University Presses – DigitalKoans

"You Don’t Know What You’ve Got till It’s Gone: The Changing Landscape of UK Learned Society Publishing"

This study draws on a longitudinal dataset of 277 UK learned societies covering the period 2015–2023 to provide evidence-based insights into the changing landscape of society publishing. It identifies a rapid decline in the number of self-published societies and an increasingly complex outsourcing landscape. New publishing partnerships are emerging with university presses and other not-for-profit entities rather than commercial publishers, while all but the largest UK societies have seen their publishing revenues decline in real terms since 2015. In general, UK learned society publishers are seeing their influence wane as market conditions favour publishing models focussed on quantity rather than quality. The decline of independent society publishers represents an unintended consequence of the transition to open access, but the trend towards increased outsourcing may be based on flawed assumptions. Analysis of financial data for a subset of 21 societies indicates that self-published societies have achieved sustained growth in their revenues from publishing while societies with publishing partners have seen a significant decline. For those societies with the means and the will to publish journals in their own right, this study bolsters the case for retaining, or even reclaiming, their independence.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.664

"Officially Launched! The New University-Based Publishing Futures Community Is Forming."

On Monday, September 30, the University Based Publishing Futures [UBPF] community officially launched with an open virtual meeting attended by 150 colleagues. UBPF is a new, multi-community coalition made up of the professionals who work at university presses, library publishers, and other academy-affiliated programs that support the infrastructure of scholarly publishing. The purpose of this “community of communities” is to share knowledge among university-based publishers and align our outreach and advocacy efforts for maximum impact. To learn more about this new community, watch the meeting recording, or visit the UBPF website on Knowledge Commons.

https://tinyurl.com/4b9eepr8

"MIT Press releases Direct to Open (D2O) Impact Report"

The MIT Press announces the release of a report on its Direct to Open (D2O) program detailing the impact that it has had in its first three years. Launched in 2021, D2O is a sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. . . .

To date, D2O has funded 240 books: 159 in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and 81 in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Design, and Mathematics (STEAM). The data show that, on average, open access HSS books in the program are used 3.75 times more and receive 21% more citations than their paywalled counterparts. Open access books in STEAM fields are used 2.67 times more and receive 15% more citations than their non-open counterparts, on average. . . .

At a time when average print runs for academic monographs are often in the low hundreds, books in the D2O program are reaching larger audiences online than ever before—averaging 3,061 downloads per title and bringing important scholarship to international audiences.

https://tinyurl.com/4cwet48f

Open Access Press: "UCL [University College London] Press Downloads Hit 10 Million"

UCL Press’s pioneering Open Access (OA) programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology. The Press has published 339 books that have been downloaded more than 8.7 million times, while its 14 journals have attracted more than 2.6 million downloads. . . .

Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost at UCL LCCOS (Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science), commented: "Started in 2015, UCL Press continues to get better and better. 10,000,000 downloads and consultations underline the transformative effect that Open Access can have, particularly in the OA monograph space. UCL is proud to be developing a sustainable model for institutional OA publishing in Europe."

https://tinyurl.com/ym76wmbh

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

"Stanford University Press and Public Knowledge Project to Collaborate on Open Access Journal Publishing Program"

This initiative, developed in consultation with the Office of Scholarly Communications at the Stanford Libraries, is a response to the rapidly increasing burdens imposed on commercial publishers’ journal editors and their boards in the form of higher article processing charges (APCs) and increased publication rates. This is a partnership of two long-established university organizations. It utilizes the strengths and resources of each to provide journals with an experienced publisher and platform developer that will offer journals both subscribe-to-open and reasonably priced APC paths, increasing access for authors and readers.

https://sup.org/oajournals/

Ithaka S+R: Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study

Key Insights

OA titles can generate significant print revenue. While there may be some tradeoff between OA editions and print sales, publishers can produce print sales revenue from their OA lists. Publishers may wish to take such revenue into account in considering business models for OA publication today.

OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue. When made available through consumer channels such as Kindle, ebooks that are available openly on other platforms can in parallel generate meaningful consumer sales. Publishers may benefit from giving focused consideration specific to OA monographs to their pricing and windowing tactics for such channels.

Outliers are essential. A small number of OA titles sell particularly well, just as is historically the case in traditional monograph sales models. Publishers bearing this in mind will be thinking in terms of the sustainability and growth of their lists overall rather than each title individually.

