AAUP Report: Among Calls for Collaboration, a Plea to Reinvent University Presses

Sarah Gold, Publishers Weekly -- Library Journal, 06/25/2009

Go back to the
Academic Newswire
for more stories

Business model broken
Collaboration with libraries and faculty may help guarantee future
Tensions remain among presses, administrators and libraries

Collaboration and cooperation were the bywords at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses in Philadelphia, June 18-21, while a call for radical change of a “broken” business model came from the AAUP’s outgoing president, Alex Holzman, who urged presses to embrace a comprehensive e-book publishing program.

Numerous sessions with titles such as “Library-Press Cooperation,” “University and Press Collaborations” and “The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses,” underscored Holzman’s point that today’s university press business model—plagued by declining monograph sales, heavy returns, and declining subsidies from parent institutions—is in need of serious revisions. Such revisions could involve closer ties with other academic departments and institutes within the parent institution.

As Nathan MacBrien, publications director for the University of California International and Area Studies, put it, at a time when every academic department, including university presses, must justify its existence, “collaborations make for institutional embeddedness” that can help guarantee a press’s future.

Speakers also addressed other forms of cooperation: allying with campus libraries (to which some presses are already institutionally joined at the hip) and working with other university presses with complementary strengths or overlapping interests to accomplish complex projects and achieve cost savings.

Librarians weigh in
At a plenary session on changing reader and user needs, Beth Jacobs, collection development librarian at York College, Pennsylvania, spoke of students who are “overly confident in their ability to search for information online” but are not good at applying search results.

She also cited humanities faculty, including younger members, who still prefer print to digital. The situation with journals is different, she said, and the library has cut its print journal subscriptions to 500. Further, it has eliminated 85 percent of its print reference collection to make room for more computers, in response to student demands.

Jacobs also noted that she is seeking new e-book platforms to eliminate the obstacles current platforms present to students. Because faculty members use electronic reserves so course materials can be available to students at all times, the library’s Copyright Clearance Center fees have tripled in the past year.

In a session on press-library collaboration, Patrick Alexander, associate director of Penn State University Press, and Michael Furlough, assistant dean for Scholarly Communication, who co-direct the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, explained how their collaboration through the center has produced MetalMark Books. The series consists of print-on-demand versions of public domain works in the library collections that pertain to Pennsylvania history. Accordingi to Alexander, while some titles have sold only a handful of copies, others have sold as many as 700 copies--a total greater than the totals for many traditionally printed scholarly monographs.

Collaborations already underway
At the opening plenary, Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, called such collaborations a natural, organic transformation that are “already well under way.” Panelists at several sessions presented collaborations that are currently in progress.

Laura Cerruti, director of digital content development at the University of California Press, described UC Publishing Services, in which the press partners with UC Digital Library to assist various entities throughout the UC system that publish on a small scale; while these books do not carry the UC Press imprint, they benefit from the press’s marketing, distribution and promotion capabilities, as well as digitization by the library.

Radical change
Outgoing AAUP president and Temple University Press director Holzman, addressing the roughly 465 attendees, proposed a more radical transformation to ensure the survival of university presses. Citing 90 percent returns at his press in March, he said, “Don’t try to fix the old system. Let’s invent a new one”—an e-book based model, backed up by print-on-demand.

Holzman said the benefits—such as eliminating returns and used-book sales—could outweigh whatever costs and challenges the transition might present. (Holzman did not, however, endorse the University of Michigan model of moving toward digital-only monograph publication while incorporating with the library.)

Tensions abide
Despite the emphasis on cooperation, there were occasional hints of residual tensions among the presses, university administrators, and libraries. At a session called “University and Press Collaborations,” moderator B. Byron Price, director of the University of Oklahoma Press, asked panelists about such tensions. Penn State Press’s Patrick Alexander, noting that the session was being recorded, declined to answer.

The final plenary, on Saturday afternoon, explored experiments in the highly controversial area of open-access publishing, primarily of journal articles. Among others, Ivy Anderson explained the California Digital Library’s recent open-access arrangement with Springer’s journals, though overall there was perhaps more boosterism than details on a sustainable business model.

At a session on open-access digital repositories at Harvard, MIT, and Penn State, an audience member asked about studies on whether such repositories are saving campus libraries the cost of buying back faculty scholarship in the form of expensive journals; Amy Brands of Harvard said no such studies have been done, but that such cost savings are not one of the Harvard repository’s goals.

Read more Newswire stories:

Unlike Public Libraries, OhioLINK Faces Smaller Budget Cut

How Can Libraries Address Mobile Phone Users? Cambridge U. Report Sheds Some Light

Tennessee Approves $47.5M for UTC Library; Student Helps Restores FSU Library Funds

ALA Conference 2009: Panel To Address Academic Library “Hard Times”

Columns:
Stop the Presses: Reflecting on Changes in the Information Landscape, Part II | Peer to Peer Review

‘Tis the Season To Discuss Our Future, Part II | From the Bell Tower

Credo enhances login process; Salem Press adding backlist titles; Alexander Street Press giving away 50 subscriptions

People

Best Sellers in Asian History