At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.

Charles Watkinson is Director, Purdue Univ. Press. He says he wishes everyone were like Bryn [see prior post]. But univ. presses generally only receive 15% of their income from the university. So, Bryn’s model isn’t generally applicable.

His toddlers watch Dinosaur Train. “I know you perceive university presses as dinosaurs” but as in the show, some dinosaurs are different from others.

John Thompson in Books in the Digital Age talks about “publishing fields.” He says it’s complex but not without order. We’re seeing the emergence of several different mission-driven publishers: university presses, scholarly societies, library presses. He will talk about univ and library presses. (He points to Envisioning Emancipation as a univ. press at its best.) He goes through some of the similarities and differences between the two presses.

He takes as a case study the Purdue U Press and Purdue Scholarly Publishing Services as an example of how these types of presses can be complementary. (He mentions Anne Kenney’s partnering of Cornell Library with DukePurdue U Press on Project Euclid.)

The aim, Charles says, is to meet the full spectrum of needs, ranging from pre-print to published books. He points to the differences in brand styles of the two and how they can be merged.

So, “What can we do together that we couldn’t do apart?”

“We can serve campus needs better.” He points to the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research, which combines library skills (instruction, assessment, institutional outreach) with publisher skills (solicitation for content, project management, editing, design).

Also, together they can support disciplines. E.g., Habri Central Library skills: bibliographic research, taxonomy, metadata, licensing, preservation. Publisher skills: financial management, acquisition of original content, marketing.

Also, solve issues in the system. E.g., the underlying data behind tech reports, e.g., JTRP. Library skills: digitization, metadata, online hosting, linked data, preservation. Publisher skills: peer review administration, process redesign, project management.

Questions for these merged entities: What disciplines can best be served together? How to build credibility? How to turn projects into programs? What is the future role of earned revenues? Will all products be Open Access? What is the sustainability plan for OA?

Maybe libraries should turn to university presses for advice and help with engagement since “that’s what university presses do.”

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At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.

Bryn Geffert is College Librarian at Amherst.

Imagine a biologist at Amherst who writes a science article. Who paid for her to write that article? Amherst. But who paid Amherst? Students. Alumni and donors. US funds.

Now it’s accepted by Elsevier. The biologist gives it to Elsevier as a gift, in effect. Elsevier charges Amherst $24,000/year for a subscription to this particular journal. It’s Looney Tunes, Bryn says. There isn’t a worse imaginable model.

Since 1986, serial [= journal] prices have increased 400%. Why? Because a few publishers have a monopoly: Wiley, Elsevier, Springer. With increasing prices for serials, libraries have less money for books. In 1986, academic libraries spent 46% of budgets on books. Now it’s down to 22%. And the effect on book publishers is even worse: when they can’t sell books to libraries, they shut down publishing in entire disciplinary fields. The average sales per academic book is now 200 copies. Since 1993, 5 disciplines have lost presses. E.g., the number of presses sserving British Lit have dropped by about half. More and more academic works are going to bad commercial presses — bad in that they don’t improve what they get.

These these are just the problems of wealthy institutions. How about the effect on developing countries? He gives three examples of work of direct relevance to local cultures where the local culture cannot afford to buy the work.

University presses are dying. Money to purchase anything except journals is dying. Academic presses are dying. And we’re paying no attention to the world around us.

Why does Amherst care? Their motto is “terras irradient”: light the world. But nothing in this model supports that model.

What do we have to do? He goes through these quickly because, he says, we are familiar with them:

1. Open Access policies
2. Legislation that mandates that federally supported research be Open Access
3. Go after the monopolies that are violating anti-trust
4. Libraries have to boycott offenders.

But even so, we need to design a new system.

Amherst is asking what the mission of a university press is. Part of it: make good work even better and make it as widely available as possible.

What is the mission of the academic libraries? Make good info as widely available as possible.

So, combine forces. U of Mich put its press under the library. This inspired Amherst. But Amherst doesn’t have a press. So, they’re creating one.

• Everything will be online, Open Access (Creative Commons)

• They will hustle to get manuscripts

• All will be peer reviewed and rigorously edited

But how will they pay for it? Amherst’s Frost Library is giving two positions to the press. In return, those editors will solicit manuscripts. The President will raise money to endow a chair of the editor of the press. They’ll take some money from the Library to pay freelancers for copy-editing. Some other units at Amherst are kicking in other services, including design and building an online platform.

People say this is too small to make a difference. But other schools are starting to do similar things. This means that Amherst is a recipient of free content from them. Bryn can imagine a time when there’s so much OA content that the savings realized offset the costs of publishing OA content.

The goal is to move away from individual presses looking out for their own interests to one in which there’s free sharing. “I want to see a world in which the students at a university in Nairobi have access to the same information as students at Columbia.”

