DigitalKoans

The Association of Research Libraries has published Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing by Karla L. Hahn.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

To foster a deeper understanding of an emerging research library role as publishing service provider, in late 2007 the Association of Research Libraries surveyed its membership to gather data on the publishing services they were providing. Following the survey, publishing program managers at ten institutions participated in semi-structured interviews to delve more deeply into several aspects of service development: the sources and motivations for service launch, the range of publishing services, and relationships with partners.

The survey verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services. By late 2007, 44% of the 80 responding ARL member libraries reported they were delivering publishing services and another 21% were in the process of planning publishing service development. Only 36% of responding institutions were not active in this arena.

These libraries are publishing many kinds of works, but the main focus is journals; 88% of publishing libraries reported publishing journals compared to 79% who publish conference papers and proceedings, and 71% who publish monographs. Established journal titles dominate this emerging publishing sector and are the main drivers of service development, although new titles are also being produced. Although the numbers of titles reported represent a very thin slice of the scholarly publishing pie, the survey respondents work with 265 titles: 131 are established titles, 81 are new titles, and 53 were under development at the time of the survey. On average, these libraries work with 7 or 8 titles with 6 currently available. . . .

Peer reviewed works dominate library publishing programs and editors or acquisitions committees typically maintain their traditional roles in identifying quality content. Libraries often provide technical support for streamlined peer review workflows, but they are not providing peer review itself. The manuscript handling services provided by some publishing programs were a significant attraction to the editors of established publications.

Library publishing program managers report substantial demand for hosting services. Libraries increasingly are positioned to provide at least basic hosting services. Open source software such as the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and DPubs along with new commercial services such as those offered by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) through Digital Commons allows libraries to support basic journal hosting relatively easily.

Advice and consulting regarding a variety of publishing practices and decisions are perhaps even more popular services. There are pressing demands for information and advice about issues such as moving print publications into electronic publishing, discontinuing print in favor of electronic alternatives, publishing works with limited revenue-generating capability, revenue generation, standards of various sorts, markup and encoding, metadata generation, preservation, contracting with service providers, and copyright management.

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities have published Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions: A Report on the Conference of January 14, 2008, which was written by Ithaka staff.

Here'a an excerpt from the "Introduction":

On January 14, 2008, a group of editors, representatives from university presses, and other stakeholders met to discuss the future of scholarly editions and how they might best be supported in the digital age. . . . .

The objectives of the meeting were:

• To identify services and tools that are critical for supporting digital documentary editions;
• To assess the need for a service provider to facilitate the production of these editions; and
• To articulate the key uncertainties involved in creating such a service provider, so that those can be further investigated.

This report documents the workshop, with the goal of providing a reference not only for participants, but also for others in the community who are concerned with the future of scholarly editions. It is divided into three sections that follow the course of the day itself:

1. Developing a vision for the next generation scholarly edition
2. How do we get there? Identifying needs and gaps
3. Creating a service provider for scholarly editions

The New York University Division of Libraries and the Institute for the Future of the Book will work together to develop new digital scholarly communications tools.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"We are constantly watching the unfolding digital landscape for new paths we might want to take," said Carol A. Mandel, dean of the NYU Libraries. "IFB is a thought leader in the future of scholarly communication. We will work together to develop new software and new options that faculty can use to pubish, review, share, and collaborate at NYU and in the larger academic community."

For the past three years, IFB has been researching, prototyping, and sketching out models for how university presses could expand their publishing programs to include digital and networked formats. IFB is best known for its series of "networked book" experiments, which modify popular blogging technologies to create social book formats for the Web. Among these are: "Without Gods" by NYU’s Mitchell Stephens, "The Googlization of Everything" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Gamer Theory" by McKenzie Wark (the first fully networked digital monograph), and "Expressive Processing" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, which is currently undergoing the first blog-based peer review.

Out of these projects, IFB developed CommentPress, an extension for the WordPress blog platform that enables paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. IFB is also at work on a powerful open source digital authoring environment called Sophie, the first version of which has just been released.

"We are thrilled to be working with NYU," said IFB Director Bob Stein. "We now have the benefit not only of the Libraries’ first-rate technical support, but also of working with world-class faculty, many of whom are leading innovators in digital scholarly communications."

In an auspicious start to their partnership, NYU Libraries and IFB have been awarded a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to design a set of networking tools that will serve as the membership system for MediaCommons, an all-electronic scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities that IFB has been instrumental in developing.

Under the agreement, three of IFB’s leaders will serve as visiting scholars at NYU. They are Bob Stein; Ben Vershbow, IFB editorial director; and researcher Dan Visel. They will work with NYU librarians; with the digital library team, headed by James Bullen; and with Monica McCormick, the Libraries’ program officer for digital scholarly publishing.

Read more about it at "Major News: IFB and NYU Libraries to Collaborate."

Previously ("Book to Be Published by MIT Press Undergoing Blog-Based Open Peer Review"), DigitalKoans reported on an open-peer-review experiment on the Grand Text Auto Weblog.

Now, if:book has published a dialog between its staff, the book's author, and Donald J. Waters, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program Officer for scholarly communications, about the experiment.

