Sandy's remarks were enormously valuable and useful. Many thanks for this post.

It should be mentioned that the Canadian scene incorporates significant subsidies to monograph publishing amounting to around 2 million dollars per year. At least this was the amount of money available when I was VP of the Canadian of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in charge of the "dissemination of research portfolio" within the Federation (about five years ago). The Federation administers this programme on behalf of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. In my capacity within the Federation, I tried to argue that all the books that had been subsidized by this programme and that were out of print should be digitized and offered in open access. I further argued that the rates of downloads applied to these titles would give interesting indications about titles that might deserve being reprinted. Alas, I hit a wall: university presses had this idea that there was some gold in them thar's hills, and, furthermore, several had already signed binding contracts with various commercial outfits such as eBrary to digitize their backlog.

The point of all this is that, nowadays, university presses are so pressed for money by their parent institutions that they have lost most if not all of any elbow room they might have had in the past. This fragility has also made the heads of these presses deeply risk-adverse, and very nervous about any form of change.

Curiously, Australia seems to be moving forward more easily than Canada despite the fact that, so far as I know, subsidies for monographs do not exist or have not existed for quite a few years. This must mean that universities in Australia are retaining a strong sense of their mission as disseminators of knowledge beyond the ivory tower. I hope Canadian universities find inspiration in this Australian example (to which we should  add Athabasca University more locally).

Jean-Claude Guédon