During this discussion, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch reported on Internet2 and the NDIIPP storage systems symposium.  Cliff also responded to participants’ questions about the Bamboo Project, the trend for university libraries and university presses to work together, and the open access movement.

In honor of the upcoming celebration of open access week and because I felt the need to write something other than administrative memos, I composed the following essay outlining my relationship to commercial scholarly publishing in the wake of concluding my work as editor of Museum Anthropology. It is offered here [CC BY NC SA 3.0] for those who might be interested in my thinking on one piece of the larger scholarly communications puzzle.

Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps [1]

Jason Baird Jackson
Indiana University

Last year, did you get paid nothing to work hard for a multinational corporation with reported revenues of over 1 billion dollars in 2008? [2]

If you have (1) done peer-reviews for, (2) submitted an article to, (3) written a book or media review for, or (4) taken on the editorship of a scholarly journal published by giant firms such as Springer, Reed Elisevier, or Wiley, then you belong to a very large group of very well-educated people whose unpaid labor has helped make these firms very profitable. Their profitability in turn has positioned them to work vigorously against the interests of (1) university presses and other not-for-profit publishers in the public interest, (2) libraries at all levels, (3) university and college students, (4) scholars themselves, and (5) particular and general publics with a need to consult the scholarly record.

I am not willing to freely give my labor to large multinational corporations whose interests align with their shareholders but that are antagonistic to my own. This is my view on one key aspect of scholarly communications today. Scholars can advance several different worthwhile causes by doing all that they can to stop becoming further entangled (individually and collectively) with for-profit scholarly publishers, particularly the largest of the multinational firms that increasingly seek to exert a kind of hegemony over the entire domain of scholarly communications.

There is a great variety of steps that can be taken to build a different, more accessible and progressive system of scholarly communication. My focus here is on five simple choices that scholars can make while sitting at their desk pursuing their own publishing work. These are choices that I have made and that I encourage my colleagues to consider making.

• Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to publications owned by for-profit firms.
• Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being published by a for-profit publisher.
• Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially published journals or book series.

If taken, the preceding steps are individual in their point of action even as they support a variety of more collective projects aimed at redirecting the scholarly communication system in more progressive, sustainable, and open ways.

If you care about university presses, these steps will help.  If you are eager to resist corporate enclosure of public goods, resources, and ideas, they will help. If you care about reform in intellectual property systems, they will help. If you advocate for green open access publishing, they will help.  If you want to cultivate not-for-profit gold open access publishing, they will help.  If you are worried that your college or university library is on the brink of financial collapse, they will help. If you want to make sure that your scholarship is as available as possible to colleagues, students, and the public, they will help. If you believe in open education and other approaches to transforming teaching and learning, they will help. If you are concerned about the harmful effects of media consolidation, they will help. If you are selfish and resent being taken advantage of, they will help.

If you are a shareholder or employee of a for-profit publisher, they, of course, won’t help.

If you believe that only for-profit firms can sufficiently “add value” to your work between the time of authorship and the time of publication, then your views are those of the commercial firms and their lobbyists, but they do not match my own experiences as an author or journal editor or consumer of scholarly works across several disciplines.

If you belong to a discipline in which there are no viable not-for-profit publishing options left, then you and your colleagues face bigger questions that are beyond the scope of this essay (but there is still hope).

The fact that a large number of not-for-profit scholarly societies with active publishing programs have entered into partnership with the large commercial publishers makes coming to an individual conclusion about these issues more difficult, at least vis-a-vis those publications that are simultaneously producing profits for the private publishers and for the not-for-profit scholarly associations. Many scholars value their own scholarly organizations highly and appreciate the variety of services that they provide to members. Scholarly societies have chosen to partner with for-profit publishers because of a perceived need for the revenue that these publishers can provide. As a member and as a journal editor, I have experienced these dynamics in the context of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and its decision to move first from self-publishing to a co-publishing arrangement with the University of Californian Press and then to a publishing partnership with the commercial firm Wiley. The tale of these experiences and their ramifications is the topic for another essay, but my own choice is that I have selected to remain an active member of the AAA but not to undertake further editorial, authorial, or peer-review work for its journals while it remains partnered with Wiley. My hope is to be an effective advocate for (and builder of) alternative approaches to scholarly publication within and beyond the association and to work to understand the costs as well as the benefits that the Wiley partnership has brought. Thankfully, a not-for-profit sector still exists in anthropological publishing. While it has been reduced through the vigorous efforts of the commercial firms, it has been expanded, to a degree, through the founding of some new not-for-profit and open access publication outlets. Resisting commercial publishing and sustaining this diverse and non-commercial communications ecosystem is where I most wish to invest my time and labor. I regret that my association chose to turn its back on the university presses that have long been so important to the social sciences and humanities and that its embrace of commercial publishing has alienated the institutional partners that it could have cultivated in the service of more open approaches to publishing, but nothing is permanent. (On the AAA case, see Kelty et al. 2008)

