Jean Claude Guedon suggested that this recent post to the Liblicense
list could be of interest, in light of recent emails. So apologies to
those who are on both lists.
Colin
******************************
As a general backgroung to this debate, we need to look at scholarly
communication costs and structures holistically on campuses. There is
surely no point in institutions supporting the huge costs of academic
research if there are decreasing means of distributing and accessing it
effectively in the social sciences and humanties. The current scholarly
publishing process is flawed in access terms in the social sciences and
humanities from a monographic point of view.
Many academics spend years researching and writing a book but then find
themselves either without a publishing outlet or that their book when
published -often years later- has relatively few sales and thus exposure
for their research. In many cases this is a laborious and costly
process, often including subsidies, to produce a static book artefact
for tenure and promotion purposes.
As Richard Fisher, the Executive Director, Academic and Professional
Publishing, Cambridge University Press, noted last year in Sydney, we
should address the question- "assuming the primary research is original
and important, what is the best means to disseminate that research to
the wider world". The opportunities provided for university presses
through the twenty-first century digital revolution and the reworking of
scholarly communication frameworks can ensure a greater public
accessibility to scholarship.
The 2007 "Ithaka Report" 'University Publishing in a Digital Age'
reaffirms the relative isolation of many university presses from their
core administrative structures: "Publishing generally receives little
attention from senior leadership at universities, and the result has
been a scholarly-publishing industry that many in the university
community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values
of the academy".
The Ithaka exhortations will certainly need some work however.
Shulenburger has noted in an ARL piece that when he asked American
University Provosts whether their university had a formal, written
research publishing strategy, the overwhelming majority of Provosts who
responded had no strategy! Clearly at the present time neither
university presses nor institutional repositories in American
universities are seen by most provosts within the context of "research
publishing strategies". Contrast the Rentier comments on this list.
The potential for Open Access books is arguably as strong if not
stronger than for articles in terms of availibility of final versions,
impact, accessibility and distribution, as E-Press statistics
demonstrate. The Open Access debate is about all disciplines not simply
STM articles and needs to be linked into university wide missions of
disseminating knowledge as Sandy Thatcher has cogenty argued in several
recent articles.
The recent establishment of an Open Access journal fund at the
University of California, Berkeley is another attempt to stimulate
access within existing publishing guidelines. The Berkeley Research
Impact Initiative (BRII)is quoted as supporting faculty members who want
to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon
publication. The program is funded by the discretionary budget accounts
of the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research. Given
the success of 'Californis Escholarship',the same approach hopefully
will be extended to monographs, which in terms of dollar value per page
could offer better access returns.
It will be interesting to see how much of a take-up occurs, given the
recent studies of faculty behaviour at the University of California,
which highlighted the perceptions and realities of the reward systems
and their strong influence on publishing behaviour and attitudes. In the
end, the faculty perceptions have to be tackled in situ, with the
process including both local and national advocacy programs. The impact
of successful projects also can percolate through the system. Thus the
word of mouth by leading academics at the Australian National University
on the success of the penetration of their E-Press monographs has been
more effective than any press release.
An underlying motivation of the funding of the ANU E-Press in 2003/4 was
to provide an emerging vehicle for the monographic distribution of ANU
research on a global basis in the humanities and social sciences. The
Vice Chancellor of ANU,Professor Ian Chubb at the launch, with the
Spanish Ambassador in Canberra, of the Spanish version of a major ANU
work on the Spanish in the Pacific, stated that the "E-Press was a
result of a strategic decision to get our scholarship out to the rest of
the world ... free and online".
The ANU E-Press is now a continuing budget line in the overall budget of
the ANU's Division of Information, which includes the library, digital
infrastructure provision, administrative computing, etc etc. As such,
the Press is a relatively small component cost within the Division's
budget which runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
There are two crucial issues. Firstly that the Press is seen as an
essential part of the scholarly communication infrastructure and is not
"isolated" within the University and secondly, that the Press relies on
the existing ICT infrastructure of the Division and the University. The
aim here is to reflect that there is no point in supporting key academic
research if there is no means of distributing and accessing it
effectively.
The ANU publishing framework has a distributed editorial model with
twenty E-Press Editorial Boards,supported locally, spread across the
university and then supported centrally by a set of ICT services. It has
been argued by some STM publishers that this use of university
infrastructures constitutes a hidden subsidy to university presses. This
overlooks however, the much larger subsidies the other way, to the same
multinational publishers from university infrastructures - in addition
to their receipt of university scholars' original research "free of
charge", and the fact that traditional print subsidies fail to alleviate
the access and distribution problems.
I would agree with Jean-Claude Guedon here re future OA pathways for the
Canadian subsidies. Robin Derricourt,Managing Director of UNSW Press
argues in the January 2008 issue of 'Learned Publishing 'that "the
nominal sum of, say, A$10,000 (a little more for a complex technical and
illustrated title) could allow a well-written, strongly peer-reviewed
manuscript to appear in a reputable imprint, priced at a level such
that specialists in Australia could acquire personal copies, and
distributed worldwide. ...This is a small cost to pay to achieve impact
and productivity from publicly funded research".
Peer reviewed ANU E-Press titles are freely available in html, PDF, and
mobile device formats. E-Press titles are discoverable through Google
Book Search and Google Scholar. 2,400 POD copies were sold January to
November 2007 but the press monographs are freely downloadable around
the world and sales are not the main means of distribution. Download
statistics have been impressive, particularly when compared to average
sales of traditional print monographs.
ANU E-Press staff are conscious of the late 2007 email discussion list
comments on the issues of downloads, hits and the impact of spiders.
Thus the preamble to the ANU E-Press statistics for 2007 notes that,
"the ANU E-Press undertakes additional filtering of these statistics in
order to differentiate between human visitors and webcrawlers, and to
eliminate the latter from presented statistics. While we believe that
the statistics provided by ANU E-Press are largely accurate, a margin
for error should be recognised".
Nonetheless, even given conservative margins, the figures are
significant for complete downloads.Total PDF and HTML downloads from
January to November 2007 totalled 1.16 million. Top countries in order
were Australia, United States, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Fiji,
Canada, Indonesia, France, Germany and Japan. The Spanish book 'El Lago
Espanol' had 62,408 downloads - in order to Australia, Spain, Mexico,
Indonesia, and Venezuela -four of these countries not usually on the old
ANU press print distribution radar.
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 books bought in bookshops, are not necessarily read either.
It is often said that the most acrimonious debates take place between
poets as they have the least funding to fight over. Similarly it makes
no sense for libraries and presses to squabble on campuses when they
should be uniting on campus so that the institution's scholarship is
available in the most accessible and cost beneficial terms.
Richard Fisher has compared the academic monograph to the Hapsburg
monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline for ever! The current
situation in publishing and university institutional settings is
certainly Balkanised in terms of the scholarly monograph and the
distribution of its content. Scholarly communication frameworks need to
be reassessed so that the presses become an integral part of the
research framework of the university. It is clear that many key players
such as publishers, university administrators and researchers are still
wedded to historical web 1.0 monograph environments. Peer reviewed
digitally constructed monographs, available within Open Scholarship
institutional frameworks, the 2.0 or 3.0 models,will hopefully become
the norm in the 21st century.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
Copland Building 24
Room G037, Division of Information
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Email: colin.steele_at_anu.edu.au
University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002) and
Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
Received on Sat Feb 16 2008 - 03:16:00 GMT
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