On August 10, President Obama signed into law H.R. 2765, known as the SPEECH Act. Strongly supported by the publishing community and other First Amendment advocates, the act prohibits federal courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign libel judgments that do not pass First Amendment muster. The legislation also allows American authors and publishers to seek a declaration in court that such a foreign judgment is not enforceable in the U.S., and to do so even if no attempt has been made to enforce the foreign judgment.
In FY 2009, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 32% of peer-reviewed project proposals through its grants programs. In that same year, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was able to fund less than 17% of peer-reviewed proposals with its program funds. Approximately $60 million over FY 2010 levels of funding is needed to make up that gap in funding for humanities research and teaching. One hundred members of the National Humanities Alliance, including representatives from AAUP and member presses, went to Capitol Hill on March 9 to ask Congress to make up this difference with a total of $204 million in NEH program funds and to strongly oppose the president’s proposed cuts of approximately $7.2 million to the Endowment.
The other federal humanities funding agency of significance to scholarly publishing is the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant-making arm of the National Archives. Humanities advocates also lobbied Congress for program funds of $10 million for the NHPRC. Importantly, Congress is also being asked to consider reauthorizing the NHPRC at $20 million, raising the cap of possible funding.
More recently, on May 3 the “Preserving the American Historical Record Act” (PAHR) (S. 3227) was introduced by Senators Hatch and Levin to establish a program of formula grants to support archives and the preservation of historical records at the state and local level through the National Archives. The act is identical to legislation introduced in the House last year and is endorsed by the National Coalition for History.
NHA Issues at a Glance: http://www.nhalliance.org/advocacy/issues/index.shtml
PAHR Act: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:s3227is.txt.pdf
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.
Former Representative Jim Leach was confirmed by the Senate as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on August 7, 2009. Nominated in June for the position by President Obama, Leach was the co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Humanities Caucus.
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.
Children’s book publishers and their representatives have been urgently advocating for an exemption from the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), the requirements of which were to go into effect February 10, 2009. On Friday January 30, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously to issue a one year stay of enforcement for certain testing and certification requirements which had been part of CPSIA.
CPSIA was enacted last August in response to reports of high lead content in imported toys manufactured in China. The law imposes stringent requirements for lead-content testing of toys and other children’s products. CPSIA had the potential to have serious, if unintended consequences for children’s book publishing.
The stay of enforcement provides relief from some of the requirements which were to be enforced beginning next week. The stay pushes the enforcement of these requirements back to February 10, 2010. At that point, the Commission will vote on whether or not to terminate the stay, after it has had more time to consider whether any products will be exempted from the act. According to the press release, the stay requires that, “Manufacturers and importers – large and small – of children’s products will not need to test or certify to these new requirements, but will need to meet the lead and phthalates limits, mandatory toy standards and other requirements.”
Several publishers had been contacted in early November by retailers, indicating that if presses did not certify their books as meeting the new CPSIA lead-content limitations, those books would be removed from the retailers’ inventory. It is uncertain as to how much relief this stay will provide to publishers, as Allan Adler explained in Publisher’s Weekly: “Whether or not this gives us more breathing room really depends on the reaction of the distribution chain to this stay.”
Read the press release from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml09/09115.html
In Publisher’s Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6633893.html?nid=2286&source=link&rid=1160192508
The presentation made by the AAP group on behalf of publishers to the Commission on January 22 can be viewed here:
http://www.cpsc.gov/ABOUT/Cpsia/publishers.html
On his first full day in office, January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama restored the protections of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Revoking George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13233, Obama’s new order also restores limits on who may claim executive privilege to block the release of executive office records to incumbent and living former presidents. EO 13233 had groundlessly expanded “executive privilege” to include Vice Presidents, and designated representatives of both living and deceased former presidents and vice presidents.
Bush’s order was signed on November 1, 2001, and was an early indicator of the stifling secrecy and over-reaching claims of executive power that would characterize the next seven years. Led by prominent historians, a broad coalition of scholars, journalists, publishers, librarians, and First Amendment interest groups fought the Bush order in the courts of law and public opinion. While the former battles were hampered by issues of standing (all lawsuits had to be predicated on specific records that were being held back under the provisions of the order), public opinion remained on the side of public access to the records of our executive civil servants. Obama’s early action on this matter is testament to its importance.
AAUP joined amici in supporting the lawsuits, and organized a brochure and book exhibit highlighting some of the American history impossible to write without guaranteed access to presidential records. The books included specialist studies of the policies of the Vietnam and Cold Wars, as well as popular biographies such as Robert Caro’s award-winning and still-incomplete The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a projected four-volume life of the 36th president.
January 21, 2009, was in many ways a red-letter day for freedom of information. In addition to the Executive Order on Presidential Records, Obama issued a memorandum to executive departments and agencies regarding the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The administration re-affirmed the democratic tenets of accountability and transparency, stating clearly: “In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”
Obama Executive Order on Presidential Records:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords/
Bush Executive Order 13233:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2001/11/eo-pra.html
January 21, 2009 Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/foia/2009foia.mem.rel.pdf