarding the Google Book Search Settlement on February 4. Among the concerns the statement details is that the federal court lacks the authority to approve the settlement, which should properly be a matter for Congress. A fairness hearing was held on February 18, during which Judge Chin heard from 26 speakers (21 against the settlement, 5 in favor). Most notably, the court heard from U.S. attorney William Cavanaugh, who argued that the class action vehicle was not appropriate for this matter and that the settlement went too far in modifying copyright, and Duralyn Durie (for Google), Michael Boni, and Bruce Keller (for the plaintiffs) who countered Cavanaugh’s claims and urged the court to approve the settlement.
View the statement of interest from the Department of Justice regarding the proposed amended settlement agreement: http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/usa.pdf
Interviewed by Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Early in 2009, Kate Wittenberg was appointed to the position of Project Director, Client and Partnership Development at Ithaka. A longtime member of the AAUP community, she had previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Columbia University Press, and went on to found and direct the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) at the university. As head of EPIC, Wittenberg oversaw pioneering projects in digital publishing, including CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online), and Gutenberg-E.
Wittenberg brings this history of innovation and experimentation to her new position at Ithaka, in which she focuses on consulting for research institutes, scholarly publishers, and libraries who are involved in the planning and sustaining of digital resources. Among the services she and her colleagues in Strategy, “help clients conceptualize and plan projects, develop business models, think about partnerships, and analyze infrastructure and staffing issues that need to be addressed in the digital environment.”
Responding to questions by email, Wittenberg offered her thoughts on press partnerships, digital scholarship and tenure, sustainability for scholarly publishing, and the thinking that is driving Ithaka’s newest projects. Says Wittenberg, “I believe we are in a period in which there are unprecedented changes taking place in digital research and scholarly communication, and I find it very exciting to be able to play a role in helping those involved in this important work.”
MB (AAUP): Gutenberg-e, which you worked on at Columbia, focused on the relationship between publishers and scholars and the challenges of prevailing tenure standards. Is Ithaka doing any work on these issues?
KW: The relationship between publishers and authors and the related issue of academic credentialing is at the heart of scholarly communication and university press publishing. The Gutenberg-e project suggested new ways of thinking about born-digital scholarship and demonstrated that both scholarly publishing and peer-review can make the transition to a digital environment. These issues are also central to Ithaka’s work, and a number of our projects here focus on these and related issues. In one of our current projects we are consulting with a research center that is developing an inter-connected set of digital initiatives that will introduce new models for publication of digital scholarship as well as the mechanisms for peer review and credentialing of that work.
MB: It seems that while publishers have been willing to try new digital models, junior scholars are reluctant to change, fearing that those making tenure and promotion decisions are not as open to these formats. Do you think presses can work more with scholars to change these perceptions or is this something that will have to happen within the community of scholars?
KW: This gets right to the heart of the problem. I honestly don’t know whether changes in the perception of digital scholarship can come from the outside through innovative work being done by presses, or whether it is something that must be generated by the scholarly community itself. I suppose I really believe that it will have to come from a number of places. That is, as presses provide an increasing number of viable options for publishing peer-reviewed digital scholarship, and as scholars themselves demand the platforms and tools that will allow them to present evidence and make arguments in new ways, the academy will have to create new mechanisms for credentialing and professional advancement that acknowledge the value and richness of
these new types of scholarly communication.
MB: What are the biggest obstacles to press partnerships with other institutions?
KW: Historically, presses have worked independently from other parts of the information industry. Until now they have not only controlled the development of content, but also its discovery and delivery, creating and managing their own systems for content development, production, and marketing. In a print-based world, it was possible to remain largely independent, and thus maintain one’s autonomy and “brand” in the publishing environment. I think that this tradition has made it difficult to create close partnerships with other organizations, partly because of a concern about losing one’s identity. But now, the old model of working in an industry that operates independently from other sectors of the community is no longer effective. The desire to remain apart from other players in the information industry has become a handicap for presses in an environment where collaboration and partnerships are necessary in order to succeed.
MB: Has the current economic climate made the need for new partnerships and initiatives more urgent for presses?
