From: Colin Steele <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2017 02:46:56 +0000
Two comments on this debate.
My 2014 article, below, picks up some of the historical points that
Sandy Thatcher made in his email of 12 June, in terms of scholarly
communication hopes and disappointments, in USA, UK and Australia. The
issues relating to the monograph are also touched on in: Colin Steele,
Scholarly Communication, Scholarly Publishing and University
Libraries. Plus Ça Change?, Australian Academic and Research
Libraries, December 2014 (1-21).
Available at: https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/11944/1/Steele%20Scholarly%20Communication%202014.pdf
Secondly, northern hemisphere institutions should take note of the
Australian Open Access scholarly monograph initiatives. In 2016, the
ANU Press, which now has around 550 open access publications (mostly
monographs), was reviewed by a panel consisting of Professor Geoff
Crossick, from the UK, Andrew Stammer from CSIRO Publishing and Dr Amy
Brand from MIT Press. Readers of this list might be interested in the
review report which is available at:
http://www.anu.edu.au/files/review/ANU-Press-Review-Report-Final.pdf
Another publication which is of interest and was launched at the
British Academy recently:
Aileen Fyfe, et al. Untangling academic publishing: a history of the
relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the
circulation of research. UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, May
2017. See in particular the Recommendations.
https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/untangling-academic-publishing(d9c19bbd-d3a2-49a9-a3f1-619ec0fca807)/export.html
Best
Colin
---------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
The Australian National University
Room 3.31, Beryl Rawson Building #13
Acton, ACT, 2601
Australia
P: + 61 2 6125 8983
E: [log in to unmask]
From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE
Sent: Monday, 12 June 2017 4:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Future of the University Press
From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2017 09:53:44 -0500
Here is the link:
http://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/The-Future-of-the-University/118?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=869c5421560248be8a97e2271ce565ef&elq=c05818a1a6bf42518cb8f4a35f03bb6b&elqaid=14188&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5954
The very first sentence starts: "People are convinced there is a
crisis in university press publishing . . . ."
This "crisis" has long been with us. In 1997 at a conference
co-sponsored by the AAUP, ARL, and ACLS I gave a talk titled
"Thinking Systematically about the Crisis in Scholarly Communication"
for which i provided this background:
But first it may be useful to offer some historical perspective on
this so-called crisis. It has, in fact, been with us for so long now
that maybe "crisis" is really a misnomer--"chronic illness" may be a
more accurate description. The librarians in this audience will be
familiar with a now classic NSF-funded study by Bernard Fry and
Herbert White published in 1975 that found, for the period 1969-1973,
that the ratio of book to journal expenditures in the largest academic
libraries had dropped over that five-year period from better than 2 to
1 to 1.16 to 1 (Fry/White 1975: 61), with every expectation that this
trend would only get worse--as, indeed, it has. (Recent ARL statistics
show the decline in monograph purchases since 1986 among these
libraries to have been nearly 25%.) Fry and White's prognosis for
university presses was particularly gloomy: their situation, they
said, "can be described, without exaggeration, as disastrous. Already
heavily encumbered by operating deficits..., university presses
appear...to be sliding even more rapidly toward financial imbalance"
(Fry/White 1975: 11).
This precarious situation was viewed with alarm by university presses
themselves at this time. A series of articles appeared in the journal
Scholarly Publishing in April 1972, July 1973, and April 1974 based on
successive surveys of presses covering the years 1970-1974. The first
article, entitled "The Impending Crisis in University Publishing,"
"clearly indicated that presses were in the midst of a period of
extraordinary financial stress, which posed a serious threat to the
continuing survival of many of them" (Becker 1974: 195). The next two
articles bore the titles "The Crisis--One Year Later" and "The
Crisis--Is It Over?" The somewhat encouraging conclusion of the last
article in this series was that, "except for the smaller ones, presses
for the most part have managed to survive their financial difficulties
quite well by making a host of adjustments, including radically
increased book prices, substantially lower discounts, economies
achieved in book production costs, slashing staffs, publishing more
books with sales potential and fewer which cannot pay their own way,
special inventory sales, and so forth." But, the author wondered, how
much more can such methods be used without becoming at some point
self-defeating. Ominously and--as we can now see with the wisdom of
hindsight--presciently, he ended by pointing to "the increasing danger
that presses will turn more and more to publishing books on the basis
of saleability rather than scholarly merit." And, while noting the
temporary mitigating effects that a generous grant from the Mellon
Foundation to presses for publishing books in the humanities might
have, he asked: "But what then?" (Becker 1974: 202)
As Jim said, "There must be some smart people doing some good work"
because we still have a lot of university presses continuing to
function and performing their service for academe and the public good.
Sandy Thatcher
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2017 09:10:29 -0700
The Chronicle of Higher Education today has results of an extensive
survey of University Press leaders and others on the vexed future of
that community. The following link takes you to the landing page for
the feature, but that comprises only a list of links to sub-topics,
most of which are paywalled. Worth an exploration if you have access.
Their introduction: "We asked publishers, press directors, editors,
scholars, and other insiders for their views on the state and future
of academic publishing. Of the people we contacted, including the
heads of nearly every one of the Association of American University
Presses' 143 members, 46 sent back responses to our questions. We got
back a surprisingly wide range of views - and good ideas on how
university presses are preparing for an uncertain future.
At the end of a quarter century of attending meetings and reading
articles discussing the crisis in University Press publishing, I
observe that for there to be still 143 players standing in that space
suggests that something is working. There must be some smart people
doing some good work.
Jim O'Donnell
ASU
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