From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:21:36 -0500

All I can say is "amen" and "it's about time." Let me explain why.

Back in the late 1960s Indiana librarian Bernard Fry and associates
published an NSF-funded study of the allocation of resources in
library acquisitions between books and journals, documenting a shift
from great expenditures on the former to greater expenditures on the
latter, which was an early recognition of what later came to be called
"the serials crisis."

Responding in part to this shift, but also for other reasons, several
of my colleagues at Princeton University Press where I was then
working  wrote a series of articles for the Journal of Scholarly
Publishing about the "crisis in scholarly communication." Although the
last of these articles was fairly optimistic about the effects of
changes at presses that could shield them from some of the new
economic pressures attributable to declining library sales of
monographs, the problems continued to get worse over time.  Later in
the 1970s several foundations cooperated to fund the National Enquiry
into Scholarly Communication (housed at PUP), which produced a report
in 1979 that recommended, among other things, a broader sharing of
support for scholarly publishing among all universities, which this
new AAU/ARL initiative is finally taking to heart:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Scholarly_communication.html?id=fLEXAAAAMAAJ

At Princeton University Press we began to think about other approaches
to publishing monographs, particularly in certain fields that the
market could not adequately support, such as literary criticism and
Latin American studies. Herb Bailey, PUP's director, dubbed these
"endangered species." He had long had contact with leaders of the
Mellon Foundation, and we discussed our concerns with them. (Mellon
was later to be headed by William Bowen, former president of
Princeton, who had served on PUP's board of trustees during his
presidency.) Nothing directly resulted from those discussions then.

But after moving to Penn State as the new director of its press, I
began to develop these ideas further, in conversation especially with
then Associate Librarian Bonnie MacEwan (now at Auburn), and
eventually we came up with the idea for an electronic monograph
publishing project in Latin American studies. Taking advantage of Penn
State's entry into the Big Ten and the Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (CIC) academic consortium (which also includes Chicago),
we eventually took our proposal to the CIC head librarians and press
directors, who held a series of joint meetings during the early 1990s
and put together a plan to launch an electronic monograph publishing
program, focused on two fields, literary criticism and African
American studies. A formal proposal was submitted to the Mellon
Foundation circa 1996, but by that time Mellon had already decided to
fund some other projects, including Project Muse and JSTOR, and
declined to pursue our CIC project, which then went into abeyance as
the CIC executive director retired as did also most of the head
librarians and press directors who had supported the project.

During all this time I continued to write about the "crisis"
concerning monograph publishing as it manifested itself in various
ways. In 1990 I wrote about how the shift in trade publishing toward
"blockbusters" left commercial publishers less inclined to publish
"mid-list" books, which then became available to university presses,
which were looking for books with better sales potential and
preferring these titles to traditional monographs:
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vq990 In 1995 I explained why
Penn State Press had decided to discontinue publishing in traditional
literary criticism for economic reasons:
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr13m

In 1996 I penned an essay titled "A Nonmarket Solution for Scholarly
Publishing?" that suggested a dual track for university press
publishing, one track to be developed in much the nonmarket, "open
access" way outlined in this new AAU/ARL initiative while the other
track would continue to be based on the market for books presses could
viably sustain through sales in retail channels:

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/downloads/9880vr155

In the late 1990s I served on an advisory committee (along with Ann
Okerson) that helped Bob Darnton develop his ideas for what became the
Mellon-supported Gutenberg-e and ACLS Humanities E-book projects
(which were not, however, "open access"):

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr53k

Later, in cooperation with the Libraries at Penn State, the Press
launched the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in 2005 to
implement "open access" publishing of various kinds, including a
monograph series in Romance studies. This remains ongoing today.  As
president of the AAUP I took the opportunity to draft its Statement on
Open Access, calling for more attention to be paid to the plight of
monographs.  And I continued to write about open access and monograph
publishing, as the university press columnist for Against the Grain
for three years:

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr63t

I attended a conference at Harvard in February 2012 convened by Bob
Darnton to discuss Frances Pinter's emerging idea for what became
Knowledge Unlatched, and there both Paul Courant and I argued for an
alternative approach that would provide direct subsidies to junior
faculty for publication of their first books. (Courant must have been
a principal member of the AAU/ARL Task Force because this proposal has
all the earmarks of his thinking.) Most recently I was privileged to
serve on the search committee for the new director of the "open
access" humanities monograph publisher Amherst College Press and to
support the work of the Digital Public Library of America, which was
inspired, of course, by Bob Darnton.

The point of this brief history is to make it clear how long this kind
of initiative has been in gestation, for at least two decades, if not
even longer.  So, I say, indeed "it's about time." I welcome it with a
hearty three cheers.  This can change the face of university press
publishing forever, freeing it to pursue the mission of publishing the
best scholarship irrespective of its market potential, while also
allowing presses to continue publishing other works, like regional
books, that still have a viable market.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 20:42:33 -0400
>
> The Association of American Universities and the Association of
> Research Libraries have an ongoing scholarly communications task
> force, comprising provosts and librarians from leading institutions.
> This group released just a few days ago a proposal to support a
> critical early phase of scholarly publishing.  Given the source, this
> is a project with very good prospects.
>
> "Prospectus for an Institutionally Funded First-book Subvention"
>
> http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/aau-arl-prospectus-for-institutionally-funded-first-book-subvention-june2014.pdf
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown