From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 08:26:57 +0100

Founded in 1999 by three Berkeley professors, bepress (formerly
Berkeley Electronic Press) spent the first decade of its existence
building up a portfolio of peer-reviewed journals -- much like any
scholarly publisher. In 2011, however, it took what might seem like a
surprising decision: it decided to sell all its journals to De Gruyter
and reinvent itself as a technology company.

Instead of publishing journals, bepress is now focussed on developing
and licensing the publishing technology it created for its earlier
publishing activities, and its flagship product is a cloud-based
institutional repository/publishing platform called Digital Commons.

Digital Commons is currently licensed to more than 320 academic
institutions, who use the software to publish over 700 journals, 94%
of which are open access. This publishing activity is invariably
managed by the institution's library, and often includes the
publishing of books, conference proceedings, data sets, audio-visual
collections, and other digital content types too.

Is this a sign of things to come: Publishers becoming technology
companies and librarians becoming publishers? President and CEO of
bepress Jean-Gabriel Bankier believes it is. As he puts it in a Q&A
just published, "Library-led publishing is an integral strategy in the
university taking back ownership of scholarly communication." As such,
he adds, the future of scholarly publishing now "lies in the hands of
libraries and scholars."

To support his argument Bankier cites a US study in which 55% of the
universities and colleges surveyed said that they are offering or
considering offering library publishing services.

What all this means, he says, is that if publishers "want to continue
to play a significant role in supporting the changing needs of the
research community" they will need to consider following the example
of bepress, and morph from content provider to technology company.

The interview with Bankier can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/interview-with-jean-gabriel-bankier.html