Not everyone will come to the same conclusions that I have about these issues. That is the way of things. I have found encouragement though in the diversity and energy of the many colleagues who have given serious thought to the problems that scholarly communications work now faces and who are working hard to develop the many solutions that are being pioneered right now. Concluding where I began, with an image of scholars contributing to their own exploitation and to the impoverishment of society generally, I end with a the observations of anthropologist Michael F. Brown. Discussing the decision by the AAA to partner with Wiley, he reflected: “I find myself asking the following question: Why would anyone agree to edit a journal for free or to review submissions for free when the organization that distributes the final product is committed to generating profits for its shareholders or owners? The whole idea of “service to the profession” begins to look like a clever form of economic exploitation (Brown 2007).”

What choices are you making? Are you ready to get out of the business?

Notes

1. My deepest thanks go to everyone who has worked hard to teach me about the world of publishing and libraries, as well as to those who have supported my work as an author, editor and publisher.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA

2 As a measure of scale, consider the following three large commercial STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publishers. For 2008, Springer reported revenues of 892 Million Euros (or about 1.3 Billion U.S. Dollars) (Springer 2008:20). For 2008, Reed Elisevier reported revenues of 5 Billion, 334 Million Euros (or about 7.9 Billion U.S. Dollars) (Reed Elsevier 2008:6). For its Fiscal Year 2008, Wiley reported revenues of 1 Billion, 674 Million U.S. Dollars (Wiley 2008). Revenue is different from profit, but these are very profitable firms. Unlike the bulk of their scholarly content, their annual reports are freely available via the corporate information or investor relations sections of their websites.

References Cited

Brown, Michael F.

2007    Weblog Comment. http://savageminds.org/2007/08/22/press-coverage-on-the-possible-wiley-decision/#comment-112957, accessed October 11, 2009.

Kelty, Christopher M., Michael M. J. Fischer, Alex Golub, Jason Baird Jackson, Kimberly Christen, Michael F. Brown, and Tom Boellstorff

2008    Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies. Cultural Anthropology 23(3):559-558. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3167, accessed October 11, 2009.

Reed Elsevier

2008    Annual Reports and Financial Statements 2008. Amsterdam: Reed Elsevier. http://www.reed-elsevier.com/PDFFiles/ReedElsevier-AnnualReports-08.pdf, accessed October 11, 2009.

Springer

2008    Springer Science+Business Media Annual Report 2008. Berlin: Springer Science+Business Media. http://www.springer-sbm.com/fileadmin/springer_internet/downloads/annual_reports/2008_interim/SpringerSBM_Annual_Report_2008.pdf, accessed October 11, 2009.

Wiley

2008    John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2008 Annual Report. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2008/financial.htm, accessed October 11, 2009.

Update (10/29/2009)

As of this evening, WordPress tells me that about 750 people have specifically consulted this essay. Because it is visible on the main page, I suspect folks visiting for other reasons occasionally notice it and that the WordPress count is mainly of individuals who come to the essay via the links that are out and about. While it is dissipating, there was a lively discussion in a number of places about the essay. For everyone who took the time to read it, link to it, or comment upon it, I am very thankful.

While it has been linked to from a number of places, the discussion unfolded in a few places that can be identified for the benefit of anyone who comes along later.

The comment section of the post itself (and of the thank you post that I wrote later) is an obvious place where discussion unfolded. The others that are known to me are:

The JISC-REPOSITORIES listserv, whose archives are available here. Look for the thread titled “Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself” begun by Stevan Harnad on 10/21/2009. While the thread began with Harnad’s critique, a number of authors recognized that my main point was not an intervention in direct support of Green OA but about a different matter of concern to some but not all scholarly communications workers/observers. I appreciate the discussion that the repositories community gave my reflection and appreciate those who picked up on what I was trying to say.

Stevan Harnad posted a comment here on my site to which I replied. In addition to the JISC-REPOSITORIES listserv, he also posted his statement on his own website (where I also offered a comment) and circulated it on various other OA-related lists.

Thanks also to those who supportive in their positive comments and linking to the essay, including the good people at Savage Minds, Publishing Archaeology, and Cultural Sustainability.  Interested folks on Facebook and Twitter also spread the word about the essay. All of this was a useful lesson in me relative to the power of social media to help spread an idea and facilitate a discussion among scholars and their allies.

I was motivated to gather up these links and notes in an update because I just heard from my friend Randy Lewis about an event being held at the University of Texas Austin. The important gold OA media studies journal FLOW is celebrating its 5th anniversary with panel discussion in which he is participating. (Hacking the Ivory Tower: A Roundtable Discussion). He mentioned that he though he might mention my essay/post. In case anyone new came around to check it out, I wanted to make finding some of the follow up easy.  (Congratulations to everyone who has made FLOW a success, by the way.)

Update (11/1/2009)

Discussion of the essay also took place on the Budapest Open Access Initiative Forum. It can be found archived as a thread at: http://threader.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lists/boaiforum/thread-1786.html Discussion there took place (or at least began) in October. I found the comment of my IU colleague Bob Noel particularly engaging and I appreciate his arguments on behalf of my position. To reiterate, I favor (like Stevan Harnad) action and advocacy in support of green OA but (unlike Stevan Harnad) this is not the only scholarly communications issue that I am concerned to address in my own work.

In an October 31 post (Message #5233) Stevan Harnad reposted his reply to Bob Noel’s BOAI Forum post to the SPARC-OAForum. It can be found here:  https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5233.html Further discussion on the SPARC-OAForum might or might not materialize.

It is interesting to ponder what it means that much of the discussion of the essay has taken place on listserv’s rather than in weblog comment sections.

I forgot previously to mention an additional venue in which discussion of the essay took place–Open Anthropology Cooperative, where Keith Hart offered extensive and interesting commentary. See:  http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/resisting-corporate-enclosure

Yale University Press chose, at a late stage and on the advice of the highest-ranking Muslim in the UN, to pull incendiary comics from a copublished book.

Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World included cartoons of Muhammed, which were taken out at the last minute. Yale UP’s decision was based upon the advice of Ibrahim Gambari and Marcia Inhorn, chair of the council on Middle East studies at Yale.

Inhorn said: “If Yale publishes this book with any of the proposed illustrations, it is likely to provoke a violent outcry.”
Gambari warned: “It will cause riots I predict from Indonesia to Nigeria.”

Whoa. In this case, a little interference may not be as bad as it sounds.

Another thing I would like to draw your attention to is an excellent speech given by Michael Jensen at the Association of American University Presses’ (AAUP) annual meeting last June. Michael Jensen is the Director of Strategic Web Communications at the National Academies Press, one of the oldest Open Access publishers. As Wikipedia states: ‘The National Academy Press (as it was known in 1993) was the first self-sustaining publisher to make its material available on the Web, for free, in an open access model’.  Jensen combined in his plenary presentation the urge for an Open Access business model with the need for environmental changes in publishing. I met Michael Jensen last June as part of the external stakeholder group meeting of the OAPEN project, for which I am doing research, and found him a very passionate Open Access believer though at the same time a very pragmatic person, where he stated, amongst others, that our project should not try to solve all the problems facing Open Access at once but should rather focus on its main goal, on what it set out to achieve in the beginning and work from there. And this shows in my opinion how Jensen is at the same time a man who is not afraid to be both a practical problem solving guy as well as a man who reflects on broad strategic future visions, as set out for instance in his AAUP presentation. The Open Access movement should be proud to have him on its side. I also like the way he says in his presentation that he is not an Open Access zealot but a firm believer in Open Access as the only sustainable publishing model for academic publishing in the years to come: 

“I believe that we must shift our business models — publicly, transparently, intentionally, thoughtfully, but radically — to a digital one, with open access as the backbone of scholarly publishing. We must do this to survive a tremendously turbulent next decade, and to ensure that our mission, and its survival, continues to be fulfilled.”

 His plea goes out to a model in which print is no longer the main course but rather a side-product of publishing, reducing the environmental strain that comes with the physical dissemination of books and journals: 

“Scholarly publishing is a vital part of a larger scholarly communications system, and must be preserved. University Presses also recognize that we have a societal responsibility. We recognize that the lifecycle energy and CO2 costs of printing, shipping, storing, and distributing physical books must be radically curtailed. […]Scholarly publishing’s role in the world must be de-linked from print publication. The print book must become the exception, not the rule, as soon as possible.” 

Underneath you will find his speech as given. You can find the full text here. Underneath the You Tube movies you can find some more inspiring lines from Jensen’s speech.

“To retain the qualities of scholarly communication, we’ll radically shift, if you’ll step up to the plate.

Does that mean giving up some control? Yes.
Does that mean collaborating more? Yes.
Does that mean innovating our way out of a failed system? Yes.
Does that mean embracing various forms of open access in exchange for institutional support? Yes.
Does that mean rethinking the economics, and the cost recovery systems, and the sustainability models of scholarly publishing, based on a collapsing physical world? Yes.

Within the context of a world in crisis, we *must* demonstrate that we’re radically rethinking our relationship to the future. We must demonstrate that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We must seize initiative now, and start making changes as fast as we can.

Open access + digital publishing will help get us to a sustainable world, and keep us in the mix.”

I first read about this interview yesterday via Jacket Copy of the LA Times, though it has been discussed far and wide [as in here at MOBYLIVES] in the hours since.  Quick synopsis: Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Stephen Levy for Wired on the Kindle and the future of the book, which included nuggets such as the following:

Levy: For a special book, do you still want to read the physical book?

