Yesterday I got my laptop back from the menders, so it is excellent to be able to write again. For me writing is like breathing, so I have been holding my breath since 29th May and it feels good to be able to exhale. In the meantime I have learned lots of things and done lots of things that I wish to record for posterity here, so I shall start posting like mad to capture them all before the seep from my brain and the pieces of paper on which I wrote all my notes fly off to wherever it is that notes go to when you really want to find them.
The first is a talk on Academic Publishing in the 21st Century, by Josie Dixon, a publisher.
Josie portrayed a bleak world where academics were all hell bent on publishing obscure works about subjects that nobody wanted to read about, much less spend money on. The academics want to publish because in America career advancement depends on proving that you have written, particularly monographs, and in Britain institutions are judged and funded according to how many articles and books their staff produce, which amounts to the same situation. In short, the Academic publishing world is in the unusual situation of being driven by the supply end rather than by demand.
Libraries cannot afford to buy much stock and are moving away from purchasing their own copies (ownership) and towards providing access for their readers via document delivery and inter-library loan. They are getting together to form purchasing consortia, where a single copy is shared between several libraries.
In the US University Libraries have traditionally been subsidised by their universities and could thus afford to publish non-profitable books, but funding has become more difficult recently, and Stanford Univeristy Press, for instance is under threat. In the UK university presses have always been expected to be profitable, and, indeed, to make money for their universities. [This situation is helped by Cambridge University Press owning all rights to the King James Bible, I should imagine.]
Josie talked about the way technologies and practices were changing. Cheap facilities had become available in the far east, but the transport and ethical issues involed in outsourcing conflicted with the demands for an increase in Green practice.
Ever larger numbers of books are being produced in ever smaller quantitites. Books are being saved digitally and after a first edition of sometimes as little as two hundred copies, (the front-list) the back list titles are being made available for printing on demand. This saves expensive warehousing costs. Josie said that the next logical step was not to print any copies at all for a first edition and only to print copies on demand.
Another issue was the rising availability of ebooks. Writers can put anything online, in digital repositories or straight onto the web, and people were begining to question whether the publisher's role was necessary any more. In order to do this, publishers had to get their authors to agree to new terms and conditions so that their work could be downloaded at will. Pay to publish facilities were becoming available, where authors rather than purchasers paid for publications, but with fees as high as £500 per article, or for commercial publishers £2,500, issues of discrimination arose against those from poorer countries. Institutions were in some cases forcing their academics to deposit work in digital repositories, so that a recent issue of a nature journal was published where seven out of the eight articles were already available free online in some form or other before the journal appeared in print. This was, she implied, unfair on the publishers. Publishers argued that the services they provided; technological innovation, publicity, design and peer reviews filtering and rights management, justified the money they make. It was the institutions rather than the authors themselves who were interested in digital repositories.
Funding of digitisation projects was another issue. Projects such as the Guttenberg E project were expensive to fund. In one case a charity donated $20,000 towards the digitisation of each monograph it supported, which was far more than the cost of publishing a normal monograph. A universities' project to digitise material, TORCH, funded by the Mellon foundation, was discontinued after Google books was launched as the two projects were too similar; as a result Google now own the only technology available for reading all the books they have scanned as a part of the Google books project. Rights issues were involved too: some publishers are unhappy at having their books scanned and made available in this way, and a court case is ensuing against Google Books. Google lawyers argue that although they scan the whole books they only make a few lines available to their users, which falls within fair copy laws.
The digitisation of books provided technical advantages. Instead of having to buy whole journals, it was becoming possible via projects such as ebury to only buy a chapter, article or even a page of an article; hence improving granularity. Macmilan Bookstore was offering any publisher the possiblity to deposit works digitally for posterity.
I spoke to others about the talk afterwards. They felt that the author speaking from the publisher's view had painted an unduly bleak view of demand for academic work. The talk taught me quite a few things that I didn't know.
The first is a talk on Academic Publishing in the 21st Century, by Josie Dixon, a publisher.
Josie portrayed a bleak world where academics were all hell bent on publishing obscure works about subjects that nobody wanted to read about, much less spend money on. The academics want to publish because in America career advancement depends on proving that you have written, particularly monographs, and in Britain institutions are judged and funded according to how many articles and books their staff produce, which amounts to the same situation. In short, the Academic publishing world is in the unusual situation of being driven by the supply end rather than by demand.
Libraries cannot afford to buy much stock and are moving away from purchasing their own copies (ownership) and towards providing access for their readers via document delivery and inter-library loan. They are getting together to form purchasing consortia, where a single copy is shared between several libraries.
In the US University Libraries have traditionally been subsidised by their universities and could thus afford to publish non-profitable books, but funding has become more difficult recently, and Stanford Univeristy Press, for instance is under threat. In the UK university presses have always been expected to be profitable, and, indeed, to make money for their universities. [This situation is helped by Cambridge University Press owning all rights to the King James Bible, I should imagine.]
Josie talked about the way technologies and practices were changing. Cheap facilities had become available in the far east, but the transport and ethical issues involed in outsourcing conflicted with the demands for an increase in Green practice.
Ever larger numbers of books are being produced in ever smaller quantitites. Books are being saved digitally and after a first edition of sometimes as little as two hundred copies, (the front-list) the back list titles are being made available for printing on demand. This saves expensive warehousing costs. Josie said that the next logical step was not to print any copies at all for a first edition and only to print copies on demand.
Another issue was the rising availability of ebooks. Writers can put anything online, in digital repositories or straight onto the web, and people were begining to question whether the publisher's role was necessary any more. In order to do this, publishers had to get their authors to agree to new terms and conditions so that their work could be downloaded at will. Pay to publish facilities were becoming available, where authors rather than purchasers paid for publications, but with fees as high as £500 per article, or for commercial publishers £2,500, issues of discrimination arose against those from poorer countries. Institutions were in some cases forcing their academics to deposit work in digital repositories, so that a recent issue of a nature journal was published where seven out of the eight articles were already available free online in some form or other before the journal appeared in print. This was, she implied, unfair on the publishers. Publishers argued that the services they provided; technological innovation, publicity, design and peer reviews filtering and rights management, justified the money they make. It was the institutions rather than the authors themselves who were interested in digital repositories.
Funding of digitisation projects was another issue. Projects such as the Guttenberg E project were expensive to fund. In one case a charity donated $20,000 towards the digitisation of each monograph it supported, which was far more than the cost of publishing a normal monograph. A universities' project to digitise material, TORCH, funded by the Mellon foundation, was discontinued after Google books was launched as the two projects were too similar; as a result Google now own the only technology available for reading all the books they have scanned as a part of the Google books project. Rights issues were involved too: some publishers are unhappy at having their books scanned and made available in this way, and a court case is ensuing against Google Books. Google lawyers argue that although they scan the whole books they only make a few lines available to their users, which falls within fair copy laws.
The digitisation of books provided technical advantages. Instead of having to buy whole journals, it was becoming possible via projects such as ebury to only buy a chapter, article or even a page of an article; hence improving granularity. Macmilan Bookstore was offering any publisher the possiblity to deposit works digitally for posterity.
I spoke to others about the talk afterwards. They felt that the author speaking from the publisher's view had painted an unduly bleak view of demand for academic work. The talk taught me quite a few things that I didn't know.
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