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]