University Presses To Publish Books Online at JSTOR

[Sarah Glasser <Sarah.Glasser@ithaka.org>]

January 11, 2011 - New York, NY -  Five of the nation's leading 
university presses - Chicago, Minnesota, North Carolina, 
Princeton, and Yale - are at the forefront of a new effort to 
publish scholarly books online as part of the non-profit service 
JSTOR.  Their books, representing ground-breaking scholarship 
across the humanistic, social, and scientific disciplines, are 
expected to be available in 2012.

"Books at JSTOR" will make front and back list titles available 
to libraries around the world in flexible ways that encourage 
purchase, adoption, and use. This new initiative is the result of 
a year-long investigation into the needs of the publishing, 
library, and scholarly communities. Consultations with dozens of 
libraries, end-users, and project partners helped to identify 
elements of a solution that include overcoming limitations on use 
and offering flexible purchase models for libraries, while 
developing a sustainable model for publishers for whom online 
book publishing must migrate quickly from being ancillary to a 
fundamental part of their business. Among the instrumental 
collaborators in this project were several presses beyond those 
announced here, including California, Harvard, and MIT.

It is, however, authors and scholars that factor most prominently 
in this new effort. Press partners are being encouraged to join 
based on the quality of their publishing and the relevancy of 
their lists to material already part of JSTOR to improve both 
visibility of authors' work and ease of use for scholars. The 
books will be deeply integrated with the 1,600 current and 
archival journals on JSTOR, as well as the diverse primary 
sources available today.  All the content will be 
cross-searchable, and the books will be linked with the more than 
2 million book reviews and hundreds of thousands of books 
references in the journal literature. Works written by the same 
authors or focused on the same topics, regardless of format, will 
be connected, and alerting services for users will cross 
publishers, other content providers, and content formats.

Greater than the Sum of the Parts

"'Books at JSTOR' is terrific shorthand, but it doesn't tell the 
whole story," said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. 
"This is really the next step in a series of efforts to integrate 
scholarship across formats and media and to establish a platform 
where librarians, publishers, authors, and users can innovate in 
the future."

"We are investing in something with others in our community," 
explained Garrett Kiely, Director of The University of Chicago 
Press which will be adding its books to its complete journal 
archives and current issues already on JSTOR. "Publishing digital 
scholarship that includes long- and short-form arguments, 
supported by multi-media, and usefully integrated with other 
content is where we need to go to help authors and researchers do 
their very best work in the future."

Matching scholarly research and teaching interests with 
impactful, relevant books for users is also a significant focus. 
While books are already highly discoverable through Google and 
Amazon, this is about academic books set in an academic context 
that should be valuable specifically for research and teaching, 
whether a faculty member is at an institution in Nebraska or 
Nepal.  Faculty and students at nearly 7,000 institutions and 
libraries around the world already have access to and use JSTOR, 
and will now have the opportunity to conveniently read and 
reference books online directly relevant to their work.

"For a publisher like Princeton," noted Peter Dougherty, Director 
of Princeton University Press, "Having our titles 
cross-searchable with JSTOR's well-established journal 
collections will provide us with another valuable means of making 
our books available in research and other libraries around the 
world."

Promise for Digital Scholarship

Longer term, there are exciting possibilities for scholarship as 
authors embrace technology and the capabilities of the platform. 
This month as part of the Current Scholarship Program at JSTOR, 
humanistic scholars are seeing the potential for publishing more 
compelling and effective work through the integration of text 
with other media.  The Journal of the Society of Architectural 
Historians, under the catalytic leadership of editors Hilary 
Ballon and David Brownlee and the stewardship of the University 
of California Press, has begun publishing papers where images, 
video, and GIS technologies are integral to the text, enabling 
readers to engage in new ways and better understand their 
arguments. The society has also mounted a campaign to encourage 
submissions of this kind and is working with other societies in 
the arts to do the same.

"Scholars amass remarkable materials and create valuable 
resources in the course of their research, much of which cannot 
be incorporated into the physical or argumentative form of the 
book," expressed Doug Armato, Director of The University of 
Minnesota Press.  "This project holds the promise of widely 
sharing and preserving some of those materials and linking them 
within a broader context, creating in the process an ebook 
environment that can take advantage of the kinds of exciting 
tools and scholarly practices emerging from the digital 
humanities."

This opportunity to utilize a variety of media is particularly 
appealing to publishers like Yale University Press given their 
substantial focus in the arts as well as the humanities and 
social sciences. "Being part of this collaboration will enable us 
to reach the scholarly community in needed ways and contribute to 
the building of a valuable environment for libraries and users. 
But just as exciting may be the opportunity to create a new 
ecosystem for publishing in the arts through the collaboration of 
many like-minded organizations, including the potential for 
overcoming difficult rights and technological issues in the 
future," said John Donatich, Director of Yale University Press.

Preservation Assurance

Longevity and stability, particularly with new media, is also an 
important focus of the initiative.  "Authors, users, and 
librarians need to know these books and related work will be 
available over the very long term," said Kevin Guthrie, President 
of ITHAKA, the organization that is home to JSTOR and to the 
digital preservation service, Portico. "Preservation is 
fundamental to our mission and a critical part of what we have 
worked with the scholarly community to achieve since 1995."  All 
of the books will be preserved in Portico, which already archives 
more than 66,000 e-books as well as journals and digitized 
historical collections.

Given the scope of Books at JSTOR, it will be open to all kinds 
of publishers, whether non-profit or commercial, so long as they 
share the vision, collaborative spirit, and values of the group. 
We anticipate others will join soon. Conversations with 
California, Harvard, and MIT are ongoing, as are discussions with 
others.  Libraries are also expected to be invited to contribute 
books from their collections in the future.

Kate Torrey, Director of The University of North Carolina Press 
summarized: "This is a really exciting collaboration. Following 
extensive research and planning, we now look forward to a launch 
that brings together distinguished book and journal content and 
establishes what we believe will be the gold-standard. It's been 
a long time coming but with Books at JSTOR, we can finally see 
the reality of scholarly books coming of digital age."

***

For more information:

The University of Chicago Press (www.press.uchicago.edu/)

The University of Minnesota Press (www.upress.umn.edu/)
Heather Skinner
Publicity Manager
presspr@umn.edu
612-627-1932

The University of North Carolina Press (www.uncpress.unc.edu/)
Gina Mahalek
Director of Publicity
mahalek@unc.edu
919-962-0581

Princeton University Press (www.press.princeton.edu)
Priscilla Treadwell
Electronic Publications Marketing Manager
priscilla_treadwell@press.princeton.edu
609-258-9387

Yale University Press (www.yale.edu/yup)
Brenda King
Director of Publicity
Brenda.king@yale.edu

203 432 0163

ITHAKA (www.ithaka.org)
JSTOR (www.jstor.org)
Heidi McGregor
VP, Marketing & Communications
heidi.mcgregor@ithaka.org
212-358-6406