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.
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.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
2010 has been a banner year for poetry published by university presses. Rae Armantrout’s Versed, published by Wesleyan University Press, was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Published by the University of California Press, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry, for which Armantrout’s book and Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Pittsburgh University Press) were also nominated, making university press poetry three-fifths of the field. These are just a few of the most recent honors, continuing a long tradition of poetic excellence and innovation fostered at university presses.
What is it about university presses that have made them such a good home for so many talented poets? AAUP spoke with university press editors, one of the award-winning poets, and a poetry reviewer to get their takes on the subject.
Having previously worked with small independent presses, Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout has found that Wesleyan has been better able to manage publicity, including reviews and award submissions (which have certainly paid off!). She has developed a sense of trust in the Wesleyan staff, and is confident in their reliability: “If Suzanna [Tamminen, director and editor-in-chief of Wesleyan University Press] says a book will be out in June, it will.” Describing her “amazing and almost unbelievable” experience of going “from being a relatively obscure poet to getting this kind of recognition,” Armantrout asserted that the Wesleyan staff “deserve considerable credit.” The respect is mutual and the staff’s pride in Armantrout’s work is evident; Tamminen said of the poet: “[we] think very highly of her, it’s just great that the world is catching on to how great she is and how important her work is”
The factor that came up again and again in discussing why university presses can be an ideal home for poetry is the fact that they are mission-driven. Rachel Berchten, poetry and poetics editor at the University of California press, said, “UC Press’s mission statement—that we enrich ‘lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities’—is fulfilled by our publishing a range of poets and poetry.” Tamminen put it simply: “good poetry exhibits good thinking.” Poetry is “a different kind of thinking and expression” that is an essential component of the scholarly enterprise. This focus on the production of scholarship and new knowledge that drives university presses also contributes to what Tamminen describes as a “somewhat edgier feel,” and a sense that new work and creativity will be both welcomed and fostered.
Although university presses must maintain their financial viability, there is general agreement that they tend to be less guided by commercial considerations than their trade counterparts, who tend to publish poetry only by well-known authors. Craig Teicher, Poetry Reviews Editor for Publishers Weekly and Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, would answer that the suitability of university presses for the enterprise, in part, boils down to economics: “poetry doesn’t make money.” Smaller houses like university presses, he noted, are more accustomed to smaller print runs, and finding and marketing to niche markets, which allows them to commit to publishing authors. University presses are also willing to take risks, for the sake of their scholarly mission, publishing “innovative or emerging poets or translations,” said Berchten. University presses also have a good reputation for keeping books in print, which is important to poets. This commitment, in addition to a tendency to develop long-term publishing relationships with authors, allows editors to “nurture someone’s voice or career,” noted Tamminen.
Practically, both California and Wesleyan have found that publishing poetry is very much like any other scholarly area. As in any other field, a primary motivator in acquisitions is how it fits in with the foundation and desired direction of the list. As poetry falls into trade rather than scholarly lists, Tamminen considers factors similar to those for regional books, such as “whether the author is going to be a good promoter of his or her work,” in terms of whether books will succeed. “Poetry is always changing and growing,” said Teicher, and for this reason publishers must make sure to keep up with the important networks and venues, to ensure they can “keep their lists current—with new poets whose work represents current stylistic trends—while also finding spots for all their older poets to whom they have a commitment.”
A strong poetry list can be a serious boon to a press as a whole. Tamminen explained that having such a high profile poetry program has definitely helped the press’s relationship to the university, as “the books go out into the world and carry the university’s name as home for great writing.” At California, Berchten has found that poetry “expands our presence in the trade media and trade market, as well as lending its lustre to UC Press as a whole.”
Going forward, Teicher said he believes that “university presses are only going to become more important.” He attributes this to what he sees as the increasing specificity of readers’ tastes as more and more work becomes available and easy to search and find. He said, “there will be more books, but fewer readers for each of them,” a circumstance he thinks trade publishers may shy away from and will lead to an increase in “literary books—not just poetry—being published, and published significantly…by independent, nonprofit, or university presses.”
Any discussion of the future of publishing necessarily touches on the issue of e-publication, and poetry is no different. California is currently publishing all of its new poetry books in e-book as well as print format, in what Berchten sees as “an expansion of our poetry program that will make these important works of literature available to an even larger audience.” Wesleyan is still in the process of converting all of its titles to e-books—they have found some formats work very well for the genre, while others, including EPUB, can cause problems because of the way text reflows. Tamminen said she thinks because of poetry’s small market share, technology has not been as quick to deal with its specific conversion issues, but she finds that the poets themselves are “already very active online and quite knowledgeable about e-books and the digital world—in fact we feel like they’re leading us.”
Whatever the format, all of the stakeholders we spoke with had confidence that university presses will continue to play an important role in publishing poetry and nurturing poets. Perhaps most importantly, as Armantrout attested, “university presses often have editors who care about poetry,” a factor that will continue to entice authors and ensure the respect of the scholarly community and the poetry-reading public. As she concluded of the recent string of successes university press-published poetry has seen, “it must mean something.”
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.
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).
Ithaka released “Faculty Survey 2009,” the “fourth in a series of surveys conducted over the past decade examined faculty attitudes and behaviors on key issues.” The findings are detailed in a three-part report, covering “Discovery and the Evolving Role of the Library,” “The Formation Transition for Scholarly Works,” and “Scholarly Communications.”
View the report: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) opened a Public Access Forum in December and January. They posed nine questions relating to public access to archived publications resulting from federally funded research, and solicited comments from interested members of the public and scholarly publishing community.
AAUP submitted comments to the OSTP Forum on January 21.
Earlier in January, the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, convened by the House Committee on Science and Technology to develop “consensus recommendations for expanding public access,” also issued their report. In the association’s comments to the OSTP, the Board of AAUP endorsed the shared principles and many of the recommendations in this report. Most especially, AAUP echoed the call that funding agencies should develop public access policies within a coherent set of guiding principles, taking into account the differing needs and scholarly norms of various fields, and “in cooperation with all stakeholders.”
Read AAUP’s contribution to the OSTP Public Access Forum in full.
Read the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and other relevant materials.
Robin Derricourt
Director, University of New South Wales Press, Australia
How does a university press stay solvent, with resources to fulfill its mission, when it receives no funding in cash or kind from its parent university, has no foundation support, and operates in a relatively small and highly competitive market? One simple answer is flexibility and diversity, a willingness and structure that allow adaptability and change, with an entrepreneurial staff willing to embrace the new or different. In challenging times for US and other university presses the UNSW Press example from Australia may be of wider interest.
University of New South Wales Press (operating since 1962) has continued to expand annually and with over 50 staff is now the largest of the diverse university press operations in the southern hemisphere. We operate in a domestic market of 22 million people, but with only 40 universities whose libraries are both centralised and boast of their efficient interlibrary loan system, so they do not provide an adequate market for domestic books. To enable to us to survive and to grow we have developed structures and strategies that differ from most of our US colleagues.
The first is diversity of activities: we are book publishers, we run a retail bookshop, and we also provide marketing, sales representation and distribution services for the books of 35 other publishers. In 1997 we rebranded our sales division as Unireps (renamed NewSouth Books in 2009) and took on a wide range of academic and up-market trade lists from Australian and international publishers. Our Australian sales representatives are our own employees, operating a monthly sales cycle of 12 sales kits (not two seasonal kits) and we do the marketing and publicity for the overseas publishers, while the domestic publishers handle their own marketing. Operating NewSouth means for us we can control our own reach into the trade.