Bezos: No. No, in fact, I now … I kind of am grumpy when I am forced to read a physical book. Because it’s not as convenient. Turning the pages … I didn’t know this either, until I started using the Kindles a couple months ago, I mean a couple years ago, I didn’t understand all of the failings of a physical book, because I’m inured to them. But you can’t turn the page with one hand. The book is always flopping itself shut at the wrong moment. They’re heavy. You can only take one or two of them with you at a time. It’s had a great 500-year run. [Audience laughter.] It’s an unbelievably successful technology. But it’s time to change.

Poor Bezos, getting grumpy having to read a book!  Turning pages?  Watch out Jeff, you might get sore from over-exercise!  Carolyn Kellogg of Jacket Copy responded to the above excerpt with the following:

Which seems an odd thing to say for an empire built on the bindings and pages of actual hard-copy books. But Bezos is looking forward, not backward.

But is he? Is Bezos right? Is the book’s 500-year run over?

First, there is the possibility that Bezos is correct.  Nothing is an unassailable force.  However, let’s take Bezos’ comments with a grain of salt.  What is his primary objective in this interview?  Getting people talking about the Kindle, getting journalists to write about the Kindle, and getting bloggers to chatter about the Kindle.  He wants this interview to become viral.  I would honestly not be surprised if the above statement was in some sense a prepared statement.  Not a fed question, by any means, but a brilliant nugget that some PR person came up with that they knew would cause some waves.  So of course his goal is to deliver some great one-liners, regardless of if they

Second, let’s look at what kind of reader Bezos is.  He points out, yes, some flaws in the book’s design as a technology.  And, granted, a large percentage of books are sold to be read in such a fashion–at the beach, by the pool, lying in bed before falling asleep.  Bugt for “all of the failings of a physical book,” Bezos only can name two: the difficulty reading with one hand (which is really only a notable difficulty when reading mass market paperbacks) and the size and weight of books (we will disregard that mass market paperbacks are pretty small and pretty light, due to their cheap quality).  There are a few other deficiencies that he fails to mention, such as an inability to search, but overall when viewed closely Bezos does not exactly point out some death-knell failures of book technology, especially when compared with the failures or inadequacies of the current crop of e-readers: no color, odd-sized pages (particularly for a medium like poetry, though the larger sized Kindle likely begins to address this situation), no ability to take notes, no ability to browse by hand quickly through the entire book, &c.  So perhaps for somebody reading mass-market paperbacks there is a clear winner for the Kindle.  But, though that reader might be the primary propellant for Amazon’s sales, that is not the only reader out there.

Let’s return to the “but it’s time to change” statement that concludes the above excerpt.  When people make these grand claims of major upheaval and revolution, I tend to take them with a grain of salt.  Not necessarily in a cynical way, or at least I attempt to not by cynical about it.  But, still, it seems incredibly pretentious and egotistical to think that you, Jeff Bezos, are going to single-handedly destroy the book as a physical object.  I will grant you that e-books are here to stay, and that they will continue to improve and replace at least a portion of the printed book industry, and that much of that credit will likely go to the Kindle.  I have discussed before the inherent qualities the book has that will be difficult, if not impossible, for the e-book to replace, and I still stand by the idea that the book as physical object has tangible qualities that music-as-a-CD or a movie-as-a-DVD do and did not.

Jeff & Amazon, I will jump on board full fledged when you offer me the following: intelligent search capabilities, note-taking ability (not typing, writing on the book), and some ability to quickly browse through the book.  Oh, and why don’t we hurry up and get access to university press books [aside: an AP wire report on the perilous near-demise of university presses], independent literary presses, &c.  It would be wonderful to go on a vacation and still have access to any and all information I need for whatever project I am currently working on.

On a tangential, but interesting, note, a new poetry application has been released for the iPhone.  Modeled somewhat after the refrigerator magnets, Touch Poet allows for the construction of poems simply on an iPhone or iPod Touch, complete with fully customizable language sets to work with.  The article mentions an ability to upload the poems to Twitter (a poor poetry format, in my view, as there are few formatting options) or to Mail.  Does that mean there won’t be a central site where people can publicly share their creations?

Earlier this week Ted Genoways published what he titled a manifesto on the future of university publications:

Nearly seventy-five years later, Southern Review remains one of the most important quarterlies in the country, and LSU Press has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s most revered university presses. In the last three decades alone, LSU Press’s literary titles have garnered four Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its exceptional history list has won three Bancroft Prizes and the Lincoln Prize. Yet, LSU’s new chancellor, Michael Martin, has targeted both Southern Review and LSU Press as entities within the university that, due to the economic downturn, will now need to contribute additional revenue to the university—or else. According to the preliminary budget report issued by the university, “it is very possible they cannot generate the revenue needed and will close.” In a prepared statement released after the budget was made public earlier this week, Martin praised LSU’s nationally recognized publications as “a very valuable asset to this university” but insisted that “we must protect the academic core of LSU first and foremost.”