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Sands Fish [twitter: sandsfish and Sean Thomas [twitter: sean_m_thomas] at MIT are interested in pursuing a project to see if the new wealth of Open Access research is getting into the hands of people who can use it to solve problems. What is the distribution of access to OA?

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Peter Suber points out that FaceBook, Yahoo, Elsevier and Yahoo have joined the NetChoice.org lobby that has issued a clarion call against open access that blurs the line between lies and gibberish. Peter blows the statements apart, leaving nothing but clean air and a whiff of ozone.

NetChoice.org is publicizing its monthly “iAWFUL” (Internet advocates watchlist for ugly laws) list of policies that it doesn’t like. The list has little to do with advocating for the Internet, and everything to do with supporting the interests of Internet businesses (“committed to tearing down barriers to e-commerce”). For example, this month’s iAWFUL list includes data breach notification bills and a CT bill that “would force publishers to sell digital books at ‘reasonable” prices to state libraries.” That’s in addition to opposing actions (including the recent epochal White House Memorandum) that support public access to research — often research that the public has paid for. But they have it all bollixed up.

What makes it more distressing, then, is that reputable journals, including Computerworld, CIO and PC World, are running NetChoice’s iAWFUL PR puffery.

Thankfully, Peter Suber is on the case.

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Buy Flagyl Online

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Rob Sanderson [twitter:@azaroth42] of Los Alamos is talking about annotating Medieval manuscripts.

He says many Medieval manuscripts are being digitized. The Mellon Foundation is funding many such projects. But these have tended to reinvent the same tech, and have not been designed for interoperability with other projects. So the Digital Medieval Initiative was founded, with a long list of prestigious partners. They thought about what they’d like: distributed, linked data, interoperable, etc. For this they need a shared description format.

The traditional approach is annotate an image of a page. But it can be very difficult to know which images to annotate; he gives as an example a page that has fold-outs. “The naive assuption is that an image equals a page.” But there may be fragments, or only portions of the page have been digitized (e.g., the illuminations), etc. There may be multiple images on a page, revealed by multi-spectral imaging. There may be multiple orientations of the page, etc.

The solution? The canvas paradigm. A canvas is an empty space corresponding to the rectangle (or whatever) of the page. You allow rich resources to be associated with it, and allow users to comment. For this, they use Open Annotation. You can specify a choice of images. You can associate text with an area of the canvas. There are lots of different ways to visualize those comments: overlays, side-by-side, etc.

You can build hybrid pages. For example, and old scan might have a new color scan of its illustrations pointing at it. Or you could have a recorded performance of a piece of music pointing at the musical notation.

In summary, the SharedCanvas model uses open standards (HTML 5, Open Annotation, TEI, etc.) and can be implement distributed across reporsitories, encouraging engagement by domain experts.

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From an email:

…an online discussion on Open Access (OA) from the perspective of the developing world.

Funded by DFID, through the Mobilising Knowledge for Development (MK4D) programme in the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University, and managed through the African Commons project in South Africa and the Centre for Internet and Society in India, the discussion will be hosted on UNESCO’s WSIS Open Access Community Forum. This open access dialogue will provide a valuable space to discuss different perspectives on what open access means for the developing world and what it can offer.

There is compelling evidence which indicates that OA has finally entered mainstream discourse. Yet, in the developing world context there remain specific challenges and untapped opportunities for OA. A series of open access discussions aimed at developing world critical thinkers, activists and academics, seeks to explore insights and articulate opinion on OA in the developing world. Join us for stimulating debate!

Register here:

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I’m enjoying my friend Peter Suber’s small book Open Access. He’s a very clear and concise writer, and of course he knows this topic better than anyone.

Here are some facts Peter mentions:

• In 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials. Yale subscribed to 73,900. “The best-funded research library in India…subscribed to 10,600.” And, Peter points out, some Sub-Saharan universities cannot afford to subscribe to any. (pp. 30-32) Way to make yourself smart, humanity!

• “In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent.” (p. 32)

• The cost of journals has caused a dramatic decrease in the percentage of their budgets research libraries spend on books, from 44% in 1986 to 28% now. “Because academic libraries now buy fewer books, academic book publishers now accept fewer mauscripts…” (p. 33)

Peter’s book will help you understand better why you already favor Open Access.

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I learned yesterday from Robin Wendler (who worked mightily on the project) that Harvard’s library catalog dataset of 12.3M records has been bulk downloaded a thousand times, excluding the Web spiderings. That seems like an awful lot to me, and makes me happy.

The library catalog dataset comprises bibliographic records of almost all of Harvard Library’s gigantic collection. It’s available under a CC 0 public domain license for bulk download, and can be accessed through an API via the DPLA’s prototype platform. More info here.

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The Federal Research Public Access Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House. It would require federally-funded research to be made public within six months of publication (with security exceptions, natch). More here.

Go FRPAA! (Ok, not the catchiest slogan ever.)

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