Since 1997 we have also operated our parent university’s campus bookshop, selling all books at discount while paying directly to the university a cash dividend from sales. In its first year the shop was named Australia’s Campus Bookseller of the Year and has won or appeared in this award many years since. The strength is that a textbook (and course materials) shop at the start of each semester turns into an outstanding general and academic bookshop for the rest of the year; and is supplemented by an on-line bookshop with seven-figure revenues, a secondhand bookshop and outreach for event sales.
There are several advantages to a university press in being book publisher, bookseller and book representative/distributor. They lie first in cash flow and the ability to generate a modest annual trading surplus which would not readily be achievable from publishing alone. The economies of scale support overheads in IT, accounting, operations and general management which it would be hard to maintain on the revenues of a mid-sized publishing list alone. For UNSW Press is structured not as a university department but as a not-for-profit company whose directors, including outside experts, are appointed by the university.
Australia has four university presses, in the conventional sense of fully staffed operations creating printed books for sale; some other universities have developed small in-house and e-book operations. Of the four, those of UNSW and Melbourne University operate as companies, those of the universities of Queensland and Western Australia as departments with a modest annual grant; both these include literary fiction in their programs. Melbourne formerly operated their university bookshop and now receives a large annual university grant as well as foundation funding. Queensland formerly ran the university bookshop which they have now subcontracted. Only UNSW Press has its own sales and distribution division.
Willingness to move into new areas of activity has to be matched by willingness to withdraw from them. Until 1974 we were also book printers. In 2009 we closed our 45-year old warehouse and outsourced order fulfilment: a decision brought on by the substantial growth of sales (and stocks!) and the ever increasing capital costs of software development and physical infrastructure; we were able to reduce staff numbers as a result. Australian has no wholesalers, only publisher/distributors and these provide the efficiencies of scale.
But primarily a university press is judged by the quality of its publications. We have maintained diversity in our publishing: our books win many awards, though sales revenues and public praise are not always neatly aligned. Flexibility in our list development is achieved by the energies of our commissioning but also by our structure. Publishing decisions on individual books do not involve the university or the board members; they are taken at an internal meeting of editorial, marketing, sales, production and financial staff; each contract proposal has to meet criteria of excellence, saleability and financial profile. The Press list emerged, unusually, from a tertiary textbook program but in the face of stiff competition from the multinational publishers this has been in retreat, as has a small program of professional books. The current model for quality scholarly books is to underwrite their publication from internal resources on condition of matching funding from the institution hosting the research. There are challenges here since Australia’s centralised government research funding body disallows used of grants to help publish results.
Our larger emphasis has been on important “books of ideas” for a wider audience, often but by no means always authors based in a university, aiming at a market beyond the specialist; this award winning list is one which has all the challenges of the “crossover” titles. Experiments in more ambitious trade non-fiction have had their challenges too. The most successful titles include ones which sell a substantial coedition to a US or other international copublisher. We have maintained our own books for a program of trade reference publishing, but focusing on proven strengths. And a final program is creating books which meet our criteria for content but sell back to the sponsor: institutional histories, for example. Occasionally like any publisher we have acquired lists by purchase or collaborative arrangements, but we have also been willing to sell a title or a list for strategic reasons.
All this produces a program of 60-70 books a year, spreading the publishing risks across a range of genres. And spreading risk in ever changing markets is probably a major benefit of the diversity in our operations and approach. As a university press, our primary goals lie in fulfilling our mission and in the content of what we publish, rather than in financial surplus, but our primary duty is to survive on the resources we can create so that we can continue to publish. With no external subsidy, a flexible approach to what we do and how we do it has enabled us to continue and grow.
For further information on scholarly publishing in Australia, see Robin Derricourt’s articles:
“Scholarly Book Publishing in Australia: The Impact of the Last Decade”
Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33 (4), 2002
“For a few dollars more: a future for scholarly books in Australia?”
Learned Publishing 21 (1), 2008
“Book publishing and the university sector in Australia”
in Making books: contemporary Australian publishing (ed. Carter & Galligan), UQP, 2007
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
For the past 29 years, academic librarians and academic publishers have gathered in Charleston, SC, in early November to discuss common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition.” In 1980, it was an informal group of 20 sharing problems and brainstorming solutions—now, the Charleston Conference hosts more than 1,000 attendees every year. This past November, while the hallways seemed less crowded than in 2007 (before the current economic decline had taken hold), plenary sessions were still filled to capacity and the program was overstuffed with interesting topics. Despite its growth, the conference maintains its reputation for collegial professionalism between publishers and academics—and still puts the emphasis on practical knowledge sharing over visionary set pieces.
One particularly well-conceived panel of interest to AAUP members was a session on the e-Duke Books project subtitled “What have we learned?” The session featured Michael McCullough, Sales Manager at Duke University Press; Lois Schultz, the Duke librarian handling cataloging and MARC record creation for the e-book collection; a Georgia State University librarian who acquired the collection; and a representative of collection vendor YBP. The session was a frank discussion from all sides of how an innovative e-book experiment was developed, and the real challenges they met.
Other AAUP members spoke at sessions on how the economy affects editorial programs and on advising librarians on best practices in publishing. Doug Armato, University of Minnesota Press Director, and Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka President, spoke at the annual “I Hear the Train A Comin’” plenary, focused on what’s around the bend in scholarly communications. Many of the plenary sessions were recorded and are being made available, after editing, at http://www.katina.info/conference/video.php.
The official 2009 Charleston tagline was “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but another, one-word theme seemed prevalent in many sessions and informal conversations: “usage.” In the journals world, usage statistics have long been an important component of pricing and licensing discussions. A detailed presentation on how the Institute of Physics develops journals digital pricing made clear how key the “cost-per-access” data point is (as did several tough questions from purchasing librarians in the audience). As monograph-length scholarship begins to ford the book-journal digital divide, usage statistics are going to have an increasing impact on value perceptions in the book world. Indeed, the GSU librarian mentioned that e-Duke Books’ offering of COUNTER-compliant usage data was a point in its favor.
There are “usage stats” in the print world, too, of course, though they are often more anecdotal and based on the only partial picture of circulation studies. Highly specialized monographs in small fields can be reasonably assumed to have low circulation (or usage). While it is reasonably argued that increased discoverability of e-books may increase even the most esoteric title’s usage, the expectations, standards, and patterns of usage will always be different for books and articles.
The most primal of a book’s “usage stats” is at the base of one of Charleston’s hot topics this year: patron-driven acquisitions. Under this model, books (in whatever media) are not purchased until requested by a library patron. The University of Denver shared details of their demand-driven acquisitions pilot project. Blackwell Book Services maintains the Denver library’s approval plan, and is paid for metadata and profiling work. While certain collections remain on an automatic approval basis (not waiting for a patron request), other books are simply exposed through library systems until a user requests the title. Books are sourced through whatever means will be the appropriate mix of fastest and cheapest, and patrons are given the choice of print and/or e-books when possible. Denver selectors continue to do their usual job of selecting library acquisitions up to the point of purchase. At the end of the pilot, selectors’ choices will be compared to user requests and general collection needs to see if this model will continue.