That sounds reasonable enough, but what does it really mean? What—or where—exactly is a university’s academic core?

This potential fate for the journal and press at LSU are not unique.  The University of New Mexico, for one, has had an intense and contentious round of layoffs itself.  This idea of profitability is somewhat frightening.  The purpose, to some degree, of the academy is to support ventures that have cultural and intellectual worth, regardless of their monetary worth (or lack thereof).  What is frightening is less the houses themselves and more what the rationale used to either shutter or put pressure on them means for the future of the academy as a whole.  Perhaps LSU is hurting particularly for money to keep functioning, but looking at endowments paints a pretty rosy picture for these universities.  According to Inside Higher Ed, at the end of the 2008 fiscal year 76 schools had at least a $1 billion endowment.

But let’s not just blame the university heads.  Genoways points out many reasons why the university presses are a necessary cog in the academy machinery, and it is rather unassailable that that is the case at least to a large degree.  What is interesting is their difficulty raising funds on their own through outside means.  I do not know the funding situation when it comes to grants or other governmental assistance, but that is a route that the sciences have taken to gather much of the funding necessary to undertake expensive experiments.  If I understand correctly, grants are also how Open Letter, a press at the University of Rochester, are able not only to function but to offer their books in hardcover at a very reasonable rate of $17.95 suggested retail price.  Yes, selling translated fiction is much easier than selling esoteric, academic philosophy books, and the number of sales of Vilnius Poker allow for an economy of scale that other academic publications cannot, but there still seems to be a passivity that is welling up here.

Genoways somewhat unknowingly highlights this passivity:

In 2002, Stephen Greenblatt, the esteemed Renaissance scholar and then president of the Modern Language Society, wrote: “The immediate problem . . . is that university presses, which in the past brought out the vast majority of scholarly books, are cutting back.” That trend has deepened in recent years, to the point that there are now more worthy manuscripts than worthy university presses. Sadder still, by virtually ceding entire genres—poetry, memoir, narrative history, to name a few—university presses have given rise to a crop of independent presses that have siphoned too many books by artists and public intellectuals away from our universities and colleges.

LSU still has a thriving poetry list, namely Reginald Gibbons’ National Book Award finalist Creatures of a Day.  Still, overall, many of the best books of poetry have left the academy boundaries and moved to the many presses that have been popping up left and right.  What is slightly amusing is that this is going on as poets move more and more into the academy with the proliferation of MFA and PhD in creative writing programs giving them professorial jobs.

Is the loss of certain genres a bad thing?  When we look at some of these university presses, their breadth is absolutely phenomenal.  They publish poetry, fiction, philosophy, history, neurobiology, &c &c.  And the books typically require a much higher level of expert to edit in the first place.  What seems to be making the smaller, independent presses viable at least marginally is their narrowed focus and ability to target a customer base.  University presses already have the backbone of library sales; perhaps it is time for each press to narrow its own focus, become particularly interested in one or two topics rather than attempt to publish across the entire swath of academia.  The Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series of books from Stanford comes to mind in particular as something of an example.

Genoways concludes with:

Today, James Monroe Smith looks like a genius for recognizing that great universities extend well beyond the edges of their campuses. They reach out to the larger world, they challenge and engage the public, and the most effective and enduring way of doing so remains the written word. How will history judge today’s university presidents if they fail to protect these legacies of publishing excellence their forebears have entrusted to their care?

The university presidents should work to protect and promote such a vital aspect of academia and the cultural relevancy of America.  The editors of these university presses should at the same time adapt their models to current times and needs.  The big, broad publishing houses are the houses hurting the most right now.  The independent presses (or at least a number of them) are marching valiantly onward.  Is it time to tailor the university presses to match some of the traits of these smaller, more mobile publishing houses?

“For decades, university presses and other scholarly and professional publishers in the United States played a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge. Their books and journals became the ‘gold standard’ in many academic fields for tenure, promotion, and merit pay. Their basic business model was successful, since this diverse collection of presses had a unique value proposition. They dominated the scholarly publishing field with preeminent sales in three major markets or channels of distribution: libraries and institutions; college and graduate school adoptions; and general readers (i.e., sales to general retailers). Yet this insulated world changed abruptly in the late 1990s …” (more)

[Scholarship 2.0, 10 May]

KM: u will cry. it was for academic journals. “Gynecological Oncology” & the Journal of Math, etc.

CA: So that’s how you wound up in publishing in Arizona? You must really have really wanted to be there – it’s not like the jobs are as plentiful as the cactuses.

 

KM: Surprisingly, there are a nice handful of publishers out here. And I’ve worked 4 most of them. but, i lucked out by getting a job at UofA Press back in the day. Kathryn Conrad (@azKat) was my mentor/partner in crime. taught me tons about book mktg & the wonderful world of acad. presses. and YOU – u have worked the pub side AND the review side. you’re a multi-tasker!