Titles with both hard and soft cover formats generate the most revenue. This may be the result of format choices publishers based on market forecasting, so from our data we cannot be sure that there is a causal relationship. Still, publishers may wish to give additional attention to their format strategy for OA books.

Sales vary widely by field. History, arts, and humanities saw lower unit sales while social sciences saw higher unit sales and STEM fields saw the greatest. Publishers may need to pursue different sustainability models for OA books based on their field.

An opportunity to increase print sales? There is currently significant friction for users in navigating from digital to print editions. Publishers and digital distribution platforms should work together to create a more seamless reader experience from digital discoverability of and engagement with the OA version to potential print sales.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.319642

"USC Press and University Libraries Launch Open-Access Publishing Platform"

The University of South Carolina Press and University Libraries are embarking on a new collaborative venture: Open Carolina, an open-access publishing platform. . . .

Many ventures into open scholarly resources are planned as temporary pilot operations because they are funded by time-limited grant pools. Thanks to consistent funding from the Libraries, Open Carolina has a sustainable model that will allow scholars with limited publishing funds to share their research via the platform, partially or totally foregoing associated fees. In its inaugural year, the Libraries aim to fund four full-length books and support is in place to make the program sustainable for years to come and allow Open Carolina to grow steadily.

Open Carolina will offer opportunities to a wide range of scholars and researchers regardless of university affiliation.

https://tinyurl.com/yn7zd3ta

Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Project: TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report

The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses published a final report assessing the success of the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project. The five-year pilot project engaged with more than 60 university presses and more than 150 open access scholarly works to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project was launched in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The final report examines whether the pilot’s community of writers, institutions, libraries, and presses found it useful.

https://tinyurl.com/3wr7wv37

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D20) Achieves Second Year Goal, Opens Access to Eighty-Two New Books in 2023"

Thanks to the support of libraries participating in Direct to Open (D2O), the MIT Press will publish its full list (see below) of 2023 scholarly monographs and edited collections open access on the MIT Press Direct platform. . . .

In its second year, 322 libraries, an increase of 33% from the first year, from around the globe committed to support D2O. Expanding D2O’s international footprint, the Press also entered into all-in agreements with Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, as well as central licensing and invoicing agreements with Council of Australian University Librarians, Center for Research Libraries; Greater Western Library Alliance, MOBIUS, Northeast Research Libraries, Jisc, Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation, SCELC, and Lyrasis.

https://tinyurl.com/yc7vv3tc

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Big Ten Open Books"

Big Ten Open Books connects readers everywhere to fully accessible, trusted books from leading university presses. The first collection of 100 books is on the subject of Gender and Sexuality Studies. The ebooks are free-to-read by anyone with an Internet connection. They are also openly-licensed under Creative Commons licenses which make most of the titles free-to-reuse in any non-commercial way. . . .

The works in this collection have all been previously published by university presses and have undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content made available. Participating presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

https://tinyurl.com/37y66ccw

"The Relationship between University Presses, E-Book Vendors, and Academic Libraries: A Platform Theory Analysis"

We investigate the relations among university presses, academic libraries, and e-book vendors, by examining university presses’ perceptions of academic libraries and e-book vendors, and presses’ perceptions of themselves and the university press community. Findings are drawn from one-on-one interviews with 19 participants from 18 different university presses in the United States during 2020–2021. We observe a market structure for HSS e-books where most presses were satisfied with Big Four e-book vendors, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR, and lacked strong incentives to search for new e-book vendors. We find that most presses often treat libraries, including the one from the same institution, as their customers with limited interactions; findings also show university presses’ varied self-imaging, along with a shared perception about the collegiality of the university press community.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231185883

"New UVM Press Breaks Down Barriers to Scholarly Publishing"

The University of Vermont has launched an open-access academic press aimed at removing the financial barrier between peer-reviewed research and audiences worldwide. Fully funded by the university and overseen by UVM Libraries, the UVM Press operates under a "diamond open access model"— meaning that authors pay no fees to publish with the press, and readers pay no fees to access the press’s published materials. . . .