While the Denver librarians talked of this experiment, their hometown was host to another relevant conference, Educause. There, the overlapping ideas of e-books and library-catalog-as-storefront were implicated in Syracuse University librarian Suzanne Thorin’s bombshell statement that “the library, as a place, is dead.” The basic research tool of browsing the stacks may be taken out of the toolbox, with online search and discovery serving as a substitute (though not a replacement). Days later, Thorin faced an uprising of scholars on her own campus protesting the plans to move part of the Syracuse print collection to a storage facility more than 200 miles away. The bits and bytes and algorithms are thriving, but the stacks have life in them yet. Back in Charleston, publishers and librarians strive each year to bring some harmony to the resulting clamor of scholarly communications.
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.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
In May 2007, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced its plan to fund collaborations among university presses, excitement about the possibilities of the program abounded. Just over two years later, fourteen grants have been awarded, and some have reached the stage of having published works to show for their progress. Four directors from presses that are part of collaborative grants convened at AAUP’s 2009 Annual Meeting for a panel entitled “The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses,” and some spoke with the Exchange later to fill out their comments.
All four of the projects represented have the aim to publish in underserved areas of the humanities, often prioritizing scholars’ first books. The Modern Languages Initiative (MLI), for example, arose when the presses involved noticed that while program enrollment in Modern Languages was up, publication was down. Junior scholars in the field were thus having difficulty getting tenure books published, explained Fred Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press. Fordham is collaborating with California, Penn, Virginia, and Washington on this new program.
The Ethnomusicology collaboration, led by Indiana University Press in conjunction with Kent State and Temple, focuses on the way in which field of ethnomusicology is underserved by traditional monograph publication. The group received a one-year planning grant to research the feasibility of developing an online platform for the multimedia content (audio/video) that is frequently an essential component of scholarly works in ethnomusicology. Janet Rabinowitch, Indiana Director, explained that the presses also worked with the Society of Ethnomusicology on the project, to ensure that the proposed platform would best serve the needs of scholars in the field.
A few common themes can be found amongst the collaborations: their work with the Mellon Foundation helped the publishers to clarify and focus their aims, the grants raised press profiles at their parent universities, and working with other presses proved both challenging and extremely rewarding.
Moderator Steve Maikowski, director of NYU Press, provided a perspective from a collaboration entering its second year, the American Literatures Initiative (ALI). NYU works with Fordham, Rutgers, Temple and Virgnia on the initiative. Maikowski acknowledged the various challenges that the presses dealt with in their first year working together, but said, “the good news is, we have good books published now” – a sign of successful collaboration by any standards.
Press groups dealt with the practical aspects of collaboration in a variety of ways, but all agreed that communication among group members was paramount, despite its challenges. J. Alex Schwartz, Director of Northern Illinois University Press, member of the Early American Places Initiative with the University of Georgia Press and NYU Press, suggested that it “has to be somewhat official,” if presses with their own standards and customs, working hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles apart, are to successfully collaborate. Maikowski echoed this idea, emphasizing the necessity of having someone who is clearly directing the program, as “an enormous amount of work [must go into] management.”
While receiving a Mellon grant is certainly a major boon for a press, it does come with its own set of obstacles. The distribution of grant funds was a practical concern that occupied an unforeseen amount of staff time. Some directors noted the difficulty of re-opening acquisitions pipelines in subject areas that the press may have not published in recently.
However, all the directors seem to agree that the benefits far outweighed the challenges. Beyond the obvious advantage in cost savings that comes from pooling resources, Schwartz described the “creative dynamic” that resulted from working with other presses, and the “different mindset” which was necessary to approach the collaborative project.
Nachbaur counted among the advantages for smaller and mid-sized presses the opportunity to benefit from staff at partner presses who occupy positions that may not exist at others. The MLI initiative for example, has one person at each of the five presses handling a different aspect of marketing for the project’s titles.
The cooperative process has also served to motivate staff members. Schwartz explained that his staff has felt more like a part of a larger community as they work on this “serious inroad in scholarly communications.” This sense of community extends beyond the publishing side of the process. Nachbaur believes the initiatives have created an “intellectual community for the [subject] area.”
At the panel, Maikowski expressed a hope that the collaborations might result in the development of efficiencies from shared resources, which could potentially have an effect greater than a one-time cost savings. His hope is that “reducing the cost of publishing monographs [will] mean we can keep publishing them.”
The integration of e-publishing into the grant projects varies. Initiatives like the one in ethnomusicology have focused on formats beyond the traditional monograph, and the most recent grant was awarded to presses who will study the viability of a collaborative university press distribution system for e-books. For the grants focused on first books, however, Maikowski explained that Mellon did not want a digital-only outcome. The grant did provide funds for the conversion of print-ready PDF files through XML to make books available in digital format, an option that NYU Press, among others, has taken advantage of.
Many of the valuable lessons learned during collaboration have resulted from staff at different presses being forced to re-think the way they do things and re-evaluate certain aspects of their own press culture. The standardization of work-flow inherent in collaboration has led presses to try reduced print runs for books outside the initiatives, and experiment with new printing models, such as paperback originals versus dual editions or lower-priced hardcovers.
Maikowski gave an example of how his initial impulse was to attempt to lower costs by hiring more junior copyeditors with lower hourly rates. Convinced by his partners to go with more experienced copyeditors, he was pleasantly surprised to find out that their overall cost was lower, as hourly rates were higher but efficiency led to fewer hours per manuscript and a lower per page cost.
Within the grant-funded collaborations, press groups have already learned from each other. The ALI initiative developed an outside managing editor model in which all participating presses send their copyedited manuscripts to the project editor hired by the presses and receive back print-ready PDFs. The model ensures uniformity, and keeps costs predictable, as the group pays per manuscript. Maikowski described this model as “scalable,” and it has already been adopted by the Early American Places and Modern Languages Initiative groups.
As scholarly presses continue to search for new and innovative ways to continue their work of publishing high quality scholarship, these new projects provide a model that could be valuable even outside of grant-funded programs. Maikowski envisions this as a possibility, particularly for presses who are not able to increase their staff, but are looking to grow their list.
In addition to the four initiatives represented at the panel, six other grants have been awarded to press collaborations. Four additional grants from the Mellon Foundation have been awarded to presses partnering with their universities and other institutions on publishing projects. AAUP has recently compiled a listing of the collaborative Mellon grants received by university press collaborations to date.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Laments on the plight of the monograph abound of late, but Duke University Press is attempting to shake things up with its new program, the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Modeled on the pricing structure of the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collection, e-Duke Books offers online access to at least 100 new titles per year to subscribing libraries, in addition to access to many of the press’s backlist titles.
Michael McCullough, sales manager for the press, explained that director Steve Cohn “has been a driving force behind this for a number of years,” and had long been seeking to address “two separate but complementary problems,” that is, the decline in sales to academic libraries, and the challenge of finding the best way to make the press’s books available in digital form. As Cohn saw these two issues converging, he and his staff began to look into ways to address them, while “control[ling] our content as much as possible,” and without using multiple aggregators.
The e-Duke Books collection will include at least 100 new electronic books published by the press each year. The press typically publishes 115-120 new titles in a given year, and plans to include the great majority of these titles in the collection, excluding only “titles of regional or popular interest or titles to which Duke does not hold electronic rights.”
The press launched a pilot version of the program in 2008, with the participation of 19 US and Canadian libraries. Following a successful run with the pilot program, the press launched a full version in 2009. Collection prices are based on institutions’ 2005 Basic Carnegie Classifications, and range from $500 to $6,000 per year.