 

CA: When I was an assistant editor at HarperCollins, we published a brilliant book that got zero review attention, probably because its argument was unorthodox and the author wasn’t hugely well known.  That’s when I realized that reviewers are just as important as publishers in getting new voices heard. So when I was ready to make a change, writing about books was a logical choice. What kept you hooked on publishing, as you navigated the maze?

CA: Yup. Publishing is my tribe too. I’ve grown up in this industry, my partner and many of my close friends are in it. I’m committed to it’s highest ideals and love/hate its resistance to change with the same ardor I feel about some of my own family members. What excites you as a reader?

CA: I love memoir and bios too, especially about women writers and firebrands.  I primarily worked on nonfiction at HarperCollins and Avon Books, and as a PW book review editor. But my shelves are very eclectic. Behind me are the queer books I’m reviewing right now for the Advocate magazine, and poetry and photography books. And next to my desk are stacks of books on adoption, politics, nature, and business that I need to clear more space for. What’s around your desk? 

KM: OMG. we r totally the odd couple. (further evidence that i SO need a maid). right now i have lots of social media and mktg books, along with some popular fiction: Little Brother, 2666, the Graveyard Book.

CA: What will you say here that you wouldn’t say on your own blog, the Bookish Dilettante, or when you write for Teleread?

“College dons have become embroiled in a bitter row over plans to axe more than 150 jobs at Cambridge University Press – the oldest continually operating book publisher in the world. Established under charter from Henry VIII 425 years ago and responsible for works by John Milton, Isaac Newton, and, more recently, Stephen Hawking, the publisher was set to play a leading role in this year’s celebrations to mark the university’s 800th anniversary. But the carefully-choreographed world of Nobel prize-winning scientists, King’s College choristers and Footlights comedians has been shaken by news that scores of local printers’ jobs are under threat. Management argues that the move has been forced on them as the industry changes from lithographic to digital production. But critics claim the redundancies will be the beginning of the end …” (more)

[Terry Macalister, Guardian, 6 April]

“Developments over the last few decades have changed some of the primary concerns of scholarly book publishers within university presses. The enterprise of publishing remains a vital part of the ecology of the academy, but the future direction of book publishing is unclear. The future is less apocalyptic than some may believe, but there is no question that there are challenges that need to be addressed by the publishing community. Scholarly publishing, along with teaching and research, is one of the key activities of the university. Research increases the sum of human knowledge; teaching trains the new generation of scholars; and publishing makes the results of research available to the wider world. Without publication, the other activities of the university would become even more insular than they are – ideas, particularly the ideas discovered and discussed at universities, need to be published – to be made public in order that their true value be achieved …” (more)

[Bill Harnum, University World News, 5 April]

Inside Higher Ed

UM people argue that moving to primarily e-only monographs program frees them from the economic constraints of the traditional model (having to reject good scholarship in a niche field b/c it wouldn’t make enough money).  Expect to license annual output as a package (similar to Big Deal journals packages)

The upside-down flag is a metaphor.

A few comments on the cover of Steve Fraser’s Wall Street, reviewed Monday:

This brief history of Wall Street is part of the small-format “Icons of America” series from Yale University Press. Because it’s a good book, you might want to look for others in the line. But nothing on the cover identifies it as part of a series, so if you’re hoping to spot its kin easily at a bookstore or library, you’re out of luck.

Wall Street and “Icons of America” are recent examples of trend at university presses to publish more books with mass-market appeal. The older Harvard Business School Press “Ideas With Impact” series is another www.hbsp.harvard.edu. And so far it’s been more successful, partly because it has a distinctive visual identity: You can spot HBSP books from halfway across the store at any airport Borders. Clearly Harvard had an advantage in that the “Ideas With Impact” series gathers articles from the Harvard Business Review, which itself has a distinctive look. But if U. S. News & World Report rated the covers of university-press books the way it rates colleges, Harvard would still win by a mile.

Apart from not establishing a brand identity, the cover of Wall Street uses yellowish tones that give it a retro look – a bit misleading given that Fraser carries the history of Wall Street into the 21st century. The cover appears to show a montage of shot-from-below pictures that suggest the dizzying, topsy-turvy action of the markets, partly through the upside-down American flag. It works well as a metaphor. For the same reason, you don’t want to look too long at it.

To its credit the cover avoids a static head-on shot of the New York Stock Exchange and visual clichés such as the Merrill Lynch bull. The montage also wraps in an interesting way around the spine and about two-thirds of the back of the book, which you can’t see here. On most covers, only the background color wraps front-to-back — the cover image stops at the spine to make for room blurbs or a large author photo. The unusual use of art on this one creates a handsome effect that says “money.”

Wall Street was reviewed on Oct. 27 www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/.