KW: Yes, the current climate has clearly increased the urgency for new partnerships, and although this need has been driven by a very difficult economic environment, I believe that in the long-term, this drive to collaborate and innovate is a good thing. Presses cannot deal with the dramatic challenges posed by the economy and advances in technology alone. While one natural reaction to these changes is to focus on trying to repair the traditional model of university press publishing, I think that all of us involved in this field are starting to see that partnerships, collaboration, and new models are where we need to focus our energy in order for presses to survive and thrive.
MB: Has the Case Studies in Sustainability project affected Ithaka’s thinking about future projects that it might undertake?
KW: Yes, this project has definitely affected our thinking about future projects. We have been thinking about how to maximize the impact of this project for the community, and we are considering a number of possible next steps. One possibility is to develop tools for project leaders that will help them plan and implement sustainability strategies from the early stages of their work. Another idea is to develop a curriculum or institute for project leaders that would enable discussions and interaction among leaders who are facing similar challenges and need some guidance in thinking about their business and organizational planning. We are interested in knowing from the scholarly publishing community what would be helpful next steps in this project in terms of the challenges they are facing.
MB: What sorts of new initiatives or experiments do you see as most promising for making scholarly publishing more sustainable?
KW: Scholarly publishers face real challenges, but also significant opportunities in the current environment. Academic presses have played an enormously important role in advancing the scholarly communications process, and the value and skills that they bring to the table can remain important going forward. Presses must be seen as central to the university’s mission, as well as important players in the scholarly communications process. I believe that the most promising activities for presses will involve the following: thoughtful but bold experimentation with partnerships that complement their skills and reduce their costs; a clear focus on the next generation of readers/users and their changing expectations and needs for scholarly content; and a willingness to embrace change by re-envisioning their role, and thus making themselves essential partners in the academic process.
For example, presses might begin to see themselves more as research centers that play a significant part in leading innovation in a scholarly discipline, rather than as production-and-dissemination organizations. Or they might consider partnerships with technology organizations that can support the new ways in which scholars and students conduct research, teach, and learn. A number of presses are already moving in these directions, and this is a very positive and exciting development. It will be important for the scholarly publishing community as a whole to do this on a larger scale as our environment continues to present both new challenges and opportunities.
The parties to the Google Book settlement submitted a revised version of the settlement to the court late on November 13. Revisions include a reduced scope of coverage (limited to works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada), the establishment of a fiduciary working out of the Book Rights Registry to look out for the interests of orphan works rightsholders, an increase in the possible number of library access terminals, and the ability for rightsholders to make their books available for free or under licenses such as those from Creative Commons. The “most favored nation” clause that was a cause of concern for many has been eliminated, allowing the Books Rights Registry to “license to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.” Publishers from the U.K., Australia, and Canada have been added as plaintiffs, and will have representation on the Books Rights Registry.
Under the revised settlement, the deadline to claim books has been extended to March 31, 2011.
In a court order filed on November 19, Judge Chin gave preliminary approval to the revised settlement. In his preliminary approval, he set important dates for moving forward: supplemental notices will be sent beginning December 14, objections to the amended portions of the settlement must be filed by January 28, and a final fairness hearing has been scheduled for February 18.
In a memorandum filed the day following the court order, November 20, Amazon requested that judge to reconsider the preliminary approval he had granted to the settlement, citing that the decision was made without the benefit of opposing viewpoints from members of the class.
View the amended settlement agreement and the supplemental notice (a shorter document which details the changes to the settlement) here: http://www.googlebooksettlement.com
View a redlined version of the settlement: http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/amended_settlement_redline.pdf
Colleen Lanick
Publicity Manager, MIT Press
We live in a time where we ask a new acquaintance to “friend” us rather than exchanging phone numbers. National news programs routinely receive tweets containing questions from viewers during news segments and baseball mascots hold up signs that say “Follow me” and list a Twitter handle. Social networking sites have become a powerful source for virtually all of our news and entertainment needs. Recently, I noticed a tweet from a colleague that simply said, “Princeton University Press is now on Facebook. Twitter, Facebook—next the world! muahahaah.” Amusing and perhaps a little diabolical, but it is evidence that the university presses, from Cambridge to British Columbia, have embraced and started to harness the power of social media.
A quick and unscientific survey of several university presses confirmed that most are using some form of social networking, and that the majority are using Facebook and Twitter. A few have pages on MySpace, Good Reads, and other smaller sites, although presses are not generally as active on these sites. Social networking pages are easy to set up, but once the account has been registered and images uploaded, the challenge becomes how to use these incredibly popular and influential sites in a way that fits into current publicity and promotion for specific titles and the press as a whole.
