Executive Summary
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Within the scholarly communications ecosystem, scholarly publishers are a keystone species. University presses—as well as academic societies, research institutions, and other scholarly publishers—strive to fulfill our mission of “making public the fruits of scholarly research” as effectively as possible within that ecosystem. While that mission has remained constant, in recent years the landscape in which we carry out this mission has altered dramatically. From new technologies to new economic conditions to changing relations with stakeholders, the world of scholarly communication in 2011 looks very different than it did a generation ago.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 13 The technological and cultural shifts of the last decade—the transformation from a print-based system of content scarcity and centralization to a digital, decentralized system of content abundance, easy access to expertise, attention as the coin of the realm, handheld connections, and distraction as a big business—challenge not just publishers’ business models, but may even threaten many of the intellectual characteristics most valued by the scholarly enterprise itself: concentration, analysis, and deep expertise.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 In the developing environment of information hyperabundance, scholarship itself may struggle to be heard. For many information consumers, scholarly publications are increasingly distant. Monographs remain largely static objects, isolated from the interconnections of social computing, instead of being vibrant hubs for discussion and engagement. For both scholarship and for university presses, this is undesirable, but is also an inevitable consequence of the business model (of self-funding through product sales) that many parent institutions currently expect from their presses.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 2 University presses are enthusiastic to engage with and publish many of the worthwhile but experimental projects that inventive scholars are creating. The editorial, presentational, promotional, and business inventiveness demonstrated in the publishing projects described within this report makes it clear that university presses are wellsprings of expertise ready to engage with the future of scholarship. The expertise residing within university presses can help the scholarly enterprise prosper in both influence and impact as it moves ever more fully digital.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 However, the simple product-sales models of the twentieth century, devised when information was scarce and expensive, are clearly inappropriate for the twenty-first-century scholarly ecosystem. As the report details, new forms of openness, fees, subscriptions, products, and services are being combined to try to build sustainable business models to fund innovative digital scholarly publishing in diverse arenas.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 This report’s conclusions about sustainable business models for scholarly publishing are, of course, painted with a broad brush. The cultural changes we will see over the next decade no one can accurately predict, and we will be in transition for decades to come.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 This report a) identifies elements of the current scholarly publishing systems that are worth protecting and retaining throughout this and future periods of transition; b) explores business models of existing projects which hold promise; c) outlines the characteristics of effective business models; d) addresses the challenges of the transitional period we are entering; and e) arrives at recommendations that might allow us to sustain high-quality scholarship at a time when the fundamental expectations of publishing are changing.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Among the report’s recommendations are:
- ¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 1
- Active, structured, open sharing of lessons learned by participants in existing digital publishing projects should be an ongoing process.
- Existing partnerships between presses, libraries, and other scholarly enterprises are vital models for collaboration to learn from and build upon.
- The support of foundations, libraries, and university administrations in providing funds to work toward the digital future has been, and will remain, crucial.
- Open access is a principle to be embraced if publishing costs can be supported by the larger scholarly enterprise. University presses, and nonprofit publishers generally, should become fully engaged in these discussions.
- Proposals and plans for new business models should explicitly address the potential impact of the new model on other parts of the press’s programs, as well as explicitly address the requirements, both operational and financial, for making the transition to a new model.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 As a keystone species within the larger academic ecosystem, university presses can imagine themselves to be independent. This Task Force report makes clear, however, that during a time of dramatic transition, all members of the relevant scholarly communities—presses, authors, libraries, administrators, scholarly societies, and funding agencies—will need to be enlisted in open-ended and open-minded discussions, to ensure a robust scholarly communication ecosystem in the future.
Madeline Carr
Barbara Fister
Paul Murphy
Greg Britton
Richard Brown
Paul
Dean Blobaum
Excellent points here. One suggestion: the point about building on existing partnerships and collaborations is a good one. However, what I would like to suggest is that we all need to begin thinking about scholarly communication from a systemic point of view. It is more than ironic, for example, that universities do not support scholarly presses while at the same time universities are accidentally supporting a dysfunctional, inelastic commercial market in scholarly publishing that in effect raises costs for universities while diminishing service to the academy and creating the threats to the scholarly entreprise described here.
One approach would be to support systemic economic analyses of scholarly monograph publishing, similar to the studies carried out by Houghton and colleagues for journal articles, but taking into account the current and potential roles of university and scholarly presses.
I agree that a systemic focus is very much needed. I have used the example of the inconsistency among junior scholars needing to publish revised dissertations to gain tenure, libraries not buying them because they subscribe to Proquest’s dissertation database, and press editors being reluctant to consider revised dissertations because of anticipated low sales. It adds up to systemic dysfunction. There are many such examples in our current scholarly communication world. It will take leadership from the top to resolve these problems.
The media “ecosystem” metaphor is a not uncommon one, but it plays such a strong role in the framing of this report that I’m inclined to inquire as to the work it’s doing here. As soon as we hear “ecosystem,” we’re bound to think “fragile”; and when we say scholarly publishers are a “species” (a “keystone species,” to mix metaphors), we start to fear its companion-word “extinct,” especially when “the landscape…has altered dramatically.” Climate change, habitat depletion, California is going to break off and fall into the sea. It’s a strange language of crisis with which to discuss the introduction of a broad array of new tools for publishing.
