From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:21:36 -0500 All I can say is "amen" and "it's about time." Let me explain why. Back in the late 1960s Indiana librarian Bernard Fry and associates published an NSF-funded study of the allocation of resources in library acquisitions between books and journals, documenting a shift from great expenditures on the former to greater expenditures on the latter, which was an early recognition of what later came to be called "the serials crisis." Responding in part to this shift, but also for other reasons, several of my colleagues at Princeton University Press where I was then working wrote a series of articles for the Journal of Scholarly Publishing about the "crisis in scholarly communication." Although the last of these articles was fairly optimistic about the effects of changes at presses that could shield them from some of the new economic pressures attributable to declining library sales of monographs, the problems continued to get worse over time. Later in the 1970s several foundations cooperated to fund the National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication (housed at PUP), which produced a report in 1979 that recommended, among other things, a broader sharing of support for scholarly publishing among all universities, which this new AAU/ARL initiative is finally taking to heart: http://books.google.com/books/about/Scholarly_communication.html?id=fLEXAAAAMAAJ At Princeton University Press we began to think about other approaches to publishing monographs, particularly in certain fields that the market could not adequately support, such as literary criticism and Latin American studies. Herb Bailey, PUP's director, dubbed these "endangered species." He had long had contact with leaders of the Mellon Foundation, and we discussed our concerns with them. (Mellon was later to be headed by William Bowen, former president of Princeton, who had served on PUP's board of trustees during his presidency.) Nothing directly resulted from those discussions then. But after moving to Penn State as the new director of its press, I began to develop these ideas further, in conversation especially with then Associate Librarian Bonnie MacEwan (now at Auburn), and eventually we came up with the idea for an electronic monograph publishing project in Latin American studies. Taking advantage of Penn State's entry into the Big Ten and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) academic consortium (which also includes Chicago), we eventually took our proposal to the CIC head librarians and press directors, who held a series of joint meetings during the early 1990s and put together a plan to launch an electronic monograph publishing program, focused on two fields, literary criticism and African American studies. A formal proposal was submitted to the Mellon Foundation circa 1996, but by that time Mellon had already decided to fund some other projects, including Project Muse and JSTOR, and declined to pursue our CIC project, which then went into abeyance as the CIC executive director retired as did also most of the head librarians and press directors who had supported the project. During all this time I continued to write about the "crisis" concerning monograph publishing as it manifested itself in various ways. In 1990 I wrote about how the shift in trade publishing toward "blockbusters" left commercial publishers less inclined to publish "mid-list" books, which then became available to university presses, which were looking for books with better sales potential and preferring these titles to traditional monographs: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vq990 In 1995 I explained why Penn State Press had decided to discontinue publishing in traditional literary criticism for economic reasons: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr13m In 1996 I penned an essay titled "A Nonmarket Solution for Scholarly Publishing?" that suggested a dual track for university press publishing, one track to be developed in much the nonmarket, "open access" way outlined in this new AAU/ARL initiative while the other track would continue to be based on the market for books presses could viably sustain through sales in retail channels: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/downloads/9880vr155 In the late 1990s I served on an advisory committee (along with Ann Okerson) that helped Bob Darnton develop his ideas for what became the Mellon-supported Gutenberg-e and ACLS Humanities E-book projects (which were not, however, "open access"): https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr53k Later, in cooperation with the Libraries at Penn State, the Press launched the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in 2005 to implement "open access" publishing of various kinds, including a monograph series in Romance studies. This remains ongoing today. As president of the AAUP I took the opportunity to draft its Statement on Open Access, calling for more attention to be paid to the plight of monographs. And I continued to write about open access and monograph publishing, as the university press columnist for Against the Grain for three years: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr63t I attended a conference at Harvard in February 2012 convened by Bob Darnton to discuss Frances Pinter's emerging idea for what became Knowledge Unlatched, and there both Paul Courant and I argued for an alternative approach that would provide direct subsidies to junior faculty for publication of their first books. (Courant must have been a principal member of the AAU/ARL Task Force because this proposal has all the earmarks of his thinking.) Most recently I was privileged to serve on the search committee for the new director of the "open access" humanities monograph publisher Amherst College Press and to support the work of the Digital Public Library of America, which was inspired, of course, by Bob Darnton. The point of this brief history is to make it clear how long this kind of initiative has been in gestation, for at least two decades, if not even longer. So, I say, indeed "it's about time." I welcome it with a hearty three cheers. This can change the face of university press publishing forever, freeing it to pursue the mission of publishing the best scholarship irrespective of its market potential, while also allowing presses to continue publishing other works, like regional books, that still have a viable market. Sandy Thatcher > From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]> > Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 20:42:33 -0400 > > The Association of American Universities and the Association of > Research Libraries have an ongoing scholarly communications task > force, comprising provosts and librarians from leading institutions. > This group released just a few days ago a proposal to support a > critical early phase of scholarly publishing. Given the source, this > is a project with very good prospects. > > "Prospectus for an Institutionally Funded First-book Subvention" > > http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/aau-arl-prospectus-for-institutionally-funded-first-book-subvention-june2014.pdf > > Thoughts? > > Jim O'Donnell > Georgetown