When we first launched Facebook and Twitter pages at MIT Press, we were very aware that we were The MIT Press, not an individual, and had to be careful about how we presented ourselves. The goal is to become part of the community, not alienate it with hard sales or elaborate marketing pitches. Our pages started as an experiment to try to connect with readers who might be using social media, but we never expected them to be as successful as they are—we currently have about 5,000 fans on Facebook and over 2,600 followers on Twitter.
Our primary goal is to put a face on the press and allow our personality to shine through. We try to respond to all comments and questions and encourage interaction with our readers. For a special Facebook feature, we interviewed our acquisitions editors about how they got started in publishing and what kind of books they were interested in. Recently, we asked our fans on Facebook to comment on their memories of the Atari video game. We had a new book on the topic and offered free copies to the first five people to wax nostalgic in our comments section. More than a dozen comments were posted in just a matter of hours. We have a handful of fans and followers who consistently comment on a particular subject area. Of MIT’s list, technology, environment, and art titles generally see the most activity.
The University of Arizona Press, like many presses, joined Facebook first, and opened a Twitter account more recently. Kathryn Conrad, Arizona’s Interim Director, says they use Facebook, where they have around 170 fans, for spreading news about press events (including photos) and about media coverage for their titles. They use Twitter very differently. Their thousand-strong Twitter community “does not like marketing or self-promotion,” she says. “So, what we are doing here is trying to actively engage in the communities that are relevant to us.” They use Twitter to “engage not only in talk about books and publishing but about our state and local community, environmental concerns, indigenous rights issues—anything that relates to what we publish.”
Brian Bowen, Publishing and Marketing Coordinator at Yale University Press, views their Twitter following, currently at 3,500 and growing steadily, as a vital part of their promotion. He has been able to track which posts attract the most clicks, and has found that “the 140-character format allows would-be book buyers to stumble upon our content in the process of their normal web browsing.”
Most staff at member presses believe social networking sites should primarily be used to communicate with media and consumers, and not for direct sales, though I was pleased when on a recent post linking to a Q&A with the author of a recent book, one of our fans commented: “ I have been seduced by social marketing and have ordered the book.”
Rebecca Ford, blog editor and voice of Oxford University Press tweets, uses Twitter to build relationships and communicate with journalists about Oxford titles. They currently have around 1,300 followers. “It’s important to be accepted by the community,” she said. “You have to participate in the community, not just provide information. It is worth it if you want to invest the time to get into the community.” She has experimented with give-aways, promoting the original content on their incredibly successful blog, and linking to openly available content from Twitter. She also promotes author participation on Twitter, encouraging authors to talk with each other and collaborate.
The key to keeping people interested in your content is involving them in the discussion and paying attention to their issues and concerns. “Twitter allows us to communicate both directly and indirectly with readers and tweeters who do or might enjoy Yale books,” says Bowen. “I’ve used the @reply feature to respond to readers’ questions related to our books. Both help to expand our readership and create an online personality for the press.”
While they routinely receive comments on their posts such as “great article,” and “I really want to buy that book,” the most gratifying response Arizona received on their Facebook page centered on a post they did about the press celebrating its 50th anniversary. A local journalist saw the post and emailed Conrad saying she would like to do a story for a local weekly. “It turned into a cover story including interviews with multiple staffers and authors,” Conrad said. “We got great coverage without ever making the pitch.”
Arizona has had many fruitful interactions on Twitter as well. “We discovered a local blog that then publicized a promotion we had going on. I helped a customer find one of our books she thought was out of print. We discovered a specialty account we’d never heard of and donated some hurt books for a fundraising effort they had going on. In general, I would say it’s a lot like being at BEA or a book festival: you never know what good thing will come of it.” Conrad added that they have, “been exposed to more publishing news than you could ever find in the mainstream media.”
It is doubtful that social media will replace traditional publicity and marketing efforts. Rather, they enhance what we are already doing and afford us more direct communication with our audience, a crucial aspect that is occasionally lacking in more traditional efforts. So many of us get our news via social media that it is only logical that university presses want to participate in this rapidly growing phenomenon.