I think the environmental metaphor, and its attendant apocalyptic overtones, may occlude the degree of agency that scholars can and should have over (1) their own writing (2) the conditions under which it gets published. We should be a lot more worried about actual climate change than about the agentless “shifts” and “transformation[s]” that are “alter[ing]” “the landscape”… of publishing. After all, we’re the unseen agents, and some of us actually contributed to the growth of this media ecosystem on purpose. The proposed University of California boycott of Nature — which explicitly mentioned PLoS as an alternative venue — revealed a lot about who sits where in this food chain. University presses are great–of course. But if we’re committed to that idea, then perhaps we shouldn’t discuss them as if they were passenger pigeons.
Natalie may not be familiar with the long-standing reference to certain sectors of scholarship as “endangered species” (because the market can no longer sustain publishing in these sectors). This term was coined by my boss at Princeton U.P. way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and it has remained a staple of the literature ever since. You will find it mentioned, e.g., by Robert Darnton in his famous NYRB essay “The New Age of the Book.” And it is what inspired his effort to launch the Gutenberge project.
I don’t have a problem with the ecosystem metaphor – I have often thought that we have needed to view knowledge as an interdependent system rather than as publishing in one corner, authorship in another and libraries as a reliably gushing stream of revenue. I do have a problem with saying what we need a sustainable business model. Funding model, yes. Business … that’s what got us in this mess in the first place, assuming scholarly publishing would sustain itself financially.
Just read the whole report. I actually appreciate the use of metaphor in writing about complex subjects. Positing the scholarly communication continuum as an “ecosystem” doesn’t bother me. Rather, it helps evoke for me the beautiful flora and fauna that exist there—the vast trees and low ferns, the fluffy benign rodents and the sharp-tooth predators with binocular vision. The call for sustainable business models is right on in my opinion and crucial because “business” is the broader concept—one that encompasses fund-raising and donations, institutional support both in kind and in dollars, sales and licenses, service for a fee, free work, partnerships, grants, savvy development of content and audiences, seed money for experimentation and research, fair labor swaps, and on and on. UP’s need a myriad of pillars to continue to sustain our role in this amazing endeavor, and no press should assume they’ll be able to arrange for a totally free ride in this ecosystem. That just isn’t going to happen. I see this report as just the start of some very smart cookies in scholarly communication who are opening their eyes to the major after-asteroid shift in their world, and who intend to evolve into birds, rather than die off as dinosaurs. Congratulations, AAUP!
My dissatisfaction with assuming we need to find a business model stems from working in a library. Libraries are sustained by their institutions because what they provide is necessary. I argue we also need good scholarly publishing even if it can’t pay for itself. But by reallocating library funding to up front publishing costs, adding library values of access and discoverability – I think we can combine forces for at least some scholarly publishing ventures and stop asking presses to pay for themselves (largely through sales to libraries).
As you know, that’s exactly what we did at Penn State, and it has helped keep the press afloat there (besides providing some much needed “political” protection). As Paul suggests, I think we need to use the term “business” in a very broad sense here, not confine it to just market-based approaches, which I agree are only part of the story and, perhaps, an increasingly less important one.
I’m not against metaphors (??), nor even this particular metaphor; as I mentioned above, it’s a common one. But it ought to be observed that the metaphor works to illuminate some things (connectedness, Barbara notes) and to occlude other things.
Large-scale biological systems are perhaps paradigmatic examples of things about which we get to feel powerless, individually and institutionally (however counterproductive that feeling is, policywise). Ecosystems are nonteleological and subject to natural disasters, the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, and all sorts of other factors that no one can control. But we’re by no means powerless over scholarly communication, and a good deal of intention can and does go into the creation of this scholarly “ecosystem.”
How would it change things to describe publication and scholarly communication as a “city” rather than an “ecosystem,” for example? How much more intention would we invest in its features? How much less would we feel called upon to respond (as one “responds” to a natural disaster), how much more to build?
But, just as with ecosystems, the world of scholarly communication is replete with examples of unintended consequences, actions taken in one part of the system that affect other parts without ever having been expected to do so. An example that is looming on the horizon is PDA, patron-driven acquisitions, which i am convinced will have the effect of undermining presses’ financial stability further (esp. by creating more cash-flow problems), even though it is perfectly “rational” for librarians to adopt this approach for their own purposes.
I wanted to chime in with Paul’s defense of the ecosystem metaphor. It’s a rich cognitive tool, opening up thought to multiple positions and actors, rather than foreclosing analysis of forces.
The metaphor is also used in knowledge management quite productively (cf Nardi and O’Dea), empowering rather than victimizing participants.
Brian Eno’s recent screed about the importance of ecological thinking might be useful here as well:
“[W]e now increasingly view life as a profoundly complex weblike system, with information running in all directions, and instead of a single heirarchy we see an infinity of nested-together and co-dependent heirarchies — and the complexity of all this is such to be in and of itself creative.”
I think the ecosystem metaphor is simply a poetic way to emphasize relationships, and the fact that administrators and scholars and librarians and students and publishers and all stakeholders in scholarly communication can never act independently. And it is in our interest, in everyone’s interest, to talk to each other and coordinate our efforts as much as possible. The recently announced merger of Muse Editions and the University Press eBook Consortium, in which the interests and opinions of academic librarians were taken very seriously, is an example of that.