Full Bleed: Libraries and Publishing | Peer to Peer Review
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN May 12, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
I was pleased and excited to be invited to participate in a fascinating workshop on library publishing services last week. This series of workshops is part of a larger project to assess the current state of publishing in libraries, analyze what works and doesn't work, and draw some conclusions about sustainability. It is the brainchild of the three host libraries (Georgia Tech, Purdue, and the University of Utah) and is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, with additional support from Berkeley Electronic Press, SPARC, and Microsoft Research.
It was a draining two days, full of information and great conversations. I heard about a wide range of library publishing initiatives, including ways libraries are using Open Journal Systems to create and manage open access journals, collaborations between university presses and libraries on projects (including the way a library helped a university press land a hot book by offering to have the library provide a support for a digital exhibit of related sources). And there was a fascinating talk by Shana Kimball about what kind of training and skills a librarian needs to move into library-based publishing.
Widows and orphans
But I ended the first long day of sessions feeling depressed. Libraries were working so hard at creating new venues for open access publishing, but it seemed as if all that effort was just adding new publishing outlets to an already bloated publishing system, that it was impossible to slow the march of the commercial publishers that consume more and more of our budgets. As impressive as the home-grown local solutions are, they just don't have the juice to compete with multinational corporations (or with the giant scholarly societies that earn revenue from their publishing divisions in the tens of millions of dollars annually). No matter how technically skilled we are, the Nature Group and Elsevier will beat us hollow when it comes to bells and whistles. And even when publishers present us with user interfaces we hate nearly as much as the licenses, what choice do we have? They own the intellectual property our users need. And they have virtually cornered the market on prestige.
So what's a librarian to do? Right now, I see four options:
- Start an open access publishing program with a local focus. It can provide a home for student scholarship and for publications that serve our communities. We might tempt a faculty member who edits a journal to let us provide the back end operations if they are unhappy with their current publishers. And we may be able to support new media. For example, the commercial world isn't yet investing heavily in digital humanities, so we might find a useful niche there. We'll still have to pour the same amount of money into the coffers of commercial publishers, but we won't be worse off and we'll make friends.
- Institutions with university presses may find it beneficial to merge their operations. Presses have experience and prestige, but lack local support and the hearts and minds of presidents and trustees. Most university presses get at best a tiny fraction of their costs subsidized by their parent institutions and may be physically located in a hidden bunker far from the center of campus. Since they don't have a close relationship with their local community (scholars consider it outré to be published by their own university's press) they have a hard time making a case for themselves. Libraries have much closer local ties. We have something else that's critical: however much we fret about funding, libraries have budgets that are huge compared to those of presses, and it gives us room to experiment. What can publishers offer? They can give us lessons on how to say no. We librarians have a terrible time with that word. We shift our allocations around, sigh loudly, look for work-arounds, and make do. This is not how scholarly prestige is earned. All that said, it's not easy bridging the cultural divides between publishing and library cultures. There are very few librarians who have a foot in both camps, and they seem like diplomats negotiating peace in the Balkans or the Middle East-patient, wise, but aware they are facing nearly impossible odds. These mergers may be a significant part of our future—but while they work on the fine print of treaties, a new kind of Big Deal is emerging. University presses are poised to deliver their books en masse through Project Muse and JSTOR, probably offering digital subscriptions that libraries like mine can't afford, and once again we'll be have a body of scholarly work that is closed to most of the world-perhaps more closed than ever if interlibrary loan is disabled. (I have no idea if that's the plan, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
- Redirect funding from subscriptions to paying author fees for open access, a strategy that did not come up at the workshop. While this may make sense in certain instances, it would not be a responsible use of scarce resources if done on a grand scale. And it wouldn't solve the problem.
- Build small and nimble coalitions among libraries with scholars who do get it, who care as much about their research being read as they care about being published, who welcome new media and the ways the Internet can be a platform for open communication. Libraries might be able to work with them to open alternative channels for sharing knowledge, perhaps building on the experiences of projects like MediaCommons and Anthologize. We'd have to be clear about our shared goals and be ready to put our money (and time) where our principles are. We'll have to stand in the mirror and practice saying "no." We'll have to be ready to cross disciplinary boundaries carrying little but a backpack and a compass and enough hope to go around. And we'd have to be willing to try something that is yet unproven.
Impact factor
This last option is the only strategy that I see working for a library like mine. Admittedly, it won't usher in a new day, because it's small scale and experimental. But after a long dark night of the soul, I went back to the workshop thinking yes, this is more complicated than I had realized and we have a long, long way to go. But doing nothing to solve the problem is, for me, not an option.
In the meantime, you can follow the workshop's progress on twitter or check out these links from the workshop.
- Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues
- Three case studies of publishing partnerships
- Resource list
- MPublishing's Wiki
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