Most university presses use social media to discuss what is happening in their community and the publishing world as well as what is going on with particular books and authors. At MIT, we have found it very useful to follow others, including colleagues at peer presses and trade houses, journalists, authors, and other organizations and individuals that are relevant to our list. Editors are using social networking to attract authors. Publicists can quickly scan Twitter for alerts when book review editors resign or contribute to the buzz about a particular topic or title, and authors can keep the press and their followers interested in what they are doing to promote their new book. The possibilities are endless.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Half a million. That is the number of additional records per year major book wholesalers Baker & Taylor and Ingram estimate they are processing in these days of digitization format proliferation: half a million records on top of the approximately 200,000 new books each year1. That is a lot of metadata, and it is more important than ever at every step of the book supply chain. Book metadata often needs to contain much more than title, author, ISBN, and price to make the leap from warehouse to reader—or database to device. Tables of contents, cover images, detailed subject headings, reading level, available formats, and reviews: all help consumers, retailers, and librarians discover and procure new (and old but relevant) books. The trick, for everyone in the book world, is creating and sharing accurate metadata for all of those millions of records.
The burgeoning challenge of book metadata was the subject of a recent symposium and white paper sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center. In March 2009, they gathered experts and interested parties from the publishing, library, and standards worlds in Dublin, OH, to discuss common problems and potential solutions. Judy Luther was at that time completing research for the paper “Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow,” commissioned by OCLC and the National information Standards Organization (NISO).
While clearly an “interested party” rather than an expert, I was invited to speak to the group about the general experience of university presses dealing with metadata. Of course, in a community that ranges from presses publishing less than 20 to more than 2000 titles per year, and where the term “metadata” has not yet been fully adopted to describe bibliographic and marketing information, a general picture is not so easily taken. Before trotting off to Dublin, I spoke with several members, including Johns Hopkins University Press, a member with large book and journal publishing programs, and two presses who fall near the AAUP average: Cornell University Press, producing up to 140 new titles per year, and the University of Georgia Press, publisher of about 80 new titles per year. Not unexpectedly, the processes of metadata creation and management differed considerably. Johns Hopkins’ in-house database has an ONIX component and pushes data to both the press web site and trading partners (via either ONIX or spreadsheet). Both Cornell and Georgia were at the time researching ONIX solutions, including off-the-shelf software and service providers such as NetRead or Firebrand, and were providing data via spreadsheets or online interfaces to key sales channels.
Despite their differences, all three presses mentioned the same difficulty with providing ONIX. “The standard just isn’t standard enough,” I said to the OCLC audience. That choice of phrasing raised some eyebrows (and maybe a few hackles), but we cleared up the vocabulary. There are so many flavors of ONIX being requested from publishers—almost every channel has its own requirements as to which ONIX elements and tag variations are preferred (if they even accept ONIX). For example, while the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recommends best practices, and will certify the quality of publishers’ ONIX feeds on 30 core elements, Barnes & Noble requires tailored compliance on half-again as many data elements to be classified as a top-grade ONIX supplier2.
But these retail-chain ONIX issues were only one small part of what was discussed in Dublin. The real crux of the symposium was the misalignment between the standards that have grown up separately in the library and publishing communities. MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging) serve libraries’ needs from ordering to online catalogs. In many cases, librarians require at least basic MARC records in advance of purchase, and more and more expect MARC records to be provided with purchased titles (particularly with e-book collections). Even subject classification schemes differ between these two sides of our community. From the publishers’ end, BISAC codes are heavily weighted to trade books and were designed to help with store placement rather than broad consumer discoverability. Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are highly detailed, but provide much greater authority control.
Though these classifications and standards were designed to serve different needs, each side of the market has an even greater need for the metadata created on the other. The authority-controlled subject and author data from LC and MARC records can only help digital discovery and sales of publishers’ works. The book marketing information provided through ONIX to the retail supply chain is now just as important for library patrons, and in the growing adoption of purchase-on-request policies, library collections specialists. Crosswalks between MARC and ONIX for Books will be needed to combine this data into effective and sharable information flows. OCLC is particularly interested in that concept, and recently undertook a pilot project to experiment with ingesting publishers’ ONIX records, matching and enhancing the data with existing WorldCat records, and feeding back optimized metadata. That project has led to a new suite of metadata services for publishers. A second symposium, to move not just the conversation, but also the possible, forward, is planned for next year. Broadening representation, and easing metadata reuse and collaboration will be goals for the next meeting.
