The Ithaka Report “University Publishing in a Digital Age” was released at the end of July. The report is the result of dozens of interviews with university provosts and presidents, directors of university presses, and university librarians. It deals mostly with monographic publication, conceding that the market for journals and the online environment for journals is more mature.

Some of the recommendations are pedestrian, e.g., “take inventory of the landscape of publishing activities currently taking place within your university.” But the big recommendation is indeed a big one: “develop a shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of U.S. higher education, create an interlinked environment of information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors” (32). Yeah, and do that soon, m’kay?

Dorothea Salo and K. G. Schneider have already blogged their comments on the report, and I can guarantee that each of them have spent more time thinking about these issues than I have. But here are my notes anyway (if I read something like this and don’t blog it, it kinda doesn’t count, right?):

• As the library blogosphere frets and fights about how conservative some librarians can be when it comes to technology and change, it was refreshing and encouraging to read such sentences as “the librarians consulted for this study were more enthusiastic about the potential of multimedia than other constituents,” (14) and “among the librarians consulted for this study, we perceived a high level of energy and excitement about the ‘reinvention’ of librarians’ mission, making them more relevant and reinvigorated with a better understanding of their purpose and potential” (15). To which I have three responses:
  1. Hell yeah!
  2. If the folks they surveyed—the heads of such libraries as the University of California, Yale, the University of Virginia, etc.–weren’t enthusiastic and energized, we would be in huge trouble; and
  3. Perhaps in interviewing university provosts and press directors, they found the only two groups that are even more conservative, slow-moving, and risk-averse than librarians.
• I think they did a fair job of evaluating library strengths and weaknesses in this arena (in the narrative on pp. 14-16 and in Appendix B, pp. 36-37). Yep, we have the service and collaboration pieces down to a large extent, and we have deep connections with academic departments and other units. And nope, we aren’t so hot at evaluating or creating demand for products, or working under commercial constraints (thank heavens for that last one, eh?).
• In the list of “weaknesses” for the library is this: “do not really understand faculty as authors (copyright protection and prioritization of revenue generation for royalties versus maximization of exposure from open access…)” (36). I’m certainly one of those that doesn’t understand “revenue generation for royalties” when it comes to non-textbook academic university press publications, as I was under the impression that the royalties for such works rounded down to zero.
• As the authors of the report laid out the strengths and weaknesses of university libraries and university presses, I wondered if were were in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds: a hybrid press/library organization that is compelled to act as a commercial entity, with library-style service and collaboration, resulting in costly experiments that alienate faculty and administration when they utterly fail to perform in the market.
• Even with the recommendation that presses produce a “shared electronic publishing infrastructure,” I’m depressed at the thought of another balkanized electronic environment, with some presses contributing to one online archive, some to another, and all the commercial presses setting up their own systems. Imagine a card catalog organized by publisher, and you’ll get a sense of the frustrations that users currently face with online journals and can expect to face with online books.
• MIT press rocks.
• “The fear is that when scholarly books are ‘chunked’ into smaller segments, the long argument form will disappear. We would argue that authors should continue to produce book-length arguments, but must accept that readers will not always read them end-to-end” (24). Reminds me of Radiohead’s objection to iTunes. I think those authors need to accept that readers already have a more random-access (or, perhaps, search-and-destroy) approach to academic texts than authors might wish for in a perfect world.
• This report had me thinking of how I would like a university press to treat a hypothetical publication of mine. I think I’ll have to save that for a future post.