Can a small college library fix what’s wrong with scholarly publishing? Bryn Geffert, librarian of Amherst College, wants to find out.
Mr. Geffert is starting a new publishing operation overseen by the library and committed to open access, called the Amherst College Press. It will produce a handful of edited, peer-reviewed, digital-first books on “a very small number of subjects,” the librarian says. “We want to do a few things well, not overextend.” Amherst’s president and Board of Trustees approved the plan late last year.
Modest in scope, Amherst’s new press won’t transform the business of scholarly communication overnight. The prices of monographs and journals won’t plummet; library budgets won’t suddenly be flush with the kind of cash that used to line the pockets of for-profit publishers. Still, the venture is yet another sign of how active academic libraries have become in the publishing arena. And it gives a boost to the growing effort to escape the traditional, revenue-driven models of scholarly publishing.
While Mr. Geffert gets his press up and running, a group of 54 academic libraries is kicking off a two-year effort to create what they’re calling the Library Publishing Coalition. The idea is to create an organization to bring together the many academic libraries that now offer some kind of publishing services.
Those services have expanded rapidly. Library-based publishing “has taken on a life that five years ago we never would have been able to perceive,” says James L. Mullins, dean of libraries at Purdue University, one of the principal movers behind the coalition. Then, “most library directors would have turned to their digitization efforts,” particularly the scanning of texts, as examples of their publishing efforts. “That’s not where it is today.”
It’s all over the place, literally and figuratively. “This emergent field doesn’t quite know what it is yet,” says Katherine Skinner, executive director of the nonprofit Educopia Institute, which is coordinating the planning of the new coalition. Over the next two years, she says, the libraries involved will try to figure out “what is this field and how can it best be supported?”
The short answer to the what-is-it? question: Library-based publishing is many things to many people. It takes wildly different forms at different institutions.
At some places, like Purdue, the university press reports to the library. But at many academic libraries, publishing activity doesn’t produce anything that resembles a university-press monograph. Some universities have set up library-affiliated offices of scholarly publishing that help faculty and staff members with all manner of projects. Library-based publishing can include digitizing conference papers or scholarly reports, adding metadata, and getting them online. It can mean helping researchers produce public versions of data sets and digital-humanities projects.
Michael J. Furlough, associate dean for research and scholarly communications at Penn State University Libraries, calls this “thinking publishing more broadly.”
At Penn State, he emphasizes publishing “as a continuum of activity, not as a single thing that looks like a journal or looks like a book.”
Penn State signed on to the Library Publishing Coalition as a founding member. That meant a contribution of $5,000 and some planning time. It used to be that people working in library-based publishing “had to scout each other out,” he told me. If the coalition can make it easier to make connections and share expertise, it will be worthwhile, he says.
Model at Michigan
No place has more experience with library-based publishing than the University of Michigan. John P. Wilkin, associate university librarian for publishing and technology there, oversees MPublishing, a highly developed, increasingly integrated set of publishing operations that includes the University of Michigan Press.
When we talked, Mr. Wilkin sounded a little skeptical about the Library Publishing Coalition, which Michigan opted into as a second-tier contributing member. “Facilitating conversations isn’t enough,” Mr. Wilkin says. Shared infrastructure would be better. He worries about the term “library publishing,” a phrase he hears being used by some academic publishers “to ghettoize what’s happening” at libraries. At Michigan, “we’re in the business of scholarly publishing,” Mr. Wilkin told me.
He’s spent the last half-year working to break down the boundaries between the press and the rest of the publishing operation. He considers the University of Michigan Press the “flagship imprint” of MPublishing. Integrating them “gives us an opportunity to think less about revenue, less about the container.” That’s a good survival strategy in a time of downward sales trends. “Selling books is increasingly hard, right?” Mr. Wilkin says. “We’ve got to support scholarship here.”
Economics are certainly on Mr. Geffert’s mind at Amherst. Staff retirements allowed him to repurpose two salary lines in the library’s budget. With that money, he’ll be able to hire editorial staff, including a press director—"somebody who’s absolutely committed to open access,” he says. “That’s a fundamental value for the press.”
He’s gotten helpful advice from university-press directors but doesn’t know yet whether Amherst College Press will join the Association of American University Presses. Its members produce a lot of good work, he says, but the association has taken stands he doesn’t agree with. It objects to the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would expand federal mandates that guarantee access to publicly supported research. And the group has stood behind publishers who sued Georgia State University over alleged copyright infringement in e-reserves. Does a library-based publishing operation really “want to be part of an organization where at least part of the constituency is suing libraries?” he asks.
Mr. Geffert sounds a lot like a university-press director when he talks about the need for high editorial standards. But his vision for the future will resonate most with librarians. He hopes that library-based publishing will eventually shift the economics away from the bottom-line model that drives much of academic publishing. “I’m going to risk sounding like a wide-eyed idealist here,” he says. “If at some point enough libraries are producing or working with presses to produce enough freely available information,” the amount they need to spend on materials will drop. If that happens, the savings “will more than offset the expense we’re investing.”
Will this vision—Mr. Geffert calls it a “utopian dream"—come true? Maybe. Penn State’s Mr. Furlough points to more immediate and concrete benefits.
“I don’t think library publishing is going to take down Elsevier,” he told me. “I don’t think at the scale we’re doing it it’s going to have much success driving down prices.”
What it can do now is “open up the niches” and bring attention to scholarship that might otherwise be overlooked, Mr. Furlough says. “That’s still the most important reason libraries should be involved in publishing—to do what we can to help promote research on the campus.”