In the meantime, standards continue to change and evolve to serve the book communities’ needs. In April of 2009, ONIX for Books 3.0 was released, and is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The ISTC or International Standard Text Code, is being promulgated as “a global identification system for textual works”—that is, to identify a text rather than a product or format, as the ISBN is used. Progress is being made on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) to help in the correct identification of authors, a task that is required not just for better discovery but also in royalties and rights systems (such as the proposed Book Rights Registry from the Google settlement). In July 2009, CrossRef announced it had registered 1.7 million DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for book chapters and references. While the complexity of metadata standards is growing, so too are the support systems for producing and sharing accurate metadata. In the coming months, AAUP is planning to survey its membership about shared problems and needs in this area.
Resources:
OCLC Publisher and Librarian Symposium Reports
Metadata White Paper: Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
BISG Product Metadata Information and Best Practices
ONIX
Earlier this summer, AAUP was very pleased to announce a new membership benefit under an agreement with iPublishCentral, a self-service e-content platform from Impelsys. Member presses have a long commitment to serving the needs of scholars across every field of study. As scholars move to online practices as heterogeneous as their disciplines, AAUP is pursuing new benefit programs that will ease the process of experimenting with and adopting the right e-publishing solutions for scholarly presses.
The iPublishCentral services range from book-marketing widgets to direct e-book sales to consumers. These flexible service menus offer a broad range of ways for content to be discovered by and delivered to readers. The new AAUP-Impelsys program provides discounted monthly iPublishCentral fees to our members. In addition to the negotiated discount scale, Impelsys is offering AAUP members a special inaugural deal: waived fees for the first 12 months of contracts signed by June 2010.
The MIT Press, a cutting-edge adopter of several electronic publishing solutions, chose iPublishCentral to power their direct-to-consumer e-books store. E-books at the MIT Press currently offers approximately 450 titles from all of the Press’s publication fields and categories (trade, monographs, illustrated, and text.) Gita Manaktala, MIT’s Editorial Director, reports that they have seen a broad range of interest across all of these fields and categories.
MIT uses iPublishPortal to sell both perpetual access and time-limited e-books—a “rental” model the Press has just recently rolled out. MIT launched the e-books store in March 2009 with an intended audience of individual consumers. The biggest surprise, Manaktala says, has been the interest from libraries in purchasing single-title e-books through the site. Increasing reliance on patron requests to drive e-book acquisitions could be a factor in this library market, where turning to the press directly may be faster and easier than sourcing the title through aggregators.
MIT Press continues to work on the site’s features, layouts, and e-book offerings, and has yet to undertake a major marketing push for their e-book store. Throughout the process of building and tinkering with the new site, Manaktala says Impelsys has been “really responsive and good to work with. Their team is sophisticated and helpful, and interested in making this a success.”
In July and August, Impelsys hosted four webinars to introduce their services and the new AAUP benefit program to member publishers. More than 20 AAUP members attended these online sessions and have been favorably impressed with what they have seen. The iPublishWidget capability allows for branded, dynamic marketing across web sites, social networks, and blogs. iPublishView-Inside, with fully-searchable text and publisher controls on browsing, is an additional tool for providing what numerous e-publishing experiments have shown in recent years: online content that breeds both interest and sales. Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys. believes that this is a particularly important tool for scholarly publishers to reach readers across the globe: “Increasingly discriminating readers will access sample pages and make quick, convenient purchases from anywhere in the world, further strengthening the financial position of university presses.”
Web demos can be arranged for any AAUP member that is curious about these services. Impelsys will also be attending the Frankfurt Book fair, where interested presses can arrange a direct meeting. Use the online registration form or contact Ray Alba to set up a Frankfurt meeting or with other questions about Impelsys services. AAUP members can learn more about the AAUP-Impelsys program and pricing scale through the members web site [password required]. Impelsys also offers an online “Learning Center” for press staff to delve deeper into the functionality available.
To talk about AAUP’s current e-publishing programs with Impelsys and Tizra, or suggest new program ideas, members are invited to contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org.
Released in July, the latest report from Ithaka is entitled “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today.” The report came out of the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, which explores the “strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term.”