Here's an excerpt from the posting:

[Waters] As I understand the explanations, there is a sense in which the experiment is not aimed at "peer review" at all in the sense that peer review assesses the qualities of a work to help the publisher determine whether or not to publish it. What the exposure of the work-in-progress to the community does, besides the extremely useful community-building activity, is provide a mechanism for a function that is now all but lost in scholarly publishing, namely "developmental editing." It is a side benefit of current peer review practice that an author gets some feedback on the work that might improve it, but what really helps an author is close, careful reading by friends who offer substantive criticism and editorial comments. . . . The software that facilitates annotation and the use of the network, as demonstrated in this experiment, promise to extend this informal practice to authors more generally.

Scholarly bibliographies are not destined for the bestseller list. This is especially true of bibliographies that deal with fairly specialized topics vs. those that deal with topics of more general interest. Selling more than a few hundred copies of a specialized bibliography is a major achievement.

Does open access to digital bibliographies change the picture? Two digital books, one of which is also in print form, illustrate the potential of this new publishing strategy.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been freely available since 1996. What has use been like? Below is a table that shows file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content; page requests are a subset of file requests).

From 2006 onward there is only partial use data, since all or part of the University of Houston Libraries' use data for this period is unavailable to me. (DLIST and E-LIS use is not included for any year.)

In my experience, Web log statistics provide a general indicator of the magnitude of use, but not an absolutely precise one. There are also hermetic disputes about whether spider activity should be included, as it is above.

There are four things to note about SEPB: (1) it was born digital and has live links; (2) in July 2004, it was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that permits any kind of noncommercial use or reuse; (3) it has been updated 70 times, and these updates have been advertised; and (4) it includes a Weblog and a resource directory. It also has a prehistory: the freely available article that it was based on had 26 versions, so one could argue that the bibliography has 96 versions.

These characteristics make SEPB represent an extension and evolution of the traditional bibliography model, but not a perfect example of it.

For more information on the evolution of SEPB, see the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

The second bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, is closer to the traditional model because it has not been updated and it is based on a printed book. There are two digital versions: a PDF file and a XHTML site, neither of which has live links. All print and digital versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. The OAB was advertised on the Internet and elsewhere.

Below is a table that shows OAB file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand. It does not include any use of the digital book at the publisher's Website (Association of Research Libraries) nor at DLIST and E-LIS.

Does open access make a difference? The history of these two open access digital books suggests that it can significantly increase use. As the potentials of digital publication are more fully exploited (e.g., linking and updating), use may be driven even higher. However, these examples tell us nothing about the commercial potential of open access books, since my data are for "no-profit" use only and do not include ARL sales data for the print book (I do not receive royalties and do not have access to this data).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin's draft of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, which will be published by MIT Press, is undergoing an open peer-review process on the Grand Text Auto Weblog using a new plug-in version of CommentPress. The book is also undergoing a conventional peer-review process.

Read more about it at "Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better"and "Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review."

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded grants to four groups of university presses to support the cooperative publication of scholarly books and digital works in the fields of American Literatures, Ethnomusicology, Slavic Studies, and South Asian Studies. The Ethnomusicology project will develop a plan for publishing printed and digital works, and the American Literatures project will utilize a "a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The four projects and participating presses are:

• Slavic Studies: University of Wisconsin Press, Northwestern University Press, and the University of Pittsburgh Press;
• American Literatures: New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press;
• South Asian Studies: Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press;
• Ethnomusicology: Indiana University Press, Kent State University Press, and Temple University Press. . . .

Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Pittsburgh will use the Mellon funds to support the publication and promotion of first monographs in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies. Although all three presses have strong publication lists in this field, this initiative will enable them to accept more first books by junior scholars, to work closely with those scholars to develop their authorial skills, and in some cases to underwrite the publication of works in paperback or the incorporation of expensive elements (such as color images). . . .

The American Literatures Initiative, led by NYU in collaboration with Fordham, Rutgers, Temple and Virginia, also seeks to publish promising scholars’ first books in their focus field of English-language literatures of Central and North America and the Caribbean. The most innovative aspect of the program will be the establishment of a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative. This service will handle all copyediting, design, layout, and typesetting costs, and manage each title through to the point where it is ready for printing. Mellon funds will also be used to pay authors modest royalty advances and develop robust, collaborative marketing efforts among the five presses—which will reduce costs for advertising and electronic marketing, publicity, academic conference exhibits, and other efforts. . . .

Major editorial goals of the Columbia-led South Asian Studies series will be to open up new archival material to scholars, to explore new theories and methods, and to develop scholarship that is both deep in expertise and broad in appeal across disciplines. . . .

The ethnomusicology project received a one-year planning grant, the first phase in establishing a cooperative publishing program that will include the digital publication of related field materials. Through their cooperative series Indiana, Kent State, and Temple will seek to broaden publishing opportunities for emerging scholars in ethnomusicology, and to offer scholars in ethnomusicology and related fields enhanced means of accessing these materials via the Web. In so doing the presses’ goal is to assist in disseminating scholarship and developing new methodologies in both research and publication. The project will be eligible to apply for continued funding at the completion of the planning stage.