Jacket illustration: Hirooki Aoki/Getty Images

Note: A thousand apologies to anyone who can’t see the image on this post. I’m working to solve technical problems that cause only part of the images to appear to some visitors, particularly those using browners other than Firefox. I’ll repost this page after I’ve fixed this. In the meantime you can see the cover on the Yale University Press site yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300117554. Thanks so much for your patience and for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

In the United States, a system of just 88 university presses support and maintain the entire process of tenure and promotion for scholars working in the arts and humanities disciplines. I learned this a couple weeks ago at a depressing talk by Stephen Wrinn, Director of the University Press of Kentucky. Wrinn’s discussion attempted to familiarize graduate students and untenured faculty members with the ever-worsening market for academic books published by university presses.  For many positions (especially in English), scholars are expected to publish a book in order to get tenure, so the fragile financial conditions that most university presses now endure inevitably affect the health and stability of academic departments.  Consider the following reflections on academic publishing and its relationship to tenure and promotion:

• Academic publishing has changed drastically in recent years.  Until about 10 years ago, university presses were guaranteed to sell anywhere from 300-500 copies of a book to research libraries.  That number is now down to about 120 copies, mainly because fewer libraries can afford to buy monographs comprehensively.  Acquisitions budgets for monographs in academic libraries constantly shrink, and many libraries are forced to spend a higher percentage of the money they do have on subscription based proprietary database access.  “Information companies” like Elsevier, which specializes in science related research, essentially force universities to pay for their information twice.

• Why do universities pay twice for their information, one might ask? The tenure and promotion system, and the pressures it creates, allows this to happen. Scholars are forced to produce research and then submit it to a press or journal without being directly compensated for it. Instead of receiving direct payment or fair royalties, they receive a salary from their university to “produce knowledge,” a task recognized in each professor’s distribution of energies. Professors willingly surrender their information because their job depends on it, and after receiving their products free of charge, journals or presses then publish the information (with university systems often subsidizing this expense, which can range between $40,000-$60,000 per book).  Then, just to access many journals, universities shell out millions of dollars each year to proprietary database managers who have received their product for free.

• The obvious tension here is between the laws of capitalist enterprise and the fiduciary responsibility academic university presses have to disseminate information to other scholars.  Most academic presses are non-profit enterprises, and they exist mainly to support the tenure and promotion system of the academia in the US.  However, the book publishing industry in general operates by laws of supply and demand, and it’s no secret that academic books usually aren’t big sellers.  Thus, when fewer libraries commit to purchasing monographs, academic presses can almost never recover the costs of producing a book.  Academic publishers often turn to publishing material that leans more toward popular appeal so that it might defray the costs of publishing “less popular” (even if more rigid) scholarship.

• Academic presses are furthermore put in a bad position because they essentially work to support the credentials of other state universities.  Often, a book published by the University Press of Kentucky (for example) will help a professor teaching at the flagship university of another state achieve tenure and/or promotion.  It doesn’t make economic sense for the state resources of one university system to be expended in such a way that bolsters the faculty and relative prestige of another.  This is the academic equivalent to one company paying for professional development and training of employees that work for a rival company.  Some well-noted presses, Oxford is one of these, have remediated this problem to some extent by asking the institution which employs a prospective author to subsidize a potential publication.

• As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, many academic disciplines, English being tantamount among them, must reconsider the standards for tenure and promotion in light of the bleak academic publishing market. One solution is to value other forms of scholarship, including work published with commercial presses.  Another is to reconsider the monograph as the benchmark for a respectable and productive academic career.

Rockefeller University Press has just announced that it will follow a
Creative Commons license for its journals.   An explanatory editorial
by the executive editor of The Journal of Cell Biology and the executive director of the press is online at:

http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/jcb.200804037

Ray English
Director of Libraries
Oberlin College

thanks Ray

Cornell University Library and Duke University Press Announce Partnership; Duke to Provide Enhanced Services for Project Euclid

ITHACA, NY and DURHAM, NC, USA (April 11, 2008) – In a publishing agreement that reaches across boundaries by bringing together a leading U.S. academic research library and one of the nation’s outstanding university presses, Cornell University Library (Cornell) and Duke University Press (Duke) today announced that they have established a joint venture to expand and enhance the services of Project Euclid, the premier online information community for mathematics and statistics resources from independent publishers.

Effective July 2008, Duke will provide publishing expertise in marketing, sales, and order fulfillment to Project Euclid’s participating publishers and institutional subscribers. Duke will work to broaden and deepen Project Euclid’s subscriber base, resulting in greater global exposure for 54 journals and a growing number of monographs and conference proceedings. Cornell will continue to provide and support the vital IT infrastructure for Project Euclid and assume responsibility for archiving and preservation activities, ensuring robust and reliable access to the content deposited with Project Euclid for future scholars, researchers, and students.