Bryn Geffert, UVM’s dean of libraries, has experience with open-access publishing having launched the Amherst College Press in 2013. Geffert also led a consortium of libraries in establishing the open-access Lever Press in 2016. Geffert believes that the role of a library is to connect patrons to information, making UVM Libraries a logical partner for managing the UVM Press.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfa8msf

"The MIT Press Receives $10 Million Endowment Gift for Open Access to Knowledge"

The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also help the MIT Press continue to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world. . . .

Arcadia is providing an outright endowment gift of $5 million, as well as a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

https://bit.ly/3B5SWKb

Digital Scholarship Releases New PDF Versions of Its Bibliographies

This spring, Digital Scholarship’s bibliographies in the HTML format were reformatted as single page files with internal navigation. This included all bibliographies that were in HTML format only as well as the HTML versions of paperback books. These new PDFs are in a 12 point font and are designed for printing; however, they also have live links for immediate access. There were no content changes. For a list of all Digital Scholarship publications, see the site map.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, v. 3

Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v. 2

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Digital Curation Resource Guide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, v.7

E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography

Google Books Bibliography, v. 7

Institutional Repository Bibliography, v. 4

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals Bibliography

Open Access Webliography

Research Data Curation Bibliography, v. 10

Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography

Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, v. 80

Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

"AUPresses Receives NEH Grant to Study Impact of Open Access on Print Sales"

The project seeks to understand empirically whether the availability of OA editions of scholarly books has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. While many university presses have pursued experiments with OA publishing, sustainable financing of high-quality, rigorous scholarly publishing operations is a significant concern. The study will look at both OA and traditionally published titles across multiple disciplines from many presses. Findings from the study will be shared publicly in support of scholarly publishers, peer institutions, and associations devoted to humanities scholarship.

"Society and University Journal Publishers Gradually Progressing Towards New OA Models"

Overall, there’s no question that society and university publishers are progressing in the race to OA. It appears they’re just doing so at a slow and steady pace, likely to avoid stumbling over ongoing sustainability challenges, as revealed in Part 1 of "The OA Diamond Journals Study" from cOAlition S, based on a survey of 1,619 fully-OA journals. Respondents to that survey reported mixed degrees of OA publishing program sustainability, with a little over 40% breaking even and 25% operating at a loss.

http://bit.ly/42UFeqr

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 3

Digital Scholarship has released the Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, version 3. This bibliography includes over 300 selected English-language articles, books, and technical reports about academic libraries’ digital publishing programs from 1989 though 2022. While academic libraries have published a variety of digital publications during this period, this bibliography primarily covers the open access publishing of scholarly books, journals, and other serials. It provides a brief narrative overview of the early development of these publishing efforts. It covers the establishment of new university presses by academic libraries, especially all-digital open access presses, and the merger or cooperative efforts of libraries and university presses. It also covers the technical publishing infrastructures used by library publishing programs. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a PDF file (52 pages). It includes a Google Translate link.

The bibliography has the following major sections:

https://digital-scholarship.org/alsp/alsp.htm

Digital Scholarship’s website bibliographies have been reformatted as single-page files and a PDF file designed for printing has been made available for each one. They include a Google Translate link.

"Guest Post — Open Access for Monographs Is Here. But Are We Ready for It?"

For our next step at UNC Press, we have been helping to develop a new initiative that is essentially a compromise between the legacy model of university press publishing and a fully -funded OA model. Path to Open is a concept modeled on the NEH Fellowship Open Book Program which provides for a three-year embargo period during which presses can participate in conventional cost-recovery activities, including selling print and consumer (e.g., Kindle) eBooks. During this time, JSTOR will be offering the digital versions of these titles to academic libraries and institutions in an exclusive subscription collection. JSTOR will pay presses an estimated $5,000 for each title put into the program.

http://bit.ly/3K4wO88

"Digging into shift+OPEN: A Conversation with MIT Press"

Supported by a gift from the Arcadia Fund, shift+OPEN will provide a platform for subscription journals that wish to move to a diamond (i.e., institutionally subsidized, with no reader or author fees) open-access (OA) publishing model. . . . [Nick Lindsay] We have enough support to underwrite a modest-sized journal that is publishing on a quarterly basis and has a traditional set up. There’s a range of possibilities that we can consider inside those parameters and we plan to examine the operations of the selected journal very closely to make sure that it can reasonably fit within our financial constraints.

bit.ly/3Yv6Kbn