From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2012 12:18:47 +0100

It is interesting to note that most (possibly all) of the university presses
that have survived and flourished have moved on from only publishing the
output of their own faculty.  That tended to lead to broad subject coverage
(and, arguably, variable quality levels).  What I believe happened next was
that the Presses realised that they needed to specialise (often in areas
where their own faculty had particular strength) - you can't effectively
market a list which covers a little bit of everything.  And in order to
offer the most outstanding list possible in those specialist areas, they
began to seek out the best authors wherever they were.

They became in effect scholarly publishers like other scholarly publishers -
with a couple of big differences, however.  One is that the university is
(on one way or another - structures differ) the sole owner/shareholder, and
any surpluses made go back to the parent institution.  The other is that it
is (in my experience, at least) the policy of the Press to publish
particularly valuable scholarly works that almost certainly will lose money,
provided enough surplus is made from other publications to keep the
enterprise afloat overall (some, particularly in the US, have diversified
into non-scholarly publications - e.g. books of local interest - to achieve
this).  Commercial publishers do not, in my experience, knowingly publish
loss-makers (which is different from taking risks on books whose success is,
by definition, unknown)

Sally

Sally Morris
Email:  [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 10:06:45 +0100

Dear Rick,

I am not sure when university presses mainly published the output of their
universities as did learned societies the output of their members but
certainly in the past this was their function. What I do know is that part
of the success of commercial publishers was due to the fact that these
existing publishing organisations were seen as stifling new developments and
being in the hands of a relatively narrow group who decided what should be
published. I am not saying that this was in fact the case but I can say from
experience of someone who has started 100s of new journals in my time that
those who came to me with proposals usually if not invariably did so on this
basis.

These are publishers. It seems to me that the idea that departments should
decide who gets funding to pay APCs is much more of a problem. Wearing my
academic hat I would suggest that where disbursement of any funds is
concerned it is not infrequent that heads of department use their patronage
to favour those in their own group. They are the filter. Even Wellcome, who
are really generous funders of publications, pass the responsibility
downstream to institutions holding grants from them after a period of time.
There will have to be selection. I do not think academics in general want
their peers or superiors to be the selectors. Like you I am not suggesting
that such problems are insuperable.

Back in 2002 Raym Crow wrote an extremely lucid explanation of the new
publication environment which could be centred on the institutional
repositories in his Case for Institutional Repositories - see
http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/readings.shtml. The fact that his
suggested re-alignment of scholarly communication has not come to pass does
not mean the analysis is other than excellent. I have just been teaching a
class of students and using his thinking as a starting point. I cannot
remember whether he mentions branding

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:50:07 +0000

Isn't this becoming a debate about whether research institutions should take
responsibility for publishing the research done by their staff? This is a
big shift since, historically, institutions have largely left responsibility
for publishing to their research staff.

If we accept that institutions need to take over this responsibility from
individual staff, then we need to ask the question: will institutions be any
good at discharging this responsibility?

Another question is whether scholars will trust institutions to perform the
kind of branding for their own output that is currently performed by
third-party journals. Under the current system, if I publish an article in a
prestigious journal, those who see the citation have pretty good reason to
expect that my article is of high quality, because the journal publisher has
no vested interest in advancing my career. But what if those who see the
citation know that the publisher is also my employer?

I'm not saying this is an insuperable problem, only that it's one more thing
that would have to be considered if we want to get serious about moving in
this direction. What it would amount to, really, is institutional
self-publishing. Every journal would be seen as, essentially, a vanity press
of its institution unless some kind of structurally rigorous discrimination
were built into the system. (And what would be the institution's incentive
for building such rigor in?)

--
Rick Anderson
Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah
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