By ordering, libraries also receive access to the over 900 Duke University Press backlist books which are currently available in digital form. As the program continues, this backlist will grow in two ways. The 100+ new books that are included in the collection in a given year will become part of the backlist in subsequent years. Additionally, Duke expects to continue the work of digitizing older titles, further increasing the scope of their available backlist.
Offering such a large swath of its backlist as part of the collection required a substantial amount of digitization work. Some of the press’s titles had already been digitized through BiblioVault, funded by a grant which offered free or low-cost digitization services to university presses. That provided a head start for the press, although the remaining titles have required “fair amount of staff time” from the production department. The digitization efforts will also allow Duke to offer a single-title purchase model of e-books to libraries beginning this summer.
The press’s files are currently digitized as web-ready PDFs, with some of the conversion being handled by their partner, ebrary. The ebrary platform also allows full-text searching, and ensures that Duke’s content is cross-searchable with all ebrary content to which a library has access.
One particularly interesting aspect of Duke’s program is the option to purchase a $500 “print add-on option,” which will include cloth editions of all titles in the current year’s collection. Kimberly Steinle, Duke’s Library Relations Manager, indicated that this has been a very popular option among subscribers, with an uptake rate of more than 75%. She noted that the press wanted to ensure this was an optional add-on, rather than a requirement, as some smaller- to medium-sized libraries may not have the space for all of the books. Not requiring libraries to purchase the add-on also helps ensure that the electronic collection is as inexpensive as possible.
The option also fits well with the way the press envisions users accessing the titles. McCullough said he feels “students still don’t really want to read 40 pages at a time on screen,” and that he anticipates library patrons will more likely “discover the book online, and if they want to read more, we want to make that as easy as possible.” Having a cloth edition of the book available on the shelf facilitates this sort of fluidity.
Piracy issues have been a major concern for university presses of late, particularly with the advent of new e-publishing projects. While acknowledging that they are concerned with piracy in the same way as other university presses, McCullough explained that Duke feels the technology they are using successfully avoids any major risks. Ebrary’s printing and downloading restrictions were attributes that made the company a particularly attractive partner for Duke. With the ebrary technology, users are streaming the content, rather than downloading the material to their own computer. Additionally, ebrary limits the number of pages a user is able to print.
The e-Duke Books FAQ section has a comprehensive delineation of the various user policies of the site license, including interlibrary loan, course packs, electronic reserves, printing, and downloading. Steinle explained that these guidelines were developed in conjunction with ebrary, first looking at ebrary’s guidelines and then tailoring them to best meet the needs of the press’s content. Regarding the printing restrictions for example, she said, “our goal was to try to come as close as possible to how many pages would be in a [typical] chapter.”
Another risk for the press is how this sort of accessibility might affect course adoptions, such a mainstay of many university presses. McCullough said that this is an area in which time will tell how the subscription model affects these sales, but he again pointed to what he had spoken about earlier, that assumption most students still do not want to read book-length material online. Additionally, he pointed out that traditional library sales have not been in competition with paperback course adoptions.
As is the case with so many successful e-publishing initiatives, the press enlisted the help of the university library to provide subscribers to the program with enhanced MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records. McCullough explained that the press wanted to offer the highest level of metadata available, and thus enlisted the help of the catalogers from the Duke University Perkins/Bostock Library. With the MARC records, the cataloging happens on a chapter level – which results in a “real advantage” for both librarians and patrons. Attesting to the invaluable assistance of the library in this aspect of the project, he said, “we certainly could not be creating them [the MARC records] on our own.” Feedback from librarians was also valuable in making procedural changes to the pilot program, to best tailor the program and its offerings to the needs of libraries.
While hesitant to make any sweeping assessments at this early point in the program’s development, McCullough said the press is “very happy with the way it has gone so far.” He noted that the ability to work with colleagues who have managed the similar e-Duke Journals program has been a great help: “They’ve been through this process before.”
There are of course differences between the two programs, and unique challenges that the e-Duke Books staff is still tackling. While the majority of librarians and patrons are now accustomed to accessing journals electronically, McCullough feels that there is still some need to “sell them on the idea” of accessing books in the same manner. He also noted that librarians may be less likely to take a chance on unfamiliar models in “this challenging economic climate.”
McCullough thinks it is possible that other presses may adopt similar models in the near future, and anticipates that they will each vary them to reflect their press’s particular capacities and strengths. He pointed out that this type of model was particularly well suited to Duke’s publishing program. As their list is reasonably small, they were able to include all of their new titles, while maintaining a workable size for the press and a “cost that would not be prohibitive to libraries.” While some presses may choose to implement similar collections composed of titles in a particular subject area, the interdisciplinary nature of many of Duke’s books made this all-encompassing program a preferable option, as there was no need to fit books into neat categorizations. Duke’s well-known editorial profile as a publisher of interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship seems to have lent itself particularly well to this new model.
Daphne Ireland
Director of Intellectual Property and Documentary Publishing, Princeton University Press
Everyone is talking about the Google settlement. On March 13 the Columbia Law School hosted “The Google Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term?” a day-long symposium with exceptional speakers assembled from the publishing, legal, and academic spheres. Conference attendees, including nine rights professionals from AAUP presses, were privileged to hear expert debate on a broad continuum of issues. The day began by considering whether this class action settlement has the effect of legislation, continued with discussion of anti-trust concerns, and moved to projections about the future of book publishing, Google Book Search as compulsory license, and possible complementary orphan works legislation.
The first session of the day was “Legislating through Settlement.” Mary Beth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, observed that the settlement has a legislative effect without having been considered or approved by Congress. It incorporates aspects of legislation for orphan works, Section 108 library exceptions, treaty obligations, and compulsory licensing. Peters said she had many unanswered questions, including whether the Settlement is actually a compulsory license for the benefit of one company and what effect it might have on foreign authors and journal articles. She found it interesting that she had not been asked by Congress to comment on or study the scope of Settlement.
The technical aspects of the anti-trust question were addressed in “Competition Issues” by Randal C. Picker, Professor of Commercial Law at University of Chicago Law School. He identified in the Settlement three key features to measure how easily they might be multiplied to allow competition: digital files, scope of the rights license, and the mechanism of the Registry. How would competitors gain access to digital scans: will they negotiate anew with libraries for their own access and scanning, or will Google allow copying of their digital files? Is the scope of the settlement’s rights license able to be multiplied among competitors? Is it possible to have multiple registries? For Picker, the core of the settlement is its “one-way most favored nation clause,” which guarantees no other party can be offered license terms that are more favorable than Google’s terms in the settlement. Another anti-trust consideration is that even with competitors in this digital marketplace, Google could privilege its own book material through its Google search engine results ranking. Picker sketched an intriguing analogy between Google’s search engine/digital file access regime and the public utility access regime of the nation’s electricity grid. Finally, he explored the idea of the settlement as a compulsory license, where exclusive right holders are required to license works without prior approval on the condition that they receive royalties – similar to ASCAP and BMI in the music industry.
