University Presses, Libraries, Monographs and Ultimate yellow brick roads ?

["Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>]

The recent communications on presses and monographs in various 
strands of the list have largely focussed, as is usual and 
perhaps understandable, on American experiences.

The dilemmas of and challenges for University presses, have been 
cogently captured by Joe Esposito "The Wisdom of Oz: The Role of 
the University Press in Scholarly Communications" (Journal of 
Electronic Publishing, 10:1, Winter 2007 
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;cc=jep;rgn=main;view=text;idno=3336451.0010.103 
are perhaps highlighted by two relatively recent quotes from 
outside America.

Professor John Sutherland, of University College London, noted in 
an article that he wrote for the UK Guardian on January 18, 
'Conveyor Belt Criteria': "There are, as every wide-awake 
academic knows, presses with acceptance hurdles so low that a 
scholarly mole could get over them. They edit minimally, publish 
no more than the predictable minimum library sale (200 or so) and 
make their money from volume. They repay their authors neither in 
money nor prestige. They put out a few good books; and a lot of 
the other kind. The best imprints (Oxford and Cambridge 
University Press, for example) set the bar deterringly high. A 
scholarly kangaroo will have trouble clearing their hurdle."

More on Australian scholarly e-press kangaroos below.

Susan Wyndham, in her weekend literary column in the Sydney 
Morning Herald, recently quoted Phillipa McGuinness, who is the 
Publisher at University New South Wales Press, as follows on 
recent changes at the UNSW press: "What has changed is we 're 
doing less academic publishing. It's unsustainable. Australian 
academics do research that is too specific to work in book form 
in the Australian market." Wyndham writes, "Whether university 
presses should be supporting scholars or making profits is a 
question they can no longer afford to ask. McGuinness encourages 
academics to pitch their books at a wider readership or to write 
journal articles and opinion pieces."

We thus come back to some of the issues that Esposito raises (and 
Terry Ehling also alluded to) - the problems that university 
presses face if they have to make profits to sustain their 
operations, which usually leads to a diminution of academic works 
in terms of output compared to general, allegedly more 
commercial, works. Many scholars in the social sciences and 
humanities are still tied to historical conceptual processes in 
terms of monograph production and instead should be working 
within their campuses to reposition or revive university presses 
as part of the scholarly communication process.

Libraries can play a signficant role in that process if they are 
tied into a structured scholarly communication framework on 
campus. The demarcations on campus outlined by Esposito then 
disappear. The University of Sydney's Library eScholarship 
co-ordinator has a significant role which ranges from access, 
preservation and distribution of scholarly material in e-format, 
which includes monographs as well as innovation. See 
http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/

While the Australian National University is not as formally 
joined up in such an escholarship position, figures from the ANU 
epress, a major component part of e scholarship frameworks, are 
quite significant and bear comparison with say the widely 
publicised initiatives of Michigan and Rice Universities. The ANU 
ePress follows full peer review processes and is avalable to ANU 
affiliated scholars and post-graduate students within an avowed 
intent of making ANU research more publicly available, 
particularly in Asian Studies, and Social Sciences and 
Humanities. The press monographs are freely downloadable around 
the world but if a print copy is required a POD (print-on-demand) 
version is available.

As of 8 February 2007, 58 titles have been published with 
approximately 40 titles to be published in 2007. In terms of Web 
Usage Statistics, there were 381,740 PDF and HTML downloads for 
2005 and 745,288 PDF and HTML downloads for 2006.

The top five whole books downloaded for 2006 were: El Lago 
Espanol (30,258); Ethics and Auditing (24,584); Connected Worlds 
(18,814); The Spanish Lake (17,861); and Black Words White Pages 
(17,314). Statistics are available on where monographs are being 
downloaded. Usually Australia is first with the United States 
second, followed by European countries. The Asian titles are 
widely downloaded in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and 
China. 'The Spanish Lake' (A History of the Pacific) in its 
Spanish version clearly had a significant full text download in 
Spain. For further information on ANU titles and statistics, 
please contact Lorena Kanellopoulos:

Email: 
Lorena.Kanellopoulos@anu.edu.au or access 
http://epress.anu.edu.au

Statistics in contrast to the recent print queries, are important 
here, for example,in terms not only of assessing distribution but 
also for RQF/RAE purposes where currently initiatives include the 
time consuming mining of Thomson data for monograph impact.

Most academic print monographs were and are relatively little 
used in the large reseach libraries. Contrast these figures with 
the 200 sale copies of Sutherland above for monographs. 
Rethinking the model in terms of an overall approach on campus to 
scholarly communication is perhaps preferable to the popularise 
or die for most academic monograph proposals?  - and for most 
monographs anyway it will be die if we are talking about current 
practice for ensuring a maximum impact for research which could 
take up to a decade to complete.

In terms of an holistic approach to scholarly communication, the 
issues of copyright are often better addressed for individuals 
within an institutional framework, rather than a commercial 
publisher. See for example, the CIC Provost's Statement on 
Publishing Agreements 
(http://cic.uiuc.edu/groups/FacultyGovernanceLeaders/archive/WhitePaper/CICAuthorsRights.pdf).

Similarly, the major Australian Government DEST Report by the OAK 
Law Project to create 'a legal framework for copyright management 
of Open Access within the Australian Academic and Research 
Sector'is relevant:
(http://www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au/files/LawReport/OAK_Law_Report_v1.pdf)

Esposito was thinking of another Oz in his article title but 
there may be some relevant epress yellow brick roads down under 
to wander along?

Colin

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
The Australian National University
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au

University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)