Frankfurt Report 2009
The Entrepreneurial University Press
The Charleston Conference: Usage and Innovation
A View from Ithaka: An Interview with Kate Wittenberg
Amended Google Settlement Submitted
Miscellany:
University Press Books Honored
Books for Understanding Updates
U.S. v Stevens Argued Before Supreme Court
Green Press Initiative Publisher Toolkit
Submission Policy
Calendar: See the Events Calendar at www.aaupnet.org
Peter Givler
Executive Director, AAUP
Everyone expected that this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair would be slower than usual, but no one knew by how much. As it turned out, it was slow, but not nearly as bad as the 2001 Fair that took place a month after 9/11, when there were significant last-minute cancellations and many empty booths. Attendance this year was down by 4%, according to the Fair management, and my general impression in Hall 8 (headquarters for U.S. and U.K book publishers) was that almost all the usual publishers were there, although perhaps with smaller stands and fewer people. The AAUP members I spoke with all felt the business they were doing was, if not great, certainly good enough. This was surely helped by the fact that the book trade in the U.K and Western Europe has been much less affected by the economic downturn than it has been in the U.S.
A few items of general interest. Each year the Fair designates one country as a Guest of Honor. This year it was China, which caused a certain amount of drama during the Fair because of the Chinese government’s policies restricting freedom of expression. The New York Times has provided a good summary: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19books.html.
In April, I became Chair of the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) Copyright Committee, and in that capacity attended a number of IPA and other publishing association meetings held during the Fair. One matter of general concern is how the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) so-named Development Agenda will play out. The Development Agenda basically instructs WIPO to give particular attention to the needs of developing economies. Under that directive WIPO is now considering the question of whether it should, by means of a treaty, mandate that its members implement copyright exceptions in their national laws to address the needs of Visually Impaired Persons (VIPs), and to permit cross-border transfer of educational materials.
According to the World Blind Union, 80% of VIPs in countries with developing economies live below the poverty line. No one disputes that low-cost or cost-free access to the written word in appropriate formats—large type, Braille, audiobooks, etc.–is a fundamental requirement for personal and social advancement. The only question is whether this goal can be best achieved by means of a WIPO treaty, which takes 5-10 years to create and up to an equal amount of time to be implemented by WIPO’s member states, or whether there is a faster path to implementation through voluntary cooperation among stakeholders. Representatives of VIPs, publishers organizations, and reproduction rights organizations (RROs) have been making good progress on creating a framework for the necessary infrastructure.
The ethical imperative for an exception permitting cross-border transfer of educational materials is perhaps less clear. On the one hand, there is an undeniable need for low-cost access to educational materials in developing economies. On the other, educational publishing is the bedrock of local publishing in those same developing economies, accounting for as much as 90% of the industry. So what would be the overall effect of an educational exception on the local publishing industry and the development of an indigenous book culture? From a legal point-of-view, bringing something as broad as an educational exception into harmony with the Berne three-step test will present interesting challenges. This complicated issue is scheduled to be formally introduced at WIPO later this fall.
Finally, and on a completely different note, Saskia DeVries and Eelco Verwerda at Amsterdam University Press convened a two-hour meeting of interested parties to discuss the desirability of starting a European Association of university presses. 50 people attended, representing some 30 presses from 12 countries. The challenges are obvious, but there was great enthusiasm for the idea and a wonderful discussion of needs and possible joint projects. An organizing committee was formed, and there will be a follow-up meeting at the London Book Fair next year. This is a very exciting development; AAUP began with just such a series of informal meetings held in the 1920s at the ur-precursor to BEA, and I wish our European friends every success.
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.
The parties to the Google Book settlement submitted a revised version of the settlement to the court late on November 13. Revisions include a reduced scope of coverage (limited to works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada), the establishment of a fiduciary working out of the Book Rights Registry to look out for the interests of orphan works rightsholders, an increase in the possible number of library access terminals, and the ability for rightsholders to make their books available for free or under licenses such as those from Creative Commons. The “most favored nation” clause that was a cause of concern for many has been eliminated, allowing the Books Rights Registry to “license to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.” Publishers from the U.K., Australia, and Canada have been added as plaintiffs, and will have representation on the Books Rights Registry.
