RE: Thoughts on Publishing Trends and OA scholarship

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Colin Steele and Mark Rose describe a situation which is already 
a reality in some institutions. The US National Academy Press, 
World Bank and OECD (among others) have been developing along 
these lines over the past decade. World Bank and ourselves offer 
e-book collections on annual subscription with optional print 
supply. So there's no 'might' and 'could' about it - it is 
possible, it is financially sustainable and I encourage any 
institution which produces books (I don't know why the challenge 
is always described as being something peculiar to universities) 
to develop their publishing programme along digital lines.

However, there is one shortcoming with the institutional 
repository/POD model proposed. It misses out the significant 
dissemination opportunities offered by other channels. We don't 
have a freely accessible institutional repository at OECD. 
Instead, we load our books onto Google Books. This saves us the 
hassle and cost of maintaining a repository. It also gets us 
'inside' the Google gorilla (far mightier than even the Elsevier 
gorilla). The results are impressive. Our books are getting 
70,000 visits monthly (and they doubled over the past twelve 
months). We also make our books available via POD supplier 
Lightning Source to take advantage of their sister-company's 
(Ingram) sales channels - this is producing some useful sales. We 
have a network of local distributors around the globe and we've 
just agreed the first local POD deal (so our books can be 
manufactured locally and save shipping and inventory costs). I'm 
sure we'll be signing many more deals like this over the next few 
years.

Maximum dissemination won't occur if the books are only on an 
institution's repository with a POD machine somewhere, they will 
need to be pushed into the many e (e.g. NetLibrary et al) and POD 
dissemination channels available today and new channels coming 
tomorrow. They need to appear in library OPACs and bookseller 
catalogues. They need to be on Amazon. There is a little sting, 
however, to this tale. Achieving maximum dissemination requires 
the 'Press' (University or otherwise) to employ people to find, 
manage, feed and monitor these channels. This only becomes 
cost-effective when there is a sufficient volume of titles to 
manage. This begs the question: how many institutions have 
sufficient output that scales? And for those that are too small - 
who should they partner with?

Toby Green
OECD Publishing

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Colin Steele
Sent: 17 June, 2008 3:50 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Thoughts on Publishing Trends and OA scholarship

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
The Australian National University
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au

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