Open Access News

James F. Reische, Ronald Reagan vs. the University Press, Inside Higher Ed, September 14, 2007.  Excerpt:

...American universities have frequently undermined their presses, displacing their dedication to scholarly values in favor of an incoherent amalgam of free-market ideas about competition and profit. Scholarly publishing in 2007 is a hollow shell of its former self. We now seem to be witnessing a merciful reversal of this trend at the 11th hour; but unless the reversal is made permanent, our system of scholarly communication will remain in terrible peril....

At first glance, the defunding of presses seemed like a legitimate market correction: After all, if consumer demand for university press books was insufficient to support their publication, why should the presses be allowed to continue producing them at the same rate? ...

Unfortunately, this way of thinking incorporated two critical fallacies:

1. A book is not a book is not a book. University presses were established out of a recognition that academic monographs were never going to be profitable. They were too technical, their audiences too small to support mass-market publication. Instead, the closed cycle (scholar as author, university as publisher, library as consumer) was supposed to subsidize work that was of significant intellectual and scientific value to a small but influential cadre of experts. In other words, university presses were specifically designed to produce a public good, exempt from market forces....

2. Even if all other things were equal — which they weren’t — commercial publishing faced serious problems of its own....

[U]niversity leaders, instead of recognizing the inability of the market to properly value scholarly books, saddled their presses with a pair of contradictory missions: to produce the most advanced research for a small audience, while simultaneously earning their own way with at best a minimal subsidy....

If the real value of university presses is their role as the stewards of peer review — the rigorous scrutiny of research by qualified experts, and the publication of high-level scholarship for a specialized readership — then profits, no matter what the preferred strategy to achieve them, should never be a presumptive goal....

A number of savvy administrators and press directors have decided to reach for the digital lifeboat, despite the considerable risks involved....The result is an odd paradox: despite the fact that everyone agrees in principle on the promise of digital media, university presses are not on the whole being equipped to move decisively into the digital domain. This was perhaps the main finding of the Ithaka report, and one of the reasons why press directors and university administrators have damned the report with faint praise, by lauding its clear assessment of the problem while, by implication, lamenting its failure to propose a practical solution....

Comment.  Reische doesn't discuss OA.  But if universities take his advice, then more university presses will be willing to join the handful of pioneers in publishing OA journals and monographs, which require smaller subsidies than their print counterparts and spread knowledge further.  What's missing is the university willingness to admit that the press is a service to scholarship, not a profit center, and to adjust funding and expectations accordingly.  The AAUP made a similar point in its Statement on Open Access (from February 2007):

For university presses, unlike commercial and society publishers, open access does not necessarily pose a threat to their operation and their pursuit of the mission to “advance knowledge, and to diffuse it...far and wide.” Presses can exist in a gift economy for at least the most scholarly of their publishing functions if costs are internally reallocated (from library purchases to faculty grants and press subsidies). But presses have increasingly been required by their parent universities to operate in the market economy....