Now home to 93,000 journal articles (75% of which are open access), along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings, Project Euclid and its partner publishers will benefit from Duke’s commitment to Project Euclid’s mission and from the Press’s publishing proficiency, reputation for quality consciousness, and university-based value system. Duke’s recent initiative to expand its journals publishing program into science, technology and medicine further ensures that together the Cornell Library and Duke University Press will achieve Project Euclid’s goal to become a primary destination site for mathematicians and statisticians.

http://www.virginiafoundation.org/NEH%20Workshop%20Report%20FINAL-3.pdf

On January 14, 2008, a group of editors, representatives from university presses, and
other stakeholders met to discuss the future of scholarly editions and how they might best
be supported in the digital age. This workshop was funded by the Digital Humanities
Initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia

I expect this will my last post on university presses, unless I discover I’ve missed something particularly glaring, because I really want to start focusing on small presses. But there are still a few exciting books to mention from the university presses:

University of Iowa Press

• Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, edited by Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker. May, paperback, $24.95. Includes Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Katie Ford on Jorie Graham, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye. This is very exciting — I’d love to see the full table of contents.

Southern Illinois University Press

• A Murmuration of Starlings, by Jake Adam York. February, paperback, $14.95. This collection elegizes the martyrs of the civil rights movement.
• The Sphere of Birds, by Ciaran Berry. February, paperback, $14.95. I love the musicality of Berry’s poems: …the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,/ and harsher truths hit home hour after hour–/ the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,/ a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.

Swallow Press (Ohio University Press)

• Azores, by David Yezzi. March, paperback, $12.95. A new book of poems by the executive editor of the New Criterion.

University of Chicago Press

• Still Here, Still Now, by Robert Pack. April, hardcover, $22.00. Described as “one of America’s most eminent nature poets,” this is a major new collection, clocking in at 128 pages.

Phoenix Poets Series

• Chameleon Hours, by Elise Partridge. April, paperback, $15.00. Sad rower pushed from shore,/ I’ll disappear like circles summoned/ by an oar’s dip. I want this book, too.
• Blessings for the Hands, by Matthew Schwartz. April, paperback, $14.00. Fireflies/ apparently stumbling.// I slapped one on my leg./ Its blood glowed. This looks promising.
• Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, by Connie Voisine. March, paperback, $14.00. There are some bodies that emerge/ into desire as a god/ rises from the sea, emotion and/ memory hand like dripping clothes…

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pitt Poetry Series

• The Endarkenment, by Jeffrey McDaniel. April, paperback, $14.00. The one & only poetry workshop I’ve attended was taught by McDaniel, and it was a very positive experience. He’s a dynamic reader also.

So there we are, done with the university presses for this season. I’ve skipped Yale & Harvard, and perhaps will have to make up for that, but for now, this will do. Don’t you think?

C&RL News, January 2008
Vol. 69, No. 1

by Michael Furlough

URL is  http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2008/january08/univpressscholcomm.cfm

Five American university presses collaborate for scholarly publishing - 04 Jan 2008

Five university presses have reportedly announced a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and allow for more books to be released. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the collaboration will set up a joint operation for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press. The presses will retain complete control over book selection and distribution.

The NYU will manage the $1.37 million grant to be spread out over five years. The grant includes royalties for authors and marketing funds. It is expected that Mellon will follow this grant with several others promoting collaboration, in sectors such as Slavic studies, ethnomusicology and East Asian studies.

The new system is likely to generate adequate savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year. The project comes at a time of increased interest in using collaborative models to make university publishing more economically feasible.

Well, exciting to me, anyway.

I was thrilled to learn, via Open Access News, that the University of Pittsburgh Press is going to digitize most of their backlist and make it available online for free open access, with the help of the Pitt libraries (who have been digitizing all kinds of collections over the past decade). They’ve started off with 39 titles from their Latin American series. I’m very excited to see a major university press offer much of its books to the world at large. (And I think it would be fun to eventually have access to a digital version of, say, Youghiogheny: Appalachian River, which I bought from them a few years back.)

I also learned from Boing Boing that Vernor Vinge has put his novel Rainbows End online for free reading, along with some supplementary images, and links for buying print copies. This is a major, recent novel (it won both the Hugo and Locus Awards earlier this year). It compellingly explores many themes that resonate with people thinking about libraries of the future, including the persistence and reliability of memory, mass persuasion and coercion, imposition of computer-mediated virtual experiences over the physical world, and the resultant downgrading of the physical world and those who interact primarily in it.

The book features both wonders (like the curing of formerly “hopeless” Alzheimer’s patients) and horrors (like a spectacularly destructive mass book digitization program, horrific at least for anyone who loves print as well as electronic books.) It’s not meant as literal prediction of the future, but, like a number of Vinge’s other stories, it makes the reader think about the possible ramifications of the technologies and social systems we’re building now, and reflect on the nature of humanity, technology, and computer-mediated culture.