IT’S NOT YOU: The death of a long marriage comes as a jolt, even when the partners conclude that their differences are irreconcilable. For the University of Chicago Press, the jolt came on April 25, when the American Astronomical Society announced its decision to drop the press as publisher of its research journals.
Like so many marriages, this one split up over money — and over conflicting visions of the future. Ethan T. Vishniac, editor in chief of the society’s flagship publication, The Astrophysical Journal, and a professor of astronomy and director of the Center for Astrophysical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, put it this way: “We decided to look at our publishing agreement with UCP because we were concerned about the future of our journals in a world in which paper is becoming increasingly irrelevant.”
The relationship began in 1895, when the The Astrophysical Journal was founded at Chicago by George E. Hale and James E. Keeler. The transition will begin in January 2008, when another of the society’s periodicals, The Astronomical Journal, will move to IOP Publishing, whose parent is the Institute of Physics, a nonprofit scholarly organization based in Britain.
The institute already publishes more than 40 journals devoted to pure and applied physics. If that move goes well, The Astrophysical Journal and its supplement series will follow in January 2009.
Although the society announced the leap to a new publisher, its leaders say the organization was pushed away by the press’s desire to change longstanding financial agreements and its use of third-party electronic-publishing software.
Chicago has acted as the astronomical society’s publisher under a fee-for-service contract from 1972, said Mary Guillemette, the press’s operations manager for the journals. Under the arrangement, the society paid the salaries and benefits of the approximately 40 full-time employees needed to produce the three publications, which last year comprised 36,000 pages of material. (Chicago’s journals division employs about 150 people in all.) The press footed the rest of the bill, she explained, including “the space and the utilities and everything else that goes to keep people working.” Chicago had proposed to alter that arrangement with the society.
Another pressing concern was the cost of developing the software required to publish journals in a climate that Ms. Guillemette describes as “changing faster than it’s ever changed before.” In the early 1990s, the press designed a lot of its own software. Now the market has provided other options. “We realized, when we went to assess our strengths in the world of journals publishing today, that development of software in-house was no longer one of them,” she said.
The press is moving all of its journals to third-party software that includes Editorial Manager, an online manuscript-submission and peer-review tracking program designed by Aries Systems, and a content-hosting platform designed by Atypon Systems.
Twelve of the 47 journals and serials that Chicago publishes have already been switched, said Nawin Gupta, manager of the journals division. “The goal is to have all of the journals transitioned by next year,” he said.
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The astronomy society balked at the proposed changes. “They came to us with a request to change our business arrangement, and it didn’t mesh with our vision for the journals,” said Kevin B. Marvel, the group’s executive officer. Otherwise, he said, “we probably still would have been happily ensconced there.” Instead the society decided to play the field and issued a call for proposals.
The press made a new offer that it believed “offered the AAS all the things they needed at a lower cost,” Mr. Gupta said. But the society found the proposal from the Institute of Physics “tremendously exciting,” Mr. Marvel said. “They’re committed to future technological development. The online presentation of the journals will be enhanced.”
Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., who edited The Astrophysical Journal before Mr. Vishniac took over last year, expressed admiration for the “absolutely superb” work done by the Chicago team. “It was a genuine partnership between editors and publisher,” Mr. Kennicutt, an astronomy professor at the University of Cambridge, wrote in an e-mail message. But in the end, he said, the press’s management “forced us into a corner, and meeting their demands was not an option for us.”
Mr. Gupta acknowledged that the astronomy journals represent “a significant part of the portfolio that we publish.” He also confirmed that another journal, The American Journal of Human Genetics, has also decided to leave the Chicago press, a fact first reported in the university’s student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon. (The journal’s editor, Cynthia C. Morton, was traveling and could not be reached to confirm that the publication has landed at Cell Press, which is owned by the commercial publishing giant Elsevier.)
But Mr. Gupta takes comfort from the multidisciplinary portfolio of journals that remain with Chicago, including an impending new addition, the Journal of Human Capital, which is to appear in the fall. He and Ms. Guillemette, the operations manager, added that the press is committed to finding jobs for the 40 employees affected by the split.
This impending publishing divorce has already been felt elsewhere. Not only is it “a huge blow for a university press to lose as big a client,” said Rebecca Simon, associate director for journals and digital publishing at the University of California Press, but “it’s kind of a blow for the whole university-press community.”
Such partnerships, she said, help a university press “continue to prove that it’s a viable player” in an increasingly competitive publishing environment. “Publishing journals, especially for nonprofits and university presses, is a relationship,” said Ms. Simon. “And you never like to hear of a relationship, particularly a longstanding relationship, come to an end.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 37, Page A12
