From: Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:36:23 -0400

**
Sandy's remarks were enormously valuable and useful. Many thanks for this
post.

It should be mentioned that the Canadian scene incorporates significant
subsidies to monograph publishing amounting to around 2 million dollars per
year. At least this was the amount of money available when I was VP of the
Canadian of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in
charge of the "dissemination of research portfolio" within the Federation
(about five years ago). The Federation administers this programme on behalf
of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. In my capacity
within the Federation, I tried to argue that all the books that had been
subsidized by this programme and that were out of print should be digitized
and offered in open access. I further argued that the rates of downloads
applied to these titles would give interesting indications about titles
that might deserve being reprinted. Alas, I hit a wall: university presses
had this idea that there was some gold in them thar's hills, and,
furthermore, several had already signed binding contracts with various
commercial outfits such as eBrary to digitize their backlog.

The point of all this is that, nowadays, university presses are so pressed
for money by their parent institutions that they have lost most if not all
of any elbow room they might have had in the past. This fragility has also
made the heads of these presses deeply risk-adverse, and very nervous about
any form of change.

Curiously, Australia seems to be moving forward more easily than Canada
despite the fact that, so far as I know, subsidies for monographs do not
exist or have not existed for quite a few years. This must mean that
universities in Australia are retaining a strong sense of their mission as
disseminators of knowledge beyond the ivory tower. I hope Canadian
universities find inspiration in this Australian example (to which we
should  add Athabasca University more locally).

Jean-Claude Guédon