In “The Future of ‘Books’,” Richard Sarnoff, a chairman at Bertelsmann and Chairman of the Board of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), described the settlement as a confirmation of copyright law that sets up a mutually beneficial framework to speed the co-existence of print and digital publishing. Alan Adler, AAP, explained that it looks backward to resolve litigation and creates a path forward by designing a licensing structure to plug in with other competitors. He suggested that publishers may decide to place new works not covered by settlement terms (i.e., those copyrighted after January 5, 2009) under a Google Partner Program contract, the terms of which will likely parallel settlement terms. Lois Wasoff, former counsel at Houghton Mifflin, confessed to everyone’s relief that the settlement is “a little tough to get your arms around.” Business model and contract differences mean implications will be different among trade publishers, STM publishers, and university presses. Wasoff reported that most publishers will likely opt-in to the settlement, remove many of their works, and continue to participate in Google Book Search through the Partner Program. Richard Sarnoff summarized it well: “If you look at the settlement, there’s one thing that’s shot absolutely through it. It is the rights holder’s choice—in every possible circumstance—that rules what happens with the rights holder’s works. Outside of what I hope will be a radically shrinking number of truly orphaned works that are never claimed by anyone (and even within those, I hope with the right legislation we can handle them more actively), you are going to have the rights holder deciding whether the book will be in there in the first place, what the display uses are… and pricing…The entire settlement is set up with the full flexibility to decide how their work is to be used by Google or by anybody else.”
Authors’ opinions were surveyed in the panel “Authors and Incentives.” Jan Constantine, counsel for the Authors’ Guild, can see no downside for authors whose works are out-of-print, and applauded the development that authors and publishers will now move forward in mutual agreement about how works will be offered digitally. Arthur Klebanoff, a publisher and literary agent, highlighted the involvement of author estates in Book Rights Registry claims. In another vein, he commented that publishers will want to take care to remove previous editions of books from the Google offerings, to prevent inaccurate scholarship and edition confusion. Tracy Armstrong, President of Copyright Clearance Center, pondered the ramifications of Google Book Search, which she said certainly will include more self-publishing by authors. Armstrong speculated that one day Google Book Search’s ubiquitous user-interface could become a storefront for self-publishing intermediaries, such as iUniverse and Blurb. She wondered about legitimate incentives for competitors since Google enjoys the “first-mover advantage from this ‘ask forgiveness, not permission’ model”, and regretted that some parties might therefore imitate that illicit model.
“The Public Interest” panelists discussed whether the settlement sidestepped library and public interest and whether other industries might use this class action structure to settle their legislative issues. In his opening statement, Alex MacGillivray, counsel at Google, said “Google is in this to make search better,” to create access for researchers regardless of whether their library is financially privileged, and to serve the needs of the print-disabled. MacGillivray echoed Alan Adler’s earlier observation that the Registry will be able license the corpus to third parties. Robert Darnton, Professor and Director of Harvard University Library, thoughtfully expressed that the settlement creates the possibility of a reader’s utopia. However, he said that the Google Book Search corpus is so rich and unique that competition may be impossible. He also expressed concern that the settlement gives Google a “monopoly in fact” and that there is too great a potential for abuse of power by “ratcheting up prices” for institutional subscriptions over time, a practice he termed “cocaine pricing.” But not all monopolies are bad, in particular those providing public services. Memorably, Darnton quoted an old General Motors motto, having adapted it to: “What’s good for Google is good for the United States.” He openly invited Congress to examine the settlement and its effect on public interest. Jeffrey Cunard, counsel for AAP at DeBevoise & Plimpton, expanded on the notion that the Registry can be a licensing agency, adding that it could administrate a compulsory license for non-commercially available works, should Congress decide to enact such a license. James Grimmelman, Associate Professor at New York Law School, was insightful and brief. He is concerned about concentrated power: direct price setting, a single dominant cultural source, preservation and quality issues, changing fair use, library Section 108, first-sale doctrine, and the incentive to remain exclusive. Grimmelman believes the settlement is workable with discrete changes, which include guarantees about privacy, making the Registry accountable through transparency and oversight by the Federal Trade Commission, and a modified “most favored nation clause.” He believes this class-action settlement risks interpretation as a privately negotiated substitute for orphan works legislation.
Threaded through every panel were the topics of “out-of-print” and “non-commercially available works,” at times imprecisely discussed as “orphan works.” Google’s exclusive possession of digital scans of orphan works from libraries is an indicator of monopoly. Yet all agreed that the settlement’s greatest impact is the creation of new access to non-commercially available works. In Paul Courant’s words: “What I’ve gotten out of today is that absolutely everybody thinks that meaningful orphan works legislation would greatly improve the quality of this settlement.” Google and AAP have actively supported orphan works legislation for several years (as has AAUP). Access to truly orphan works is certainly in the public’s interest. In listening to panelists, one can imagine Congress considering orphan works legislation in the form of a compulsory license to be administered by the Registry.
There have been a couple of developments since the outstanding March conference. On April 28, the Federal District of New York postponed the deadline for right holders to opt-out and/or file oppositions to the settlement, which is now September 5, 2009. In a separate move on the same day, the Justice Department announced its inquiry into the settlement’s anti-trust issues.
There were many more speakers and compelling ideas, but this report attempts only to trace a continuum, highlighting possible long-term implications. It is likely the settlement will be approved in some form at some point in the coming year, and it has surely awakened interest on all sides.
Peter Givler was instrumental in planning the conference and roster of distinguished speakers. The following university press attendees enjoyed this stellar symposium, as well as each others’ views and good company at lunch: Lisa Bayer, Barbara Cohen, Carol Hupping, Daphne Ireland, Linda Klein, Mindy Koyanis, Jill Phillips, Clare Wellnitz, and Vicky Wells. No briefing can adequately convey the depth of the conference; fortunately, a video is available online. For details and discussion, please watch the symposium at http://kernochancenter.org/Googlebookssettlementrecording.htm
New Resource Center for Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Libraries and university presses have always been inextricably bound up in each other’s success. While at its best this relationship can provide extensive benefits to the whole of scholarly communication, too often a lack of common understanding has led to conflicting interests. With the advent of digital publishing and the demand for new methods of scholarly communication, the need for the two institutions to share their strengths and resources is increasingly evident.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition’s (SPARC) new Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships Resource Center is designed to help institutions meet that need. SPARC Senior Consultant Raym Crow explained that the idea for the guide and resource center came from “a meeting on library-press collaborations in June 2007, sponsored by the libraries and presses of the University of California and the University of Michigan.” Crow said that participants at the meeting, all actively involved in collaborative publishing initiatives, were “describ[ing] a common set of issues that they needed to address,” and it became clear that there was “a great deal of duplicative effort being expended as new partnerships wrestled with the same issues.”
It was this convergence of concerns that led Crow to create the “Guide to Critical Issues.” The guide is a five-part, comprehensive overview of what form these partnerships might take and practical considerations of how they might work.
Out of the guide grew the web resource center, which expands on issues covered therein, and keeps the information in the guide dynamic and relevant. Among the resources available are case studies, a bibliography, and LIBPRESS, an email list devoted to discussion of publishing partnerships. The resource is unique in that it gathered perspectives from librarians, press staff, and some who are straddling the divide (such as Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University).
The guide and case studies are focused specifically on library-press collaborations, but the guide’s introduction indicates that “most of the discussion applies as well to other academic units that may participate in campus-based publishing partnerships.”
The accompanying resources have been compiled by the editorial board, which was formed after the completion of the guide to direct and support the web resource. Crow emphasized the collaborative and interactive nature of the resource center, explaining that it is “designed to grow based on user feedback and participation.” Presses are encouraged both to submit sample planning documents and resources, and to submit suggestions on topics that they feel should be added or expanded to make the resources practically useful. The direction and experience of the editorial board has been particularly valuable in developing these resources, says Crow: “These are people who know what’s relevant, what’s current, and what’s needed by participants on both the press and library sides of a partnership.”
