Thoughts on Publishing Trends and OA scholarship

["Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>]

Joe Esposito made his recent "shameless plug" to his article in 
the latest issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing but 
omitted to mention that there are a number of other relevant 
articles to this debate in the latest issue, 
http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/.

Diane Harley's summary article of "The University as Publisher" 
contains interesting additions to the debate that Sandy Thatcher 
has been having with several discussants on the list. For 
example, note the comment from Professor Mark Rose that

"I think that there is an opportunity to build on these 
distributed research centers to create a new publishing model for 
specialized monographs based on print-on-demand technology and 
short-run technology. Faculty associated with such a research 
unit could develop a specialized monograph series with the 
quality secured by an editorial board and peer evaluation 
accomplished in much the same fashion as it is done at a 
university press. Publications would bear the joint imprint of 
the research center and a university press and both would accrue 
prestige. The monographs could be distributed by digital 
subscription with printing on demand. Individual scholars could 
access a copy through their libraries, download a PDF, or buy 
print-on-demand versions. Such a scheme would help to make it 
possible again to publish the kind of specialized monographs that 
today are being excluded as not viable commercially. Such a 
scheme would also help to create new partnerships between presses 
and academic research organizations and to reintegrate the 
presses with their primary academic constituents."

This concept is developed in my article, "Scholarly Monograph 
Publishing in the 21st Century: The Future More Than Ever Should 
Be an Open Book", in the same issue, which reflects on the 
growing campus distribution of research, particularly in 
Australia. We shouldn't forget that a number of university 
presses were originally founded to make available the 
intellectual output of their own scholars. Thus Manchester 
University Press was founded in 1904 to publish academic research 
being carried within the Victoria University of Manchester.

If the average sale of a university monograph is 300-400 copies
(British Academy, 2005) then this low distribution illustrates the
recent commments made by John Byron, Executive Director of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities, that "a failure to disseminate
research will be read as a failure of quality".

The leading titles from the ANU E-Press, in terms of complete PDF and
HTML downloads from January to November 2007 (with spider hits
excluded), were as follows (title, then downloads, then top 5 
countries):

El Lago Espanol
62,480
Australia, Spain, Mexico, Indonesia, Venezuela

Ethics and Auditing
44,204
Australia, Belgium, US, Turkey, UK

The Islamic Traditions of Cirebon
23,507
Australia, Indonesia, US, Germany, Slovenia

Indigenous people and the Pilbara mining boom
20,227
Australia, New Zealand, US, Germany, India

Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising
18,473
Australia, UK, US, Canada, France

The cost of the ANU E-Press is around $A320,000 per annum, which 
is a relatively small cost when set against the entire budget of 
the ANU Division of Information. As an aside, the fact that 
complete monographs are downloaded does not necessarily mean that 
they are read, just as books borrowed from libraries or bought in 
bookshops may not be read. In this context, one must also 
remember that research universities spend hundreds of millions of 
dollars on acquiring information in library acquisition 
programmes which are far from "businesslike" in terms of 
cost-benefit analyses. Much of the material acquired by libraries 
on behalf of their universities is either often not read or 
little read, as evidenced by various print collection use 
statistics in the 20th century and by digital download analyses 
of the 21st.

As mentioned in the previous discussions, it makes little sense 
to have the Library and the Press at loggerheads on campus or in 
separate scholarly communication boxes. James Hilton (Vice 
President and CIO, University of Virginia), quoted in Harley, 
states "the library, the university press and IT all face the 
same existential fate if they are not aligned with the core 
mission of the university" and this includes maximising the 
research output of the university, which is also behind the 
promotion of institutional repositories.

Many of the achievements of repositories in university outreach, 
far beyond their original publication source, have been achieved 
through repositories in Australia, UK and Europe. Harvard and 
others are much to be commended on their initiatives in 
transforming the US scene. Incidentally, the decline of the US 
dollar, which should not necessarily relate to the development of 
E-Presses and repositories, has been a major stimulus in some 
ways in forwarding the debates on scholarly communication change. 
This may be of small comfort to US libraries in the short term, 
but when the North American gorilla moves?

Two final comments. Sandy queries the benefits of repository 
deposits to the general public but repository deposit has not 
only enabled a wider distribution of research, but also 
penetrated many corners of society which would not otherwise 
access the material. There is an intelligent and discerning 
public out there and much of the material in the Social Sciences 
and Humanities has been immediately accessible to a wider public. 
It is up to individuals to decide what information they want 
rather than for it to be decided for them.

A comment in the JEP editorial process was a query that research 
assessment exercises and university league tables were somehow 
irrelevant to publishing trends and practices. This seems a 
particularly American view? In significant parts of the northern 
and southern hemispheres, they are having a profound effect on 
universities and publishing, perhaps playing into the hands of 
those publishers who publish those journals listed in the Thomson 
and Elsevier Scopus databases. These latter two provide the 
databases for the relevant publishing metrics in the Shangahi 
Jiao Tong and HES league tables.

Journal ranking lists will also play into the mix if these are 
seen exclusively by Vice Chancellors and Provosts as indicating 
quality returns in terms of rankings. The new ERA rankings from 
the Australian Research Council 
(http://www.arc.gov.au/era/indicators.htm) will undoubtedly send 
signals when finally established. The first publishers ranking 
from the Australian Political Studies Association already places 
significant Australian research at a disadvantage in monograph 
placement.

We thus come back to E-Presses and institutional repositories, 
and as Stevan Harnad and others have argued, we need to fill 
those repositories and use the data from them in terms of 
downloads and citations. There are now new "authority metrics", 
ie significant download and usage statistics available from 
e-presses and institutional repositories, that can provide 
meaningful data for assessment exercises.

It is helpful in this context that the Australian Government has 
provided funds through its ASHER initiative 
(http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews/ 
key_issues/research_quality_framework/) to ensure that all 
material collected for assessment and publication purposes will 
be available through institutional repositories. Green OA in its 
variety of peer reviewed forms ensures the further distribution 
of scholarship in frameworks that combine authority with public 
accessibility.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
Copland Building 24
Room G037, Division of Information
The Australian National University=20
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia


Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au

University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)