From: Colin Steele <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2012 07:48:35 +1000
The recent postings under the various headings, such as ‘Institutional
Publishing’ and ‘The Finch Report’, retrace some of the ground from
previous LibLicense discussions. Given the recent anniversary of
LibLicense, it would be interesting to know how many people receive
the emails in total and what percentage of the total are the few
regular contributors. One suspects only a small proportion of
recipients contribute and few from outside the United States.
In relation to university press publishing, commentators, apart from
Sandy Thatcher, continue to overlook or be unaware of developments
overseas. For example the Australian university e-presses are not
covered in Marshall Poe’s ‘What Can University Presses Do?’, Inside
Higher Ed, July 9. Yet they provide examples of peer-reviewed
monographs available free or purchasable on the web, with POD
options.
Readers of this list might be interested in the June 25 Australian
Government response to the 2011 Book Industry Strategy Group
Report.This inter alia rejected a subsidy of 10-16 million dollars to
four traditional trade-like university presses, who wanted monograph
subsidies for two hundred books over two years. Put simply, it urged
them to look to digital futures. The Australian university “E-Presses”
were less than enthusiastic about that bid, given their more cost
effective models of production and distribution. A new Australian Book
Industry Collaboration Council has now been established with an
academic publishing sub-committee..
In relation to comments about OUP and CUP, these really are ‘sui
generis’. According to trade data , CUP has doubled in size over the
last six years, with revenues, for the year ending April 2011, up 11%
to 237 million pounds. CUP has seen digital revenues raise 70% in the
past year to account for a quarter of total revenue. They have
recently closed their traditional printing press after more than 400
years of printing.
OUP, in 2011, had group sales of 649 million pounds, with a surplus of
123 million pounds, which is why the Vice Chancellor of Oxford always
praises them given the regular transfers of funds from the press to
the University. So Sandy Thatcher is right in saying you can’t make
generic comparisons with most American university presses.
While publish or perish is well-known in the US, especially through
the various reports seeking change, such as those from the Modern
Languages Association, American scholars don’t have to face the
rigidity imposed by the conservative metrics of the research
assessment exercises in countries such as England and Australia.
As Professor Patrick Dunleavy states in his two part London School of
Economics blog article earlier this year, ‘Paper books in a digital
era: How conservative publishers and authors almost killed off books
in university social science’, “When it came to books the bureaudemic
process relied on unspoken and unexamined biases about types of books
and the reputations of publishers. So an obscure monograph with an
Oxbridge university press (a dwindling numerous product) would always
rate a top mark, but a book from a (shudder at the thought)
‘commercial’ publisher must be less ‘research-based’. Over time in the
UK the numbers of books submitted to the Research Assessment Exercise
progressively shrank as these bureaudemic pressures cumulated”.
In 2012, I am a judge for both Non-Fiction and History in the
Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. A number of the
monographs submitted represented many years of research and meticulous
writing, some representing over a decade of work. The present
scholarly quantitative frameworks may well mitigate against such
monographs being written in the future, as scholars in the humanities
and social sciences struggle to meet short-term publication goals, or
‘salami slice’ their intended books into articles to gain more metric
‘brownie points’.
In so doing, we risk narrowing the capacity for considered reflection
and extended narrative argument. If metrics are to be used, a wider
framework needs to be adopted, including public impact assessments and
usage analyses for monographs in the social sciences and the
humanities.
Picking up Anthony Watkinson’s point on the history of serial
publishing, it is only in the last forty years that we have seen the
academic dominance of the larger multinational publishers and their
rising profit margins. The ‘Guedon/Mabe ‘debates in the first part of
the last decade on the history of scientific publishing since the
1660s, continue to resonate strongly in the responses to the UK Finch
Committee in perspectives on scholarly publishing futures. These are
sure to accelerate now that David Willetts, the Universities and
Science Minister,has accepted the thrust of the Finch Report.
The sense of déjà vu was revived in a recent email from David Stam,
the former Librarian of John Hopkins, New York Public and Syracuse
University. He reminded me of his 1992 retrospective of the sixty
years of the Association of Research Libraries, “Plus ca change”. He
notes that at the first meeting of ARL in December 1932 serial price
increases were on the agenda. “In March of 1933 Secretary Gilchrist
complained that the situation was so serious that Rochester had
already had to cancel four Springer titles in the previous two years”.
Later that year, an ARL memo noted a Medical Library Association
resolution, “that no library subscribe to any periodicals which do not
have a fixed annual subscription price for the entire annual output of
volumes or parts … unless definite word comes to that effect, MLA
recommends cancellation except for one library in each of six to ten
zones throughout American”.
When I attended my first meeting of CAUL, the Council of Australian
University Librarians, in the late 1970’s, a resolution on one agenda
was to cancel all Elsevier titles in order to bring pressure on
Elsevier as to the impact of rising serial prices. Needless to say,
like a similar suggestion by Peter Lyman, when University Librarian of
the University of California, Berkeley, it came to naught. The high
value of the Australian dollar has reduced some of the local debate
from the high angsts of the 1980’s and 1990’s but the current pain
being felt in North American libraries will continue to impact the
need for scholarly communication change in academic publishing.
The frameworks for radical change for wider access to scholarship are
undoubtedly emerging. Never underestimate, however, the lobbying power
by multinational publishers, nor the conservative influences in
academic research assessment exercises and global university league
tables when wider access, within and beyond academia, is being sought.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
Email: [log in to unmask]
|