Laura Cerruti, Director of Digital Content Development at the University of California Press, and Catherine Mitchell, Director of the California Digital Library’s e-Scholarship Publishing Program at the University of California, are both editorial board members who bring to the table their experience of collaboration on University of California Publishing Services (UCPubS). Mitchell described how the two organizations had been “unofficially collaborating in an episodic or opportunistic way,” and eventually came to the realization that they lacked “any kind of ongoing formal relationship that took into account the formal structure of the collaboration.” It was at this point that they decided to work with Crow, as they “decided one-off projects were not going to be sustainable in the long-run,” and establish a more formal collaboration that takes into account “sustainability and scalability.”
UCPubS combines the open access expertise of the library with the production, print-on-demand, marketing, and distribution strengths of the press to serve the wider University of California community. Cerruti commented that it was a “reality check” for both the press and the library when Crow helped them put numbers to things and be realistic about the financial picture for their projects. The hope is that more partnerships will benefit from this sort of practical approach, and undertake the “explicit planning” Crow advocates.
Cerruti said she sees the partnerships as particularly important for presses in that they allow them to “take steps forward towards some of the new business models that are out there – especially open access.” She believes presses know that open access is becoming increasingly important, but may not always be sure how to implement it. Both Cerruti and Mitchell agree that partnering with libraries, many of which are already working on open access, can facilitate a press’s move toward open access models.
On the flip side, as libraries are increasingly called upon by their universities to take on publishing roles, it is important for them to take advantage of the valuable experience and expertise of presses. Mitchell explained that these partnerships also benefit content providers who “feel strongly about open access, but also want to provide print publication,” emphasizing the importance of providing all of these options in a way that is not detrimental to a press’s business model.
Both Cerruti and Mitchell highlighted the fact that partnerships strengthen the case for university support of a press, as they demonstrate the institutional service provided. Cerruti pointed out that the practical nature of the guide makes it very easy for presses to make a case to their university about the relevance of university presses.
In terms of early feedback from presses and libraries, Crow noted that a survey of LIBPRESS participants indicated that the practical examples have been the most valuable. The editorial board now “intend[s] to increase the number of case studies, sample plans, and financial templates, as well as the networking support available through the site.”
Once the resource center is completely populated, Mitchell envisions it “enabling people to get a picture of the different models of what this kind of collaboration can be,” and that this will assist in getting partners to a point where “libraries and presses speak the same language, or at least a compatible language.” Crow hopes that the resources may encourage presses to “take the lead in creating publishing partnerships.”
Cerruti described the resource center as “one-stop shopping for resources and papers published every week,” facilitating easier access to curated content for users who may not have the time to devote on their own. Her hope is that the guide and resources will “reduce some of the duplicative experiments going on so that we can learn from each other.”
A more in-depth look at the guide and resource center is well worth it to anyone interested in campus-based publishing partnerships and their associated issues.
Those interested in joining LIBPRESS, the online discussion forum on issues of “collaborative digital publishing projects and models,” may do so here: http://listserv.ucop.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=LIBPRESS-L.
Hear more about press collaborations at the AAUP Annual Meeting!
Friday, June 19: 1:45-3:00 pm
Plenary 2: Interpress Collaborations and Cross-Marketing Partnerships: Future Visions of Scholarly Communication (Panelists include Raym Crow and Laura Cerruti)
Saturday, June 20: 3:30-4:45
Library-Press Cooperation
(Moderator: Patrick Alexander, member of SPARC editorial board)
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
On March 11, 380 representatives of universities, colleges, museums, historical and scholarly societies, humanities councils, and (of course) scholarly publishers fanned out across Capitol Hill to make the case for continued support and increased funding of federal humanities agencies. Big numbers were the theme of the 2009 National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Annual Conference and Humanities Advocacy Day. The NHA was requesting an additional an additional $75 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and (NEH) and a total of $22 million for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
These big numbers were justified by the much smaller number that NHA presented to delegates: 16%. That is the rate at which the NEH was able to fund competitive, peer-reviewed proposals, as compared to the 26% funding rate for merit-reviewed projects at the National Science Foundation. As a result, the NHA request was specifically geared toward increasing the funding available to the core programs of the NEH, including preservation and access, education, and research. At its funding peak in 1979, the Endowment demonstrated the capacity to operate at much higher funding levels ($431 million adjusted for inflation). The NHPRC is up for reauthorization, and humanities advocates hope to double its funding limit.
The timing of Humanities Advocacy Day happened to coincide with the belated passage, on March 10, of the FY 2009 omnibus spending bill. We entered the congressional visits knowing that the legislature had just passed a $155 million NEH budget, itself a comparatively handsome increase over 2008 funding levels. The NHPRC grants program, authorized at a $10 million level, received $9.25 million for FY 2009, after being zeroed out in the Bush Administration budget request for several years. Humanities advocates needed to thank the representatives and senators who had fought for that funding and make a strong case for even greater levels of support in a time of economic crisis.
What was surprising, at least on the visits I participated in (to members of the Senate Appropriations Interior subcommittee), was how few eyebrows were raised by our requests. While offered with the caveat that nothing was assured, we heard often that the need for humanities funding was recognized and appreciated, and that Senate offices were prepared to consider these larger increases.
In early May, President Obama’s budget request for FY 2010 was released. While our moderately extravagant hopes were not met here, it is certainly a better starting point for humanities advocates than in recent budget fights. NEH would see a $16.3 million increase, although $10 million of that would be earmarked for taking over the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program. Obama is also requesting the full $10 million currently authorized for NHPRC. Unfortunately, due to funding allocations in the president’s request, this includes a “cut of 55% for NHPRC supported publications projects,” according to the May 2009 NHA Policy Digest.
It is particularly key this year that NHA and its members help policymakers understand that funding for the humanities is essential to our nation’s health; that work in the humanities is an integral part of our economic life and future. Fortunately, we were given a great new tool to make that case with the launch of the “Humanities Indicators Prototype” from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS). These indicators provide the kind of data on the humanities workforce, education, funding, and research that fields of sciences and engineering have long had at their fingertips. One of the most important data points for a Congress looking at a faltering economy: the humanities sector represents at least 2.5 million jobs—distributed across every state and district in America. (NHA) Annual Conference and Humanities Advocacy Day. The NHA was requesting an additional an additional $75 million for the
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Thomas Jefferson designed the iconic Rotunda building as the academic center of his newly founded University of Virginia, “demonstrating [his] belief that a university should have as its focus a collection of academic achievements1.” Appropriately, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press takes its name from the campus landmark and fills that same role for the university in today’s digital age. Rotunda has been a stable flagship in the ever-changing realm of electronic publishing since its inception in 2001.
The original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation for the Electronic Imprint, conceived by Nancy Essig, the former director of the press, and John Unsworth, the founder of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, called for publication of born-digital scholarship. Mark Saunders, Manager of the Electronic Imprint, explained that suitable born-digital projects were scarce at the time. In response, the press’s new director, Penny Kaiserlian, along with a team of senior managers, decided to add digital editions of existing print publications to the imprint’s list, focusing on the press’s strength in critical and documentary editions.