Under the revised settlement, the deadline to claim books has been extended to March 31, 2011.
In a court order filed on November 19, Judge Chin gave preliminary approval to the revised settlement. In his preliminary approval, he set important dates for moving forward: supplemental notices will be sent beginning December 14, objections to the amended portions of the settlement must be filed by January 28, and a final fairness hearing has been scheduled for February 18.
In a memorandum filed the day following the court order, November 20, Amazon requested that judge to reconsider the preliminary approval he had granted to the settlement, citing that the decision was made without the benefit of opposing viewpoints from members of the class.
View the amended settlement agreement and the supplemental notice (a shorter document which details the changes to the settlement) here: http://www.googlebooksettlement.com
View a redlined version of the settlement: http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/amended_settlement_redline.pdf
Books published by university presses were much lauded this fall, with five National Book Award nominations, one of which went on to win in its category. On November 18, Keith Waldrop’s, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, published by the University of California Press, was named winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for 2009.
Joining Waldrop with nominations in the Poetry category were Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press) and Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (University of Pittsburgh Press). In Fiction, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, a story collection published in the Wayne State University Press “Made in Michigan Writers Series,” was nominated. Adrienne Mayor’s masterful combination of storytelling and scholarship in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, (Princeton University Press) was nominated in the Non-Fiction category.
The announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize Winners also highlighted the importance of scholarly publishers. Two university presses had published the work of 2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature Herta Mueller in translation: Nadirs is available from the University of Nebraska Press, and The Land of Green Plums and Traveling on One Leg from Northwestern University Press. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has had her work published by a number of AAUP presses. MIT Press recently published Catherine Brady’s Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA, tracing the life and work of one of this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
AAUP congratulates these presses, along with the many other AAUP members who every day publish works honored and valued by scholars, associations, and prize committees.
Press release:
http://www.aaupnet.org/news/press/october2009prizes.html
All prizes and honors received by AAUP books:
http://www.aaupnet.org/news/prizes.html
In October, AAUP released a newly revised version of its Books for Understanding New York City bibliography. Now featuring more than 300 titles from 34 presses, this extensive list includes books on the city’s history and culture, as well as guides and reference works.
Other recently updated Books for Understanding Lists include China, Social Security, the Nonprofit Sector & Philanthropy, Somalia, Sudan, and Voting & Elections.
http://www.booksforunderstanding.org
US v. Stevens, a case that raised First Amendment concerns about a federal statute intended to outlaw the animal cruelty, was argued in front of the Supreme Court on October 6. The justices generally seemed skeptical of the statute, asking questions and presenting hypotheticals that pointed to possible overbreadth of the law’s language.
AAUP joined librarians, publishers, writers, and other media groups in an amicus brief urging the court to declare this statute unconstitutional, in view of the danger it poses to First Amendment protections.
AAUP statement: http://www.aaupnet.org/news/press/stevens.html
A decision is not expected until early 2010.
“Court seems hostile to law against animal-cruelty depictions”
Analysis by Tony Mauro, First Amendment Center:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=22169
The Green Press Initiative (GPI), of which AAUP is an industry member, makes available a Book Publisher Toolkit, which details steps and guidelines for responsible paper use. The toolkit also features brief case studies from publishers of various sizes, and a breakdown of the various Forest Certification Schemes.
Staff at AAUP member presses are encouraged to submit article proposals to The Exchange about initiatives at member presses, industry news or trends, and other topics of interest to the scholarly publishing community. Feature articles are typically 700-1300 words in length.
The copy deadline for the Winter 2010 issue of The Exchange will be Monday, February 1. Initial proposals should generally be submitted at least one month in advance of the copy deadline.
Proposals may be sent to the Exchange editor, Meredith Benjamin, at mbenjamin@aaupnet.org.