“Research and Publication in the Digital Age: Dealing with the Elsevier Phenomenon” Faculty Senate Panel, February 9, 2006
Remarks by Bruce Wilcox, Director, University of Massachusetts Press

I appreciate the invitation to join this conversation today.  Publishers aren’t always included in such discussions and I am grateful for the opportunity.

It is clear that the system of scholarly communication is under stress.  One could view it as an ecosystem whose environment is changing, and whose inhabitants are all scrambling to adapt to the new climate.  I count myself among them.  Librarians have been particularly proactive in exploring the new opportunities presented by digital technologies.  (I understand that some academic librarians now refer to themselves as “digital asset managers.”)

From the librarians’ perspective, a major source of stress has been the pricing policies of the large commercial publishers of journals, such as Elsevier.  These companies obtain the rights to faculty research inexpensively and then sell that research back to the universities at exorbitant markups.  So it makes good sense that librarians are banding together to explore alternatives—from nonprofit open-access journals to institutional digital repositories.

But there are other sources of stress in the scholarly ecosystem as well.  I’d like to say a few words about what I know best—book publication in the humanities and social sciences.  Junior faculty in these fields are expected to publish books in order to advance in their careers.  For them, books are the coin of the realm.  But scholarly publishers face their own financial pressures, and this has led to new problems and dysfunctions.

At the UMass Press, when we consider a book proposal or a manuscript, we always ask three questions.  First, does it fit our list (that is, the editorial profile of the Press)?  Second, is the quality high, in terms of content, originality, writing, and scholarly contribution?  (And here we rely on outside readers to provide peer review.)  Third, is there a sufficient audience—by which we mean, a sufficient market—to enable us to recover our costs?  If not, is there some source of grant support or subsidy that might help us make ends meet?  The author’s parent university? 
A foundation?  A government agency?

It is that third criterion—the question of financial viability—that creates problems.  There are some fields (we occasionally refer to them as “endangered species”) in which the market is now so small that scholarly book publishers are shying away from accepting even very good work. 
And so there is a disjunction between the traditional expectation of tenure committees and provosts that a faculty member should be able to get his or her book published by a reputable press, and the reality that some excellent scholarly manuscripts are being rejected on strictly financial grounds.

One proposal being discussed at the moment by the Modern Language Association includes a call for recognition of “multiple pathways” to demonstrating research excellence—not just monographs, but journal articles, textbooks, jointly written books, electronic projects, and so on (http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/30/tenure).  Over at the American Council of Learned Societies, a similar recommendation can be found in the Draft Report of the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences (http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls-ci-public.pdf).
What about peer-reviewed digital publication?  Is that the answer?  It certainly seems to be working in the sciences, where journal articles rather than books are the norm.  In the long-term, I expect digital publication will become a major channel for scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences.  But not quite yet.

In book publishing, the digital revolution has definitely had a profound impact—but it has transformed the process rather than the product.  Everything we do in a publishing house—from editing to design to production to marketing and distribution—is made more efficient by digital technology.  But we are still producing printed books. 

At the moment, there is still no viable business model for digital-only publication of books.  Despite numerous experiments, the market for e-books is still small and it is largely institutional rather than individual—which is to say, libraries not individuals are buying e-books.

This may well change.  In a few months, Sony will release a new $300 portable e-book device called the Sony Reader, with an advanced display technology that is supposed to duplicate the experience of reading from paper.  It remains to be seen whether the Sony Reader and similar devices will actually catch on and become the equivalent of an I-Pod for the reading public.
           
For now, we are living in an environment in which scholars and students want access to books in digital form for research purposes, but they don’t want to read those books cover-to-cover on screen.  Even Bill Gates has said that anything over five pages, he prefers to read on paper.

Given that e-books are not yet economically viable, but scholars and students are increasingly turning to the Internet to initiate their research online, you might well ask: How are scholarly book publishers responding?

At the UMass Press, our strategy has been to continue producing our books in print form, and thereby generate the necessary revenue stream to support the publishing operation.  But we have also formed partnerships with Google, Amazon, netLibrary, ebrary, and other Internet-based companies to make sure that our books are accessible on-line when people do searches.  These books may not be “born digital,” but they are increasingly available in digital form. 

Eventually, I expect the market for e-books will expand to the point where we and other university presses can produce a fair portion of our lists exclusively in digital form, particularly the more specialized works.  I assume that by then, peer-reviewed digital publications will be treated on a par with print publications for tenure and promotion, and that the problems of long-term archiving and preservation will have been solved.

There are already many interesting experiments underway, ranging from the Gutenberg-E project at Columbia to the ACLS History E-book project, the Internet Archive, the Portico electronic archiving service, the Bibliovault, and on and on.

Of course there are significant issues of copyright law that have to be considered.  I commend to your attention a document that has recently been released under the joint auspices of the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the American Association of University Presses, and the Association of American Publishers.  It is entitled Campus Copyright—Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations (www.aaupnet.org).  The document includes a section on “Institutional Policy Issues” that every university would do well to review.

Having used up my allotted time, I thank you for listening and will yield the podium to Bob Rothstein.