By the start of 2009, Rotunda had published six projects in the 19th-Century Literature and Culture collection and four in the American Founding Era collection, with three more in active development. Two of the 19th-century projects, comparative textual editions of Herman Melville’s Typee and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, were in fact born-digital, and benefited from Rotunda’s extensive experience and expanding capabilities. The imprint is also “exploring a new collection in architecture with our colleagues at the Society for Architectural Historians.”
Kaiserlian has described the American Founding Era project as Rotunda’s “most ambitious collection yet.2” This collection brings together documentary editions of the primary and secondary materials that constitute The Papers of George Washington, The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and The Adams Papers, all in digital format. Forthcoming digital editions include The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, The Papers of James Madison, and the Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Beyond this invaluable content, however, the project is notable for the broad scope of its collaborations with other university presses and historical societies and the extent of its interoperable capabilities.
Early on, the staff at the Imprint made a pivotal decision to develop a more costly platform based on emerging standards for XML rather than focus on PDF delivery as most publishers were doing. This has proved a major boon to Rotunda’s electronic publishing projects, as it has allowed maximum “functionality, flexibility, and scalability.” The staff took advantage of the “significant expertise in textual markup [that] already existed in various digital centers at the University of Virginia.” The staff felt that the nature of the content in the document editions necessitated “that we code at as deep a level as possible.” To achieve this end, the editorial and technical staff chose to go with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, which has been developed by an international collective. David Sewell, leader of Rotunda’s staff on XML coding, now sits on the TEI Board of Directors.
Collaboration is an integral aspect of the American Founding Era project. In November 2008, Rotunda announced the release of a newly consolidated Founding Era platform, which makes the various documentary editions fully interoperable. Such a project would have been impossible without the cooperation and collaboration of the various project editors and sponsoring institutions and presses, as the various collections of papers are housed and edited at a variety of institutions. The Rotunda staff was responsible for the platform and the XML coding behind it, and drew up standards for conversion of the print volumes in conjunction with the documentary editors. Saunders described the varieties of expertise provided by some of the other participants:
In the case of the Adams Papers, conversion of the print volumes was managed by the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The editors of the Washington Papers worked for many hours to disambiguate index entries to create a cumulative index for their 52-volume project, among other contributions of time and knowledge. The editors of the Jefferson Papers performed display proofreading on the converted files, and the staff of Princeton University Press contributed publishing expertise in rights, permissions, and marketing.
This many-layered collaboration resulted in a platform that allows users to navigate across editions in various ways. Saunders explained that the platform retains the ability for users to “see the documents as they are arranged in the print volumes” while enhancing the experience by also facilitating the ability of users to “search, navigate chronologically, and access the intellectual investment reflected in the indexes.”
The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, Rotunda’s first publication, is the only born-digital edition in the American Founding Era collection. Forthcoming volumes in the collection will be available in print first, to be followed in twelve to twenty-four months by inclusion in the digital edition. The Electronic Imprint’s institution of an XML workflow is enhancing the viability and ease of these dual editions. Commenting on the recent subventions awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC ), Saunders explained that while these were traditional publication subventions for the print volumes, the XML workflow allows forthcoming editions to “be published in print and digital formats using the same underlying edited files, so in effect the continuing investment of the NHPRC in these editions will now pay off in new ways.”
Rotunda’s Founding Era project has been cited by AAUP as an important example of publisher-added value in debates on various models of open access (see AAUP’s Letter of Support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act). Saunders said that Virginia has been closely following the debates over various forms of open access “for most of Rotunda’s existence.” In February 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on an issue of open access directly impacting Rotunda and its publications: “The Founding Fathers’ Papers: Ensuring Public Access to our National Treasures.”
In April 2008, Allen Weinstein, then Archivist of the United States, released a report to Congress at the request of the Committees on Appropriations entitled “The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of America’s Founding Era.” Appropriately, Thomas Jefferson’s ink and pencil drawing of the South Elevation of the Rotunda is featured on the cover of the report. Weinstein details the ongoing efforts to produce documentary editions of these historical papers that have been in progress for years, or even decades, at various universities, university presses, and historical societies. He outlines two possible responses to the government’s call for online access to the papers: in the first, the government would scan the completed volumes as they become available, but “the volumes would not be electronically marked or indexed, making them difficult to search, and such an effort by a Federal agency would provide an inferior duplication of online publication efforts already taking place outside of Government.” The second option, recognizing the valuable work done by organizations currently involved in the process, Rotunda primary among them, suggests that the government provide support for these efforts including “engag[ing] a sole service provider to undertake transcription and document encoding for all Founding Fathers papers that have not yet been edited.” The staff at Rotunda has appreciated the report’s respect for the work of the project editors and the attention to finding an access model that is sustainable for the university press publishers of the print editions. They expect to resume these discussions with the arrival of a new Archivist and a new Congress.
University presses today are testing a variety of funding models as they attempt to find a balance between providing access to research and information and the necessity of covering operating costs. Saunders says of Rotunda’s business model, “Our interface has always promoted free discovery of our content, but our perpetual access business model has remained largely constant during the debates surrounding the Archivist’s report. At the document level, we remain a fee-based site.” This perpetual access model makes access to Rotunda’s publications available for varying fees, determined by a university’s Carnegie classification, with rates also available for other research institutions, high schools, and unaffiliated individuals. All users are able to browse the contents and conduct searches of the full text, although log-in is required to obtain access to the full contents.
Rotunda’s primary funding has until this point come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office of the University of Virginia, but Saunders explained that its ultimate mandate is to be self-sustaining. As described earlier, Rotunda’s projects are often indirectly supported by entities like the NHPRC, which has provided subventions for the documentary print editions. After the current grants expire, Rotunda’s sustaining revenue is expected to come from sale of its products and from grants for development of future individual projects. In an entrepreneurial move, Rotunda has also started Oculus, “which offers consulting services to other publishers and to digital projects that are in development,” also with the support of the Mellon Foundation.
Rotunda is well poised to continue in its role of presenting the academic achievements that are at the center of a university, both to the academic community, and with the American Founding Era project, to the nation at large.
1 “The Rotunda: History,” The University of Virginia, http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/rotunda/rotundaHistory.html.
2Penny Kaiserlian, “University of Virginia Press,” in “University Presses 2008: Snapshots in Time,” compiled by Rebecca Ann Bartlett, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40 (Oct. 2008): 26-28.
Peter Givler
Executive Director, AAUP
Virtually all of my time at the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair was spent in meetings of other publishing associations, so I didn’t spend much time on the floor of Hall 8, the main exhibition hall for U.S., Canadian, U.K. and Israeli publishers, and my impressions of the mood and pace of the rights business being transacted this year are frankly impressionistic and spotty. Certainly the nose dive in the markets was on everyone’s mind. Some thought business was slower, while others seemed to think it was more-or-less business as usual, with one Director telling me his biggest problem was that he couldn’t compete for the good stuff. He had just lost a book to a commercial publisher who had offered five times what he was willing to pay. That there’s too much cash chasing hot books is a perennial complaint, and not just at Frankfurt, but it doesn’t appear to have dried up. At least not yet.
On open access, one interesting new development was the decision by the European Commission to fund OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) for a 30-month pilot project to the tune of €900,000, announced one week before the Fair. OAPEN is a coalition of six European university presses, spearheaded by Amsterdam University Press, seeking to “achieve a sustainable European approach to improve the quantity, visibility and usability of high-quality OA content and foster the creation of new content by developing future-oriented publishing solutions, including an online library dedicated to HSS [Humanities and Social Sciences], and new business models.” OAPEN is looking for additional participants, and Eelco Verwerda of AUP, the main contact for OAPEN, was at the Fair to discuss the project with potential partners. OAPEN’s current membership does include an English-language publisher, Manchester University Press; if you’re interested in finding out more, you can go to their website at http://www.oapen.org/, or contact Eelco at e.ferwerda@aup.nl.
Since the vast majority of publishing still depends on the market for recovery of publishing costs, protecting copyright was a major item on the agenda at meetings of the publishing associations. A number of the specific issues had to do with the European version of issues also before Congress, such as how best to provide copyrighted materials in the appropriate formats for people with print and other disabilities. Others focused on the problems of developing nations: how to encourage the development of a local publishing industry and respect for both copyright and freedom of expression, for example.
There were also pubic sessions sponsored by the International Publishers Association on new opportunities, like a well-attended session on Web 2.0, and on new threats, like a panel discussion on online book piracy. In the latter, a representative of the Swedish Publishers Association gave a chilling presentation about Pirate Bay, a P2P file-sharing network based in Sweden. Billing itself as the largest file-sharing network in the world, Pirate Bay uses BitTorrent technology and offers unlimited downloads of movies, music, TV programs, sports events and, increasingly, books - all of it free, and none of it authorized.
Pirate Bay started with a free-spirited, Robin Hood ethos, liberating content from the shackles of capitalism for the benefit of the people, but it has become a capitalist enterprise it its own right, with advertising being handled by an agency in Tel Aviv and the money, €2 million last year, flowing into a bank in the Cayman Islands. What is unique about Pirate Bay, and uniquely discouraging, is that despite being blatantly illegal under Sweden’s own laws, it has such popular support there that it operates quite openly and two successive Swedish Prime Ministers have declared it politically untouchable.
Are any of your books available on this site? I’m not going to give the URL here, but it’s a snap to find: just head to your favorite search engine and look up Pirate Bay. Before you look, though, check with your IT staff about protecting your computer against malware. Ads aren’t the only way pirate sites make money.
U.S. Representatives Conyers, Issa, and Feeny introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 6845, on September 9, 2008. AAUP sent a letter in support of the bill to its sponsors and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. The letter defined the bill’s purpose as follows:
On October 28, 2008, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Authors Guild (AG), and Google announced a settlement resolving the lawsuits filed by publishers and authors in 2005. If approved, the agreement may expand online access to in-copyright books and other written materials digitized from U.S. library collections participating in Google Book Search, while recognizing and recompensing copyright holders.
The terms of the settlement require Google to make payments totaling $125 million. These payments will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers, and to cover legal fees. The terms of the agreement would improve access to out-of print books, implement additional ways to purchase copyrighted books, create institutional subscriptions to the digitized collections, and offer free access from designated computers at public and university libraries.
The settlement is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Approval will be decided after May 5, 2009, the deadline set for filing objections to the settlement terms.
AAUP’s lawyer, Linda Steinman, has written a memo for members explaining the basic terms of the settlement in the publishers’ and Authors Guild’s suits against Google. It is now posted on the members only section of the website and can be accessed here: http://aaupnet.org/members/alerts/settlementmemo103108.pdf
You can request your members only login information here:
http://aaupnet.org/pwrequest.html
The Author’s Guild has compiled a listing of information and resources regarding the settlement:
http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/settlement-resources.html
Covered in Publisher’s Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6609089.html
Reactions to the settlement in the Library Journal:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6610115.html?
nid=2673&rid=reg_visitor_id&source=title
By Shaun Manning, Communications Coordinator, AAUP
While the opportunities and challenges of digital publishing remain hot button topics in the scholarly publishing community, the Romance Studies series from Penn State University Press represents a concrete example of how online and print-on-demand publishing can sustain projects that would otherwise not be possible. Originally titled Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures when it debuted in the early 1990s and discontinued early in the new century, the more broadly-based Romance Studies series allowed Penn State to continue publishing “first book” monographs in this field by taking advantage of new digital technologies.
“Penn State Romance Studies in large measure responded to the need to support an area of scholarship that was underserved, expanded its editorial focus to move beyond simply ‘literature’ to include film, theatre, translations, and other foreign language-related titles,” said Patrick H. Alexander, Co-Director of Penn State’s Office Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), which oversees Romance Studies, and Associate Director/Editor-in-Chief of Penn State University Press. In addition to the four books currently available on the Romance Studies site, Penn State plans to release future titles at a rate of about three per year.
“This development coincided with the university’s press and libraries creating the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Peter Potter (now editor-in-chief at Cornell University Press) and Bonnie MacEwan (now dean of libraries at Auburn University),” Alexander explained. “Now co-directed by Michael J. Furlough, assistant dean of the libraries at Penn State, and myself, ODSP brings to bear the strengths of both library and press to experiment with making the volumes available–––at least initially–––both digitally and in a traditional, but ‘on-demand,’ print format.” He added that the press handles traditional publishing concerns, including peer review, copy editing, and design, while the library creates and hosts the online version using DPubS software, a platform originally developed for Cornell’s Project Euclid.
Given that the Romance Studies titles are available for sale in a print format as well as having significant portions available for free online, there was, at Penn State as with other presses exploring digital models, some concern as to whether the availability of these free chapters would ultimately hurt sales of the print volume. “Indeed there were concerns, and the jury’s still out,” Alexander said. “We wrestled with the conflict of interest between an Open Access online version and a printed edition. If the volume were available online, who would buy the print?” He added that the press’s partnership with the library alleviated many costs associated with digital publishing and distribution, but that print sales were still very important to offset the editorial, production, and other overhead costs of publishing.
“We weighed various options: no access, partial access, degraded print access, and full access,” Alexander said. ODSP’s solution was to offer all of books’ content available as chapter-by-chapter downloadable PDFs, but only around 50% of each book will be printable from these files. “It’s possible that some potential readers of Romance Studies titles will be happier to get a single chapter or do a short check online, rather than buy a book. But the online reading experience will not replicate the in-print experience, nor will printing out a whole book on the laser printer really replace the book.” He noted that the open access model presents an opportunity for greater dissemination of scholarship, but that questions remain as to how a majority of users will interact with the material in digital and print formats. For example, are the PDFs read on screen or printed out? What would each case indicate as to how Penn State should offer the Romance Studies books? Are users likely to print out an entire book, if all chapters were available, rather than simply purchasing a bound copy? “The problem is that we won’t be able to definitely prove these assumptions unless we can discover what motivates our readers’ behavior,” Alexander said.
Regardless of the challenges, though, the Romance Studies list from Penn State Press and the university’s Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing represents an important step for the press as it navigates the changing landscape of scholarly communication. “We recognize that standing still is not an option when the flow of knowledge and information and the demand of users for digital content are so great,” Alexander said. “ODSP has become a sort of Petrie dish that permits us to experiment in ways that as simply a ‘press’ we would not be able to do. In a noncompetitive environment, it allows the press to learn more about its own strengths and weaknesses and how to bring those to bear in fulfilling the university’s overall mission to disseminate knowledge and information.
“The Penn State Romance Studies series also represents a commitment to experimenting with ‘open access’ to book content that was emphasized as an imperative in AAUP’s Statement on Open Access drafted by our director, Sanford Thatcher, so as to help bridge the growing ‘digital divide’ between book and journal content in the OA world.”