University-based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues
University-based Publishing Partnerships: A Guide to Critical Issues
Raym Crow
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to their collection development and service strategy.
What kinds of digital content does the library want
to collect and distribute? Can the library serve only
some areas and not others? How will the collections
endure? Libraries are familiar with the life cycle of
information, but haven’t yet fully developed the same
processes and strategies that we have for print that
we will need in order to build, manage, and preserve
digital collections (as opposed to simply licensing or
renting them).
What Will our organizations Become?
For many of our colleagues, this question goes
to the very heart of the threat that collaboration can
bring: a challenge to existing expertise, knowledge,
and identity, based on a rigorous path of credentialing
and dues payments. It’s now commonplace to state
that libraries and presses will be very different in ten
years, and that if they are not they will not survive.
Our skills are well defined, complementary, and allow
us to capitalize on unique strengths, but we cannot
assume that these same skills will serve our community
well in the future. These types of collaborations alone
probably won’t be enough, but working together at the
very least exposes new skills, and can support the
hybridization of staff. Assuming we both will need ever
more specialization, can these early collaborations at
least help us visualize where we are headed?
Finally Are These Collaborations
Revolutionary and Disruptive, or
Evolutionary and Responsive?
Library based electronic publishing, and the
institutional repository movement, began with clarion
call to dramatically change the landscape of scholarly
communications. I don’t believe that this has really
happened, and I am doubtful that even together we
have the necessary capital to make it so. As Terry
Ehling and Erich s taib suggest in these pages,
bringing an alternative publishing channel online takes
significant investments. Though there have been
some shifts in stance and postures among libraries
and publishers after ten years of advocacy and
experimentation, I can’t think of a commercial academic
publication put out of business by an open-access or
alternative publication. Ultimately we won’t change
that landscape: researchers will. It may be that the
disruption won’t be wholly systemic, but localized,
enabling both organizations to become more agile in
light of their fluid market and information
environments. This in itself is ambitious.
Such questions can’t be answered only at our
individual campuses. But working together, the presses
and the libraries may find new ways of carrying out
their missions and in responding to, even anticipating,
the needs of their changing client base. Or they may
decide that there is not enough common cause and
go their different ways. At the very least, however,
these collaborations are challenging our assumptions
about our historical relationships to scholarship and
the points of contact that make up those relationships
among the scholar, the publisher and the library. Let’s
use the opportunity well.
Endnotes
1. “Cultural Tenacity within Libraries and
Publishers,” Library Trends 57 (1, Summer 2008).
University-based Publishing
Partnerships: A Guide to
Critical Issues
by Raym Crow (Senior Consultant, Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition) <>
Dubiquitous networking have
introigital information technologies and
duced a fundamental conceptual
shift in scholarly and scientific
communication. This changing environment has led
university libraries to redefine their roles,
and the services they provide, to better serve
the research and teaching needs of their
institutions. As a result, many university
libraries have broadened their missions
to launch online publishing programs that
explore new models for scholarly
communication.
The advent of digital publishing has
also exerted pressure on university presses,
traditionally the principal channels for
university-based publishing. As they have
struggled in a difficult market, university
presses have been criticized for failing to
exploit the benefits of online publishing
models. Yet such criticism often ignores the
constraints under which the presses operate,
including a financial model that typically
requires them to recover over 90% of their
costs, and — more significantly — the
expectations of their host institutions, indeed
of the entire academy, that they continue to
fulfill their traditional roles as publishers of
original scholarly monographs.
As their roles continue to evolve, the
boundaries separating the publishing
activities of the library and the press have become
less distinct. It is not surprising then that
the potential for libraries and university
presses to cooperate in creating new digital
publishing channels (...truncated)