Rice University Press and University E-Press developments

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

Several  more points in this rather sad development, in addition 
to Sandy Thatcher's perceptive comments in Inside Higher 
Education.  Was Rice right to rely on POD sales. Should a small 
university press continue to publish material deriving from 
scholars in other universities? As I wrote in my JEP 2008 article 
in 2008, 'Scholarly Monograph Publishing in the 21st Century', 
after all

"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 out within the Victoria 
University of Manchester. Princeton University Press, when it was 
founded in 1895, had as its mission "the promotion of education 
and scholarship and to serve the University." The University of 
California Press in the middle of the 20th century was publishing 
monographs mainly from UC faculty members. Presses evolved into 
publishing manuscripts from any academic source, and also 
ventured into trade publications. A number of the new open access 
e-presses, because they are supported in whole or part from 
internal funds, focus on the peer-reviewed monographic output of 
their own scholars, available in digital format."

In that context, the Australian National University's ANU E Press 
which is embedded within the structure of the ANU's Division of 
Information, currently publishes around 57 titles, which had just 
over 3 million individual or complete PDF downloads for 2009 and 
1,535,848 downloads from 1 January to 30 June 2010. While POD 
sales were just over 10,000 copies in 2009 this element is not 
the be all and end all, as the Open Access monographs can be 
downloaded and printed free of charge, anywhere in the world.

It may be of interest, in terms of E Press developments that two 
other Australian universities have followed the ANU Open Access 
peer reviewed monograph model. Thus, Monash University has 
recently been rebranded as the Australian Weekly Book Newsletter 
reports:

"Monash University's publishing unit, currently known as Monash 
University ePress, is set to change its business plan with the 
launch of Monash University Publishing on 8 September. From the 
launch onwards, our books will have a short print run, followed 
by print on demand,' marketing coordinator Sarah Cannon told the 
Australian Weekly Book Newsletter. 'We're going with Griffin 
Press, as they are at the forefront of printing in Australia, and 
their turnaround time is amazing. Cannon said Monash University 
Publishing books would 'all be open access'.... as we're a 
university press, where dissemination of knowledge is our cause,' 
The publisher is also planning to ramp up the number of books it 
publishes each year to 'around 20 books a year' from 2011, up 
from the three or four books a year it has been producing until 
now."

The University of Adelaide Press will produce 7 or 8 titles this 
year, rising to 15-20 in 2011. Other relevant digital Presses in 
Australia include Sydney, Melbourne and  the University of 
Technology, Sydney.The direct costs of the ANU E Press staff of 
3.5 FTEs are relatively small within both the total costs of the 
ANU Library and even more so, within the Division of Information. 
The distributed nature of editorial College advisory comittees 
and copy editing costs spreads the intellectual infrastructure 
costs across campus.We need to reconsider the role of the Press 
within the totality of the costs of access to and distribution of 
knowledge within the university.  Reconfigured university presses 
need to be seen in the context of the total scholarly 
communication process and thus costs of a university.

It was interesting to talk with Professor Cathy Davidson and Ken 
Wissoker, the Editorial Director of Duke University Press, when 
they were in Canberra recently, on these topics. We reflected  on 
the perhaps illogical continuing 'gold standard' for physical 
monographs in promotion and tenure and the seemingly permanent 
shifts in library budgets, given the costs of the continuing Big 
Deals for serials (even with economic downturns) with major STM 
publishers in particular, and the lack of funds thus unavailable 
for traditional monograph purchases. Multi-national publishers 
can act nationally and globally much more effectively than single 
libraries or even  library consortia because faculty have 
traditionally been more interested  in getting published than 
assessing the impact of their decisions to publish, while Vice 
Chancellors chase citation impacts and university league table 
rankings over the long term issues of scholarly communication on 
campus.

Sally Rumsey, Project Manager  of the Oxford University Research 
Archive (ORA), at the Open Repositories Conference in Madrid in 
July, commented, however, on the growing synergies between 
institutional repositories and research information 
registeries/offices on campuses. This is particularly relevant in 
the UK, Australia and New Zealand where Research 
Assement/Evaluation Exercises call for the collecting and 
preservation of publication data on campuses for all researchers.

The downloads from E Presses, should be a significant factor in 
future research assessment metrics - perhaps more so than a 
physical book publication given the average sale of a 
university/academic press book of 200-300 copies, with its 
content scattered across a relatively small number of libraries 
and individuals globally. We need to continue working with new 
models. In that context, the paper recently published by Eelco 
Ferwerda, the Coordinator of OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in 
European Networks), entitled 'New models for monographs - open 
books' in Serials July 2010 is well worth reading.

Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
The Australian National University
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia