The Changing Environment of University Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1by Karla Hahn, Director, ARL Office of Scholarly Communication
University Publishing in a Digital Age: Highlights of the Ithaka Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2by Laura Brown, former President of Oxford University Press USA; Rebecca Griffiths, Director of Strategic Services, Ithaka; and Matthew Rascoff, Strategic Services Analyst, Ithaka
Encouraging Public Commentary on the Ithaka Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5by Maria Bonn, Director, Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library
University Research Publishing or Distribution Strategies? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6by David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
The University of California as Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10by Catherine H. Candee, Director, eScholarship Publishing Service, California Digital Library, and Lynne Withey, Director, University of California Press
Publishing Journals@UIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12by Mary M. Case, University Librarian, and Nancy R. John, Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Synergies: Building National Infrastructure for Canadian Scholarly Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . 16by Rea Devakos, Coordinator, Scholarly Communication Initiatives, and Karen Turko, Director of Special Projects, University of Toronto Libraries
Executive Director: Duane E. WebsterEditor: G. Jaia Barrett, Deputy Executive DirectorAssistant Editor: Kaylyn GrovesDesigner: Kevin Osborn, Research & Design, Ltd., Arlington, VASubscriptions: Members—$25 per year for additional subscription;Nonmembers—$50 per year plus shipping and handling.
ARL policy is to grant blanket permission to reprint any article inthe newsletter for educational use as long as the source, author,issue, and page numbers are acknowledged. Exceptions to this
policy may be noted for certain articles. For commercial use, a reprint request should be sent to ARL [email protected].
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outsourcing model that burgeoned in the latter half of the 20th century. In re-evaluating the university’srole in disseminating scholarship, we must considerthe value of the dissemination of new knowledge as an engine of knowledge creation and theconsequences of ceding control of knowledge to nonuniversity disseminators.
Although it isn’t necessarily appropriate,possible, or desirable that research institutionspublish all works of scholarship themselves, there aremany indicators that university publishing is on therise—a trend that should be appreciated and fosteredin a digital age. Leaders at research institutions arebeing encouraged to initiate campus-wide discussionsof university publishing, including taking responsi-bility for ensuring that dissemination models are fullycongruent with the mission of cultivating newknowledge and learning.
This special issue of the ARL Bimonthly Reportpresents a number of perspectives on the changingenvironment of university publishing, paying specialattention to new ways in which libraries are takingresponsibility for exploring solutions. This is not tosuggest that libraries alone can take care of theseissues. Rather, these articles collectively provide a basis for promoting a broad consideration of thepurpose of, and need for, significantly enhancinguniversity publishing capabilities. The authors paint a picture of what campus publishing capa-bility can look like (in embryo form) and frame theopportunity for engagement, not from just a few leading institutions but as a fundamental role of the research university.
The rapid change in scholarly communicationpractices ushered in by the advent of theInternet and the Web has prompted the
consideration of previously unexamined assumptions,giving rise to a fundamental question: to what extentshould the institutions that support the creation ofscholarship and research take responsibility for itsdissemination as well?
Some, but not all, means of production ofscholarly works have long resided within researchinstitutions: many institutions sponsor universitypresses; departments, campus institutes, and otherunits manage specialized series or occasionalpublications. However, scholars often give theirresearch results to nonuniversity publishers, whoedit, package, and sell those results to libraries. In the digital age, a wide range of campus servershost new kinds of digital scholarship created withinand disseminated from academe—a renaissance ofcampus publishing has been seeded.
In this emerging landscape, publishing extendswell beyond the traditional bounds of monographsand journals. An efflorescence of new kinds of digitalworks of scholarship has occurred on the Web asscholars and researchers use new technologies toconvey content and relationships that could not becommunicated in print media. The Web too hasfostered new growth of working papers, technicalreports, preprints, conference proceedings, and othervaluable but previously hard to find types of works.
A first generation of new publishing models hasilluminated the potential of digital scholarlypublishing, as well as many inefficiencies of the
A BIMONTHLY REPORT ON RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES AND ACTIONS FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENTOF UNIVERSITY PUBLISHINGby Karla Hahn, Director, ARL Office of Scholarly Communication
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UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING IN ADIGITAL AGE: HIGHLIGHTSOF THE ITHAKA REPORTby Laura Brown, former President of Oxford University PressUSA; Rebecca Griffiths, Director of Strategic Services, Ithaka;and Matthew Rascoff, Strategic Services Analyst, Ithaka
In the fall of 2006, we launched a study to examine US university presses and their role in scholarlypublishing. The study evolved into a broader
assessment of the importance of publishing touniversities, culminating in the July 2007 report,“University Publishing in a Digital Age.”1 By publishingwe mean simply the communication and broad dissem-ination of knowledge, a function that has become bothmore complex and more important with the intro-duction and rapid evolution of digital and networkingtechnologies. There is a seemingly limitless range ofopportunities for a faculty member to distribute his orher work, from setting up a Web page or blog, to postingan article to a working-paper Web site or institutionalrepository, to including it in a peer-reviewed journal or book. In American colleges and universities, access to the Internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous;consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in someform of “publishing.” Yet universities do not treat thepublishing function as an important, mission-centricendeavor. Publishing generally receives little attentionfrom senior leadership at universities and the result hasbeen a scholarly publishing industry that many in theuniversity community find to be increasingly out of stepwith the important values of the academy.
As information technology transforms the landscapeof scholarly publishing, it is critical that universitiesdeploy the full range of their resources—faculty researchand teaching activity, library collections, IT capacity, andpublishing expertise—in ways that best serve both localinterests and the broader public interest. In this reportwe argue that a renewed commitment to publishing inits broadest sense can enable universities to more fullyrealize the potential global impact of their academicprograms, enhance the reputations of their specificinstitutions, maintain a strong voice in determiningwhat constitutes important scholarship and whichscholars deserve recognition, and in some cases reducecosts. There seems to us to be a pressing and urgentneed to revitalize the university’s publishing role andcapabilities in this digital age.
The study was sponsored by JSTOR and Ithaka andwas led by Laura Brown, former president of OxfordUniversity Press USA, in collaboration with Ithaka’sStrategic Services group.2 This is not a report presentingfindings from an objective, empirical survey of the field.Instead, it is a qualitative review, informed by a survey
and interviews as well as the knowledge of theinvestigators. We began this project with a set of hypo-theses and views based on our own experience and priordiscussions with people in the community. Thesehypotheses were tested through an extensive series ofinterviews with university administrators, press directors,librarians, and other stakeholders on campus. We alsoconducted a survey of press directors to understand bettertheir relationships to their host institutions, progress ingetting online, and ability to develop new programs.Some of what we learned through this process confirmedour sense of how the world is changing, but we also heardviews that we had not expected. We were particularlysurprised by how critical many were of university presses and the difficulties they have had in adapting.What the World Looks Like and Where We Are HeadedFormal scholarly publishing is characterized by a processof selection, editing, printing, and distribution of an author’scontent by an intermediary (preferably one with somename recognition). Informal scholarly publishing, bycomparison, is the dissemination of content (sometimescalled “gray literature”) that generally has not passedthrough these processes, such as working papers, lecturenotes, student newsletters, etc. In the past decade, therange and importance of the latter has dramaticallyexpanded through information technology. Scholarsincreasingly turn to preprint servers, blogs, e-mail lists,and institutional repositories, to share their work, ideas,data, opinions, and critiques. These forms of informalpublication have become pervasive in the university andcollege environment. As scholars rely more heavily onthese channels to share and find information, theboundaries between formal and informal publication will blur. These changes in the behavior of scholars will require changes in the approaches universities take to all kinds of publishing.
Universities have traditionally participated in theformal publication of their intellectual output through anetwork of presses, though most publishing of this output,especially in the sciences, has long taken place outside theuniversity sector. For a variety of reasons, universitypresses have become less integrated with the core activitiesand missions of their campuses over the years—a drift thatthreatens to continue as information technology transformsthe landscape of scholarly publishing. The responsibilityfor disseminating digital scholarship is migrating insteadin two other directions.
One direction is toward large (primarily commercial)publishing platforms that offer economies of scale incrucial areas, such as aggregation of content, technologydevelopment, and marketing. There are risks associatedwith this strategy. Highly specialized scholars produceresearch that may be of interest to only a small number of
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peers, and its commercial value is quite low. The valuein terms of scholarship, however, may be much higher—and in some cases the impact is not evident for years oreven decades after the research is first published. Thiskind of scholarship may be overlooked by for-profitpublishers. Moreover, the segmented nature of thescholarly communications marketplace exacerbates thepower of the largest publishing entities to exploit highlyresilient niche “monopolies”—some use their marketpower to raise prices.
The second direction is toward informal channelsoperated by other entities on campus, primarilylibraries, academic computing centers, academicdepartments, and cross-institutional research centers.These entities can all play a critical role in scholarlycommunications3 and bring new skills and resources tothe table, but they are relatively new to the publishingrealm. University presses have developed publishingskills and experience over many years that are also veryvaluable in this new context and that would be costly, if not impossible, to replicate. Furthermore, university-based and other not-for-profit presses are accustomed to grappling with the often conflicting claims ofscholarship and cost recovery. If these publishersdisappear, authors will be left with fewer and perhapsless desirable options, and many universities will nothave a place at the table.
Publishing in the future will look very different than it has looked in the past. Consumption patterns havealready changed dramatically, as many scholars haveincreasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to obtaininformation that is useful to their research and teaching.In fact, we have heard from many scholars that, from theperspective of today’s students, “if it isn’t electronic, itdoesn’t exist.” Transformation on the creation andproduction sides is taking longer, but ultimately may havean even more profound impact on the way scholars work.Publishers have made progress putting their legacycontent online, especially with journals. We believe thenext stage will be the creation of new formats madepossible by digital technologies, ultimately allowingscholars to work in deeply integrated electronic researchand publishing environments. These environments willprovide tools and resources for conducting research,collaborating with peers, manipulating data sets, andpublishing working papers and conference papers. Theywill support real-time dissemination, dynamicallyupdated content, and multimedia formats, as scholarsincreasingly seek to incorporate video and audio in theirresearch and teaching.
Alongside these changes in content creation andpublication, universities must revisit traditional viewsabout how publishing is supported. The actors in thenew system may be different, especially with user-
generated content. Already, alternative distributionmodels (institutional repositories, preprint servers, openaccess journals) are emerging with the aim to broadenaccess, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content.Different economic models will be appropriate fordifferent types of content and different audiences. Itseems critical to us that there continue to be a diversemarketplace for publishing a range of content, from fee-based to open access, from peer reviewed to self-published, from single author to collaboratively created,from simple text to rich media. This marketplace shouldinvolve commercial and not-for-profit entities, andshould include collaborations among libraries, presses, and academic computing centers.
What will, or should, the future scholarlycommunications system look like? First, every university that produces research should have apublishing strategy. Second, the actors will change.Much of the content produced in the future will bedisseminated electronically, and a new constellation ofskills (including those that currently reside in presses,libraries, and IT groups) will be required to do this mosteffectively. University presses will have to change. Someuniversities will encourage and enable their presses togrow and take more of a leadership role. Other institu-tions may decide to open new presses. Others may closetheir presses or let their presses evolve into morespecialized enterprises with a focus on editorial andcredentialing services while depending on externalentities for core infrastructure and marketing services.What seems clear is that to succeed presses are going toneed to be a more important partner in helping their hostinstitutions to fulfill their research and teaching mission.Third, in the digital environment certain activities andassets (e.g., technology development, marketing) will beconsolidated onto large-scale platforms. These newdigital publishing activities are central to the research andteaching missions of universities, and it therefore seemscritically important that the university community be ableto influence strongly the development of these platformsto ensure that they support long-held university values,rather than allowing them to be driven primarily bycommercial incentives. Role of LibrariesAmong the librarians consulted for this study, weperceived a high level of energy and excitement aboutthe “reinvention” of the librarian’s mission. Thisreinvented mission involves a combination of:
• serving faculty research, teaching, and publishingagendas (building collections to support facultyresearch, providing tools, delivering everythingthey want to the desktop, developing techno-logical expertise for their publishing projects,supporting the infrastructure for their courses);
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• serving student study needs (creating newphysical and virtual spaces for private and group work, helping students to become moreefficient researchers);
• preservation (supporting digital archivingefforts);
• making scholarship available to the wider world(open access, digitizing special collections);
• lowering the cost of scholarship (alternativepublishing, legalexperts to negotiatecontracts); and
• supporting scholarlycommunications(providing robustonline collections,creating researchenvironments that will help faculty andgraduate studentscreate the scholarshipof the future, findingways for theinstitution to take backmore control andlower the cost ofscholarship, anddevelopinginfrastructure andtools to enablemultimedia).
Increasingly, these rolesbleed into what might be considered “publishing.” Therole of librarians has always been, in part, to provideservices to the local community that help them findinformation, or learn how to find information. With theadvent of online resources, librarians developed skills inaccessing and managing online data. It therefore is notsurprising that many faculty members and studentshave turned to librarians for assistance in producingelectronic resources. At the same time, several librariansconceded to us that they are good at organizinginformation but lack expertise in choosing or prioritizingwhat merits publication. Libraries provide tools andinfrastructure to support new forms of informalpublishing, but these tend to be inward focused (towardthe home institution) rather than externally focused(toward the best scholarship in a given discipline),limiting their appeal to users. Attempts by librarians tocreate new online resources by digitizing specialcollections often fail to take into consideration thepotential market for those materials or what is reallyneeded. Likewise, librarians have limited skills and
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experience in marketing content to build awareness andusage. And library publishing options lack the prestigethat a university press imprint confers on scholarship.These are all areas in which the librarians consultedbelieve that university presses can play an important andongoing role. Role of University PressesPresses are facing a growing set of formidable challenges:their printed products have experienced waning demand,
more library acquisitionresources are expended onscientific journal literaturedistributed by largepublishers, the open accessmovement is contesting thetraditional business model of publishing, andadministrators areincreasingly looking to otherparts of campus to assumepublishing-relatedresponsibilities for digitalcontent. While many presseshave been remarkably nimblein making do on a diet ofmodest subsidies, shoestringbudgets, and programs thatpainstakingly try to balancecost-recovery goals andscholarly value, those daysmay be numbered.
One issue is that overtime, and in pursuit of the
largest public service to the global academic community,presses have tended to grow disconnected from theadministrations at their own campuses. This is due inpart to the fact that they primarily publish works fromscholars located at other institutions. As a result,university presses are viewed by their administration aslargely a general service function for higher education,not as adding value to their local institutions.Commitment to their longevity therefore tends to be low.
The second issue is that university presses havestruggled to develop workable business models forpublishing electronically. As journals have gone online,many have migrated to commercial platforms that offeredmore attractive terms and services than university pressescould provide. We are concerned that monographs and,perhaps more importantly, new forms of scholarship willfollow a similar path. Scholars in certain disciplines relyheavily on university presses for their credentialing, andit is not clear that commercial publishers would serve theneeds of authors as well.
The University of Michigan Library hosts SocialCommentary on the Ithaka Report using CommentPress,an online textual annotation tool. This screenshot shows
the Executive Summary with a reader’s comment. Formore on the CommentPress version of the Ithaka report,
see the accompanying article by Maria Bonn.
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What Needs to Be DoneIn our interviews we detected significant detachmentfrom administrators about publishing’s connection totheir core mission; a high level of energy and excitementfrom the librarians we consulted about reinventing theirroles on campus to meet the evolving needs of theirconstituents; and a wide range of responses from pressdirectors, from those who are continuing to do whatthey have always done, to those who are activelyreconnecting with their host institutions’ academicprograms and engaging in collaborative efforts todevelop new electronic products. Many press directorshave a sense of what needs to be done to jump-start theirnew enterprises, but lack the financial capital, technicalstaff, and technological skills to pursue this kind ofagenda. Librarians and press directors acknowledgethat they have limited experience in collaboratingeffectively with one another and operate on differentbusiness models that make collaboration challenging.At the same time, we found that they have anappreciation for the unique skills and experience that each brings to the table.
Administrators, librarians, and presses each have a role to play (as do scholars, though this report is notdirected at them). The vision put forward in the fullreport is unlikely to materialize without leadership fromthese three constituents, particularly from presidents andprovosts. Due to the siloed structure of universities, realcollaboration is difficult to enact without impetus fromthe top. We encourage senior administrators to embracethe fact that in this digital era, publishing, broadlydefined, is an integral part of the core mission andactivities of universities, and to take ownership of it.They should take inventory of the landscape ofpublishing activities underway within their universities to understand how resources are currently being used.They should work with librarians, press directors, ITdirectors, and faculty to develop a strategic approach topublishing, encompassing what publication servicesshould be provided to their constituents, how theseservices should be provided and funded, how publishingcontributes to their institution’s reputation, howpublishing should relate to tenure decisions, and whattheir position on intellectual assets should be. Finally,they should create the organizational structures necessaryto implement this strategy and leverage the resources ofthe university. These parties should work together tocreate a shared electronic publishing infrastructure thatwill save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate,extend the brand of US higher education, create aninterlinked environment of information, and provide arobust alternative to commercial competitors.
ENCOURAGING PUBLIC COMMENTARYON THE ITHAKA REPORTby Maria Bonn, Director, Scholarly Publishing Office,University of Michigan Library
On July 26, 2007, Ithaka released “UniversityPublishing in a Digital Age.”1 The academiccommunity has received the report with great
interest and lively discussion.Coincidentally, that same week, the Institute for
the Future of the Book released CommentPress, anonline textual annotation tool with great promise forpromoting scholarly discussion and collaboration.2
At the Scholarly Publishing Office of theUniversity of Michigan Library3 we have watchedboth of these developments with keen interest. Ourwork as online scholarly publishers, our role aspublisher of the Journal of Electronic Publishing,4 andour close affiliation with the University of MichiganPress through our joint initiative, digitalculturebooks,5direct us to pay close attention to both the conditionsand tools of scholarly publishing.
The happy simultaneity of the release of the Ithakareport and CommentPress prompted us to view thereport as ideal material with which to experiment withCommentPress. With the cooperation of the authorsof the report, we have created a version of “UniversityPublishing in a Digital Age” that invites publiccommentary and that we hope will serve as a basis for further discussions in our community.
We are watching this experiment with interest. Inthe first three weeks that the Ithaka report was availablein CommentPress, this version of the report was viewedthousands of times. We received dozens and dozens ofe-mails and verbal reports from members of theacademic community noting their enthusiasm for theprojects. And yet, the discussion the report invites hasbeen relatively quiet. We look forward to seeing if thelevel of discussion remains constant or increases and toperforming some analysis to see what this experimentcan teach us about the appropriate alignment ofcontent, user communities, and technology.
The Scholarly Publishing Office’s version of theIthaka report is available for comment at http://scholarlypublishing.org/ithakareport/. We welcomeyour feedback, both on the report itself and on thevalue of its expression in CommentPress.
“University Publishing in a Digital Age,” Ithaka Report,July 26, 2007, http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing/.
2 http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/3 http://spo.umdl.umich.edu/4 http://journalofelectronicpublishing.org/5 http://www.digitalculture.org/continues on page 6
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UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PUBLISHINGOR DISTRIBUTION STRATEGIES?by David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic AffairsNational Association of State Universities and Land-GrantColleges (NASULGC)
The following remarks were presented by the author at the 151st ARL Membership Meeting in Washington DC on October 11, 2007.
Iwill focus my remarks on a narrow slice of “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” specifically on the paper’s recommendation that
universities develop research publishing strategies. What will, or should, the future scholarlycommunications system look like? First,every university that produces researchshould have a publishing strategy, but thatdoes not mean that it should have a “press.”
— Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, and MatthewRascoff, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,”Ithaka Report, July 26, 2007, pg. 4,http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing/.
When I read the paper I was not familiar with anyNASULGC university’s formal research publishingstrategy, so I inquired of 215 NASULGC provosts,primarily provosts of the nation’s large, public, research universities, providing context and repeatingthe normative statement of Brown, et al.: “…everyuniversity that produces research should have apublishing strategy….”
My query to the provosts was: Does your university have a formal, writtenresearch publishing strategy? If so, wouldyou please email that document to me? Ifyour university has a well understood butunwritten research publishing strategy,would you send me an email briefly outliningits elements? If your university has neither,would you simply reply with the words “No strategy”?
The overwhelming majority of provosts whoresponded replied, “No strategy.”
Of those responding affirmatively, all but a fewsubmitted only faculty evaluation policies detailing therole of published research in evaluation.
Among the few exceptions are a couple of notableones: one University of California provost, in addition to sending a faculty evaluation policy, appropriatelysuggested that their system’s strategy may come toinclude the policy under consideration that requiressubmission of published work to an open accessrepository unless the faculty member specifically opts out.
Clearly this is too ambitious an agenda for institu-tions to pursue individually. Creating these sorts ofplatforms requires scale and investment of substantialcapital, and commercial entities are far ahead of theuniversity sector in investing the necessary level ofresources. Each institution must determine what it cando locally, and if and when it should combine forceswith other institutions. One of the objectives of thisstudy was to gauge the community’s interest in apossible collective investment in a technology platformto support innovation in university-based, mission-driven publishing. This infrastructure could serve as the foundation for new forms of university-centeredacademic publishing in the digital age. We heard astrong sense that a new third-party enterprise or at leasta catalytic force is needed to: facilitate the investment ofcapital; lead the community toward a shared vision ofthe scholarly communications landscape; help institu-tions find their place in that new system; marshal thenecessary ongoing resources; and help motivatecollaboration both within campuses and acrossinstitutions.
1 The full report is available at http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing/.
2 Laura Brown is a JSTOR Trustee, and Kevin Guthrie, who is president of Ithaka and contributed extensively tothis report, serves as JSTOR’s chairman. Both Ithaka andJSTOR are keenly interested in the current state and futureof scholarly publishing, and the Strategic Services group of Ithaka specializes in gathering, analyzing, and sharinginformation on topics at the intersection of higher education and technology.
3 In the past, terms such as “scholarly communications” and“scholarly publishing” were often used to depict researchoutputs that met certain criteria, such as certification,selection, and preservation. We argue here that the linesbetween formal and informal publication are breakingdown, and thus the definitions of these terms are in flux.We use them in this paper to refer to the broad spectrum ofways that scholars share their research with one another.
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Only MIT’s provost responded with a reasonablyformal strategy. “Collectively these elements sufficientlyrepresent, in our minds, the essence of a researchpublishing strategy.” The elements MIT submittedincluded (1) the university mission: “The Institute iscommitted to generating, disseminating, and preservingknowledge…”; (2) a policy declaring that researchfunders may not restrict research publication unless an exception is granted; (3) a description of DSpace, a facility with the stated intention among other things of “disseminating” MIT research; and (4) a description of the MIT press.
Perhaps MIT’s submission stands out because MIT is unique in having developed a research publishingstrategy. While I suspect this is partially true, I expectthat the real reason MIT stood out in my small survey isbecause MIT’s provost was smart enough to refer myquestion to Ann Wolpert, MIT’s distinguished Directorof Libraries, for an answer.But the word “disseminating,”a word that occurs twice inMIT’s submission, is a keyword to which I will return.
Interestingly, whileprovosts of many universitieswith university pressesanswered my query, MIT’s provost mention of theuniversity press as part of their strategy was also nearly unique.
What inferences do I draw from this survey?First, the term “research publishing strategy” is not
familiar to most provosts. (This is not entirely an inferenceas many of the respondents asked me to define it.)
Second, provosts don’t see institutional repositoriesas integral to their universities’ “research publishingstrategies.” A significant number of the respondentshave institutional repositories but only two universityprovosts mentioned them in their replies to me.
Third, university presses don’t spring to mind whenconsidering such strategy. Instructive is the Ithakapaper’s finding that most university press publicationlists had far less than 10 percent of content from their ownuniversity’s faculty. It appears to me that provosts do notregard presses as relating to their university’s publicationstrategy at all; rather, presses are regarded as relating tothe publication strategy of the academy at large.
Fourth, to provosts the mysterious term “researchpublishing strategy” most frequently brings to mindonly faculty evaluation criteria. This is the only realm inwhich provosts normally discuss research publicationstrategy. Finding appropriate outlets for researchpublication is viewed in these policies as the duty ofindividual faculty members and universities appearcontent for faculty careers to rise and fall on the basis of success in finding such outlets.
Now, the authors of “University Publishing in aDigital Age” did not intend that the term “researchpublishing strategy” encompass only faculty evaluationcriteria. Thus their prescriptive “should” statementeither describes a publication future so distant thatmyopic provosts of this day cannot resolve the vision orelse the “should” statement describes a hoped-for worldrather than the one in which universities live. I think itis the latter.
Why? It appears that universities want to take little direct
responsibility for ensuring that the research done bytheir faculties is “published.” Perhaps now is the time todefine what I, as a long-time faculty member and formerprovost, mean by “published”; I mean research findingsthat have been vetted at least by competent editors, ifnot also by referees, and deemed through the vettingprocess to be sound and worthy of publication to the
wider community. I believethis to approximate thedefinition used by the provosts responding to mysurvey. While there are moreexpansive definitions of“publication,” the relevant one for this conversation is
the one used by this group of administrators.It is not appropriate for university provosts or
faculty outside the field to evaluate whether theircolleagues’ research findings are publishable. On theother hand, I submit that they do have reasons to ensurethat the faculty research that has been vetted andpublished is distributed broadly.
The call made for universities to have researchpublication strategies might be better received if it wereinstead a call for universities to develop and articulateresearch distribution strategies.
Let me tease out both the negative and positivereasons for the greater acceptability of the worddistribution.
First the negative. The Brown paper makes theargument that libraries are well equipped to distributematerial electronically but poorly equipped to decidewhat should be published. This observation is even truerof university central administrations than of libraries.
Libraries lack the disciplinary expertise to determinewhether new work makes sufficient contributions tomerit publishing. University central administrationsclearly share this deficiency but, in addition, have aconflict of interest that makes them even less suited to determine what should be published. Centraladministrators are both the employers and evaluators of faculty. These dual roles make any picking andchoosing among scholarly work particularly treacherousas choice of publishing one work and not another carries
7
My query to the provosts was: "Does youruniversity have a formal, written research
publishing strategy?"… The overwhelmingmajority… replied, “No strategy.”
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with it evaluation that affects the rewards they asemployers allocate.
Universities have learned through hard experienceto leave judgments about research publishability tothose disciplinary experts who are at arm’s length fromthe researcher. Let me remind you of Utah’s cold fusiondebacle. While Utah’s “publication” took the form ofunveiling that research in an unvetted form at a pressconference, it clearly was placing its evaluative stampon this as-yet-untested work. I am sure that Utah had amuch more satisfying event last Tuesday [October 9,2007] when the Nobel Prize Committee announced theresults of its vetting.
To replace “publication” with “distribution”eliminates for administrators both the disciplinaryexpertise and conflict ofinterest problems. Universitiesare free to proclaim that allfaculty research should bedistributed without becominginvolved in the very fraughtprocess of determining whoseresearch is worthy ofpublication. With this change,I heartily agree that universitiesshould have research distribution strategies. Let mebriefly describe what I think might be included therein.
First, a policy statement is required to set forth the rationale for the university’s role in researchdistribution. Most frequently this statement wouldinclude a public acknowledgement of the importanceof wide distribution of university faculty research.Such an acknowledgement would recognize that ascholarly work’s value is multiplied as it becomes morewidely available; that value is enhanced not only forstudents but for other researchers in the field as itbecomes possible to learn from and build upon extantresearch rather than duplicate it. Most wouldrecognize that value is increased even more as research passes through the sifting and winnowing of the refereeing process before distribution where that is possible.
I would hope that such policies acknowledge thatboth university and faculty self-interest are furthered by broad research distribution. Faculty self-interest isreadily manifest in increased citation counts. Universityself-interest is advanced by the same mechanism and ismanifest in improved national research council rankingsand other markers of university prominence.
For public universities, the benefit of wide and opendistribution may be most evident in additional political(and perhaps financial) support as ready access tofaculty research causes citizens and legislators to realizethat “their” university faculties are working on many of the very real problems that confront them.
The policy might also acknowledge the parsimonyof having a unified research distribution policy as manygrantors require that research results, including datagenerated by research, be made available for publicaccess. Assigning responsibility to a single entity forsuch distribution would reduce the expensiveduplication of effort that currently characterizes theresponse to such mandates.
Finally, and at the risk of sounding like a one-trickpony, I believe universities should acknowledge in theirpolicy statement the public-goods nature of faculty workand proclaim that all work published by their facultiesultimately should be available to the public, for free. I have said much on this point on other occasions andwill not make this case again here.
University researchdistribution policy statementswould then be followed by thestrategies that would bring tolife their policy statements, i.e., the specifics about whatresearch should be distributed,how, and to whom.
Probably universal amongthe distribution specifics
would be the currently ubiquitous faculty evaluationpolicies with their specifications that faculty seekappropriate refereed publication outlets for their work.Thus scholarly journals would become incorporated ineach university’s strategy.
Most libraries have major research distributionability; increasingly, it is formalized in an institutionalrepository. Some repositories are passive, merelystoring and distributing material published by others.But many libraries include carefully refereed university-published journals in repositories and many universitiesnow assign theses and dissertations to these facilities.Because of NIH and NSF policies on data retention, I would imagine that retention and distributionresponsibilities for institutional repositories will sooninclude at least the smaller data sets. Similarly, taskforcereports, final grant reports, and other documents ofvalue to scholarly colleagues, students, and citizenscould be assigned here to ensure their availability andpreservation.
Strategies would include university presses wherethey exist but I do not warm to the notion of buildingsuch strategies around university presses. Presses arerelatively few in number and cannot therefore be a coreelement for all universities. In addition, the orientationof the presses, at least as judged by the positions takenby their association, the American Association ofUniversity Presses, is extremely hostile to the notions ofopen access that librarians embrace. Making the presseskey to university research distribution strategy would
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The call made for universities to haveresearch publication strategies might be
better received if it were instead a call foruniversities to develop and articulate
research distribution strategies.
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involve convincing them to alter this stance. Further,presses will lose their scholarly cachet if they areperceived as house organs for their own faculties’research. I rather hope that this portion of universitystrategy would acknowledge the true purpose andmission of the press.
While I acknowledge that presses must remainindependent arbiters in order to add value to the worksthey publish, let me emphasize that they nevertheless do belong to their home universities. It would seemappropriate for those universities to specify in theirstrategies that press books, once they lose the majority of their market value (perhaps after five years), wouldbe made available electronically, for free, to benefitscholars everywhere. You, of course, recognize this asan undisguised plea for public access. Such a changecould not be made retroactively but future author’sagreements could reflect such codicils. Electronicdistribution of such works could be made availablethrough press facilities or through universityinstitutional repositories.
A final word on presses. To make existing pressesintegral to their home institutions’ strategies would be to replace them with something that more serves narrowinstitutional aims than the broad aims of scholarship. I believe it a mistake to try to “save” presses if themethod of so doing destroys their function.
I am concerned about scholarly works of manuscriptlength that are worthy of publishing but find no “market.”These orphan works often are greeted by universitypresses with an anguished rejection notice from theeditor: “Professor Dumbarton, your manuscript isexquisite. I found it to be of highest quality and asignificant advance of scholarly knowledge.Unfortunately, the market for such works is notsufficient to cover our publication costs.” Faculties infields like art history are accustomed to such letters.Universities do have the obligation to help such workget distributed if traditional mechanisms fail.
Unfortunately, distribution of such work withoutscholarly review diminishes its value to the facultymember and to the discipline. I renew a suggestion thatI made at the CIC symposium on the scholarly mono-graph a few years ago. It would be most appropriate for scholarly societies to form peer review bodies toexamine such work of minor pecuniary value and tocertify their scholarly worth in a manner that might, intime, develop the cachet of the best presses. The workscould be entered into a series distributed by institutionalrepositories but carry the imprimatur of the scholarlysociety that vetted them.
While I agree that, with the one word change,university research distribution strategies are desirable, Ido not see a need for an inter-university infrastructure to
help implement them. Institutional repositories usingstate-of-the-art systems are fully visible over the net andcapable of presenting works in appealing ways to users.The added expense of supporting yet another newinfrastructure simply does not appear to have adequateoffsetting benefits.
The Ithaka report’s argument that increased scale isnecessary to mount this effort is based largely on the factthat commercial firms are rapidly increasing in size,largely through mergers and acquisitions. Theirmotivation for growing has little to do with the need to attain scale and a lot to do with the desire to attainmarket power. Given that attaining market power is not a motivator for university expansion in researchdistribution capability, attaining scale should not be animportant objective.
What probably is needed are cooperativeagreements between universities that have institutionalrepositories and those that do not, which will permit thelatter to place selected materials in existing repositories.Just as we do not appear to need a national infrastructureto support digital materials, we also do not need everyuniversity underwriting the cost of building, staffing,refreshing, and updating institutional repositories.University strategy ought to address whether buildingcapacity or acquiring excess archival and distributioncapacity from others is in the university’s best interest.
My listing of strategic distribution elements clearlyis not exhaustive. Creative universities would surelyfind additional novel and effective distributionstrategies.
In conclusion, while each university’s researchdistribution strategy would differ by reflecting uniquemissions, I can see real benefits to universities and thepublic of developing and implementing such strategies.This represents a shift from a passive role in researchdistribution to an active one. The effort to developpolicy and strategies will undoubtedly cause greaterappreciation of the value of university research withinthe university community and enhanced distributionwill increase research value externally. “UniversityPublishing in a Digital Age” does universities a greatservice by suggesting that universities create suchstrategies. I urge my provostial colleagues to set inmotion on their campuses the appropriate process tohave this important matter thoroughly considered.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIAAS PUBLISHERby Catherine H. Candee, Director, eScholarship PublishingService, California Digital Library,1 and Lynne Withey,Director, University of California Press
The eScholarship Publishing Service of the California DigitalLibrary and the University of California Press have partneredon a range of scholarly publishing projects since 2000. In 2007 they will formalize their collaboration.
The publishing initiatives of the California DigitalLibrary (CDL) and the University of CaliforniaPress (UC Press) reached an important milestone
this year. After a half dozen experimental publishingefforts and a growing sense of urgency abouttransforming scholarly publishing, we realized we had gone as far as we could in our current ad hocarrangement. Early this year, under the guidance of the university-wide standing committee on scholarlycommunications, we set out to survey the landscape ofscholarly publishing at UC and to determine our nextsteps. Our aim was to evaluate current and emergingfaculty publishing needs, identify opportunities tostrengthen publishing support to emerging researchareas, and recommend an appropriate role for theuniversity in scholarly publishing. Concurrent with ourstudy, a university-wide long-range planning effort wascoming to a close, which added both context andurgency to our fact-finding effort. This auspiciousintersection has resulted in a set of broad aims andambitious goals for UC scholarly publishing servicesand a program that has at its heart a new model: theuniversity as publisher.
The vision for the university that surfaced in thelong-range planning process, and was endorsed by theregents in May 2007, is simple in concept but profoundin its implications. Captured in the phrase “the powerand promise of 10,” it is built on three interrelatedpropositions:
• the university’s research, teaching, and publicservice missions are served best by 10 campusesthat distinguish themselves from one another by building unique profiles of complementarystrength;
• by working together as a single institution,bringing together the complementary strengths of 10 distinctive campuses, the university willmore effectively bring together the sum of itscreativity and resources;
• by working together when it makes sense, theuniversity can provide and continue to enrich,extend, and support scholarly innovation with
basic infrastructure that is commonly required bythe campuses but not as effectively supplied bythem when acting independently.
As part of our long-range planning, we have set a goal to strengthen our support of faculty efforts todiscover and communicate new knowledge. In additionto building research capacity and advancing scholarship,the university aims to integrate the research, teaching,and service missions more closely. For us, there couldbe no clearer call to strengthen the communication ofresearch results in ways that will also allow us to extendaccess to and improve the quality of education, betterinform public policy and public opinion, and appro-priately shape professional and industry practice. What Do UC Faculty Need?
Our research, which forms one segment of thisbroader discussion, elicited a number of important if notsurprising findings. Together they provide a compellingcase for focusing and redoubling our efforts to providein-house scholarly publishing services to the faculty andresearchers of the University of California.
• Traditional formats—books and journals—remainthe primary vehicles for scholarly publication, butthey are subject to serious economic pressures; inaddition, there is a need to adapt these formats tothe digital environment.
• Most traditional publishing remains discipline-based, while scholars’ research and teaching isincreasingly interdisciplinary in nature. Facultyfeel the need to publish in discipline-basedjournals because of the journals’ prestige, yetexpress concern about whether they are reachingaudiences beyond their specific disciplines.
• Scholars’ experimentation with nontraditionalkinds of publication is growing, but we lackaccepted procedures for evaluating, publishing,and preserving this kind of work. Such work isnot routinely accepted for tenure and promotion,in large part because we lack such procedures.
• Informal scholarly communication is becomingincreasingly digital and interactive. Scholarscontinue to make a distinction between informalcommunication and formal, archival publication,but it seems likely that the lines will blur in thefuture. (On this point, our interviews corroboratethe research of C. Judson King and Diane Harleyat UC Berkeley, who are studying facultyattitudes about publication practices, withparticular emphasis on variations amongdisciplines.)2
• In fact, many scholars are interested in exploringmore interactive, collaborative methods for
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disseminating their research results, a trend thatis likely to blur the line between informal andformal scholarly communication still more andaccelerate the trend toward publishing in digitalformats. Paradoxically, absent the procedures for validating nontraditional publications, the distinction between informal digitalcommunication and formal print publicationappears to be temporarily strengthened.
In light of these findings, we have identified severalemerging research priorities that are likely to create aneed for new publishingprograms. These new orexpanding research fields—notably environmentalsciences, health care, globalstudies, and digital arts—arebroadly interdisciplinary.Most deal with major socialissues, and thus have significant potential for widedissemination to audiences beyond the university.
Publishing of a New Type?To respond to changing needs and opportunities inscholarly communication, we are beginning to work inthree arenas that build on the work of the UC Press andeScholarship, the publishing arm of the CDL. First,drawing on our combined experience in the publicationof print and digital journals and monographs, we willdevelop more effective ways of publishing in thesetraditional formats and thus extend these services tomeet the rising needs of our faculty and researchers.We are especially keen to extend the model behind ourmonographic series, which now number five. The seriesseek to reduce costs by using faculty editorial boards forthe selection process (following the typical journalsmodel) and streamlining design, production, andmarketing.
Second, we will focus on developing andlegitimizing a process for nontraditional forms ofpublishing, including digital reference works, criticaleditions, data-rich and map-based publications, andonline course materials. Consistency of presentation,version control, peer review of nonstandardscholarship, and preservation are critical issues asemerging modes of communication clash with outdatedstandards for tenure and promotion evaluation. TheUC Press and CDL have some experience with theseissues through their collaboration on Mark TwainProject Online, a digital critical edition of Mark Twain’swritings, edited at UC Berkeley. This project, whichwill launch in October, will provide a framework thatcan be adapted for future projects.
A third area of emphasis will be creating newpublishing programs in line with the university’sresearch priorities. The university has the resources to act as “convener” or organizer, bringing togetherresearch results from many sources in forms that will be easily accessible not only to other scholars, but also to audiences outside the academic community. We are exploring the idea of launching one or more newpublishing programs in high-priority research areas,which will include both traditional and nontraditionalformats, depending on needs identified by scholars in
those fields.The activities outlined
above will constitute the coreof a University of Californiascholarly publishing program.To accomplish these plans, weare creating a more formalcollaboration between the two
organizations, to bring together their different strengths,increase the visibility of UC publishing activities, andinstitutionalize what has been up to now a series ofexperimental, ad hoc activities.
1 On November 1, 2007, Catherine H. Candee was appointedExecutive Director, Strategic Publishing and BroadcastInitiatives, University of California, Office of the President.
2 Diane Harley et al., “The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices,”Journal of Electronic Publishing 10, no. 2 (Spring 2007),http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=260.
This auspicious intersection has resulted in… a program that has at its
heart a new model: the university as publisher.
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PUBLISHING JOURNALS@UIC1
by Mary M. Case, University Librarian, and Nancy R. John,Digital Publishing Librarian, University of Illinois at Chicago Library
For several years now, the library community hasbeen discussing open access journal publishing and institutional repositories as ways to ensure
broad, permanent, and persistent access to scholarlywork. Combined with the power of the Internet, thesestrategies have the potential to accelerate the discoveryof new knowledge by facilitating sophisticatedsearching, text mining, and deep linking of multipleformats. These strategies may also serve to engage the library community in developing the infrastructureand skills base that could support a new, distributed,scholarly communication network. The University ofIllinois at Chicago (UIC) Library has embraced suchinitiatives as natural extensions of its tradition andincorporated them into its recent Strategic Plan.
One of the key goals in the library’s Strategic Plan is to take a leadership role on campus in promoting newforms of scholarly communication. Among the tactics tobe used are building and populating an institutionalrepository and increasing our capacity to host openaccess journals. To advance these efforts, a half-timeDigital Publishing Librarian position was established infall 2005. Nancy John, an emeritus faculty member whohad been the Assistant University Librarian for Systems,was named Digital Publishing Librarian. Under John’sleadership, the library implemented DSpace and theOpen Journal Systems (OJS) as key components of theUIC overall publishing strategy. Since institutionalrepositories have been addressed fairly extensively in the literature, this article will focus on the library’sjournal-publishing program.
Journal publishing at the UIC Library is part of a long-standing tradition of exploring and exploitingtechnology to make content more widely available on the Internet. In the early 1990s, the library saw theopportunity to begin providing locally producedinformation to a clientele well beyond the campus. It recognized a new role for libraries as electronicpublishers and distributors. Subsequently, as a part ofthe university’s larger community engagement mission,the UIC Library extended its online experience todevelop and host Gopher and then Web sites for anumber of external organizations, such as the ChicagoPublic Library and the US Department of State, amongothers. In addition to Web sites, in 1993, the librarybegan publishing the AIDS Book Review Journal, anoriginal electronic journal edited by a member of thelibrary faculty. The journal was delivered via e-mailwith historical files online in HTML. In 1999, the librarytook over publication of First Monday, begun in 1996 as
one of the first online-only, open-access, peer-reviewedjournals. It was distributed through a Web site witharticles in HTML and an e-mail alert service.2
Developing a Library Publishing Service with Open Journal Systems (OJS)After considering several alternative publishingplatforms, we identified the Open Journal Systems (OJS)as the most attractive option for publishing journals atUIC. OJS was attractive because it is open source anddeveloped on a platform (PHP with MySQL) thatmatched the expertise of current staff. Despite OJS’snewness at that point and its use of volunteerdevelopers, we felt that the original developers at thePublic Knowledge Project (PKP) had demonstrated astrong commitment to the software. OJS offeredsophisticated functionality at a reasonable cost. We hadfollowed the development of DPubS closely since theselection of DSpace as UIC’s repository platform, but itlooked like DPubS would not be available in thetimeframe for this project. Moreover, while we coulddevote staff resources to this effort, we did not haveother significant funds to invest. Other systems such as bepress and ScholarOne, though more widely in use,particularly in traditional publishing operations, weretoo expensive.
Designed to be installed on a local Web server, OJS facilitates electronic submission of manuscripts,manages the assignment of reviewers, tracks theprogress of papers, and provides online publication andindexing. OJS enables effective scheduling of papersand planning of future issues. The look and feel of eachjournal can be easily customized using a style sheet and,if needed, modest PHP skills. Journal managers haveoptions for continuous publication (publishing articlesas soon as they are ready), the use of readers’ tools (linksthat perform searches of authors or topics in GoogleScholar, harvesters, etc.), and the inclusion of multipleformats such as podcasts. OJS has built its own OpenArchives Initiative (OAI) harvester and is compliantwith the OAI protocol to allow harvesting by otherservices. OJS also supports LOCKSS (Lots of CopiesKeep Stuff Safe).3
Getting StartedMark Mattaini, an Associate Professor in the UIC Schoolof Social Work, played a key role in encouraging thelibrary’s role in journal publishing. He is the editor-in-chief of a journal, Behavior and Social Issues (BSI) that wasfreely available online and had a print version thatrequired a modest subscription payment. In 2004, inconversations between the UIC Library and ProfessorMattaini, we learned that the print subscription revenuewas not sufficient to support the annual costs ofproducing the journal, which included payments to a
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commercial ISP. To pay the deficit, Mattaini wouldsend his co-editors an invoice at the end of the year,usually raising around $3,000. Seeing an opportunity,the library proposed to provide a reliable, cost-effectivepublishing platform (preferably open source), relievingthe editors of the commercial ISP fee, and perhapsenabling the journal to come closer to breaking even.The move would not involve a debate of principles orsignificant loss of revenue, as the editors had alreadyembraced an open access model for the electronicversion of the journal.
Mattaini agreed to test an installation of OJS at UIC and experimented for several months with asample version of BSI. Mattaini soon convinced hisboard to move to UIC and the OJS software. Mattainiworked with the library and set up the parameters forBSI using the OJS in an Hour documentation.4 Sevenyears of BSI PDF backfiles were added using the OJSimport tool. For the first seven years of the journal, only tables of contents were available online. Thesewere imported while library staff keyed in keywordsand abstracts. Scanning of the full-text of these issueshas been left to a later time.
BSI has now been running on Journals@UIC foralmost two years.5
Mattaini reports that hits have increasedsignificantly since moving to OJS. The journal nowreceives about 18,000 visits per month, up from the6,000 per month just before moving to OJS. BSI is OAI-harvestable and searchable through Google Scholar. It is being archived through UIC’s LOCKSS server. The journal’s financial state, however, remainsunchanged. While the costs of the ISP havedisappeared, print subscriptions have declined. A next step might be to explore more cost-effectiveprinting options or for the editorial board to considerdropping the print altogether.
While the editors love the capabilities for trackingmanuscripts and assigning reviewers, they are not yetsending manuscripts and receiving reviews through thesystem. This is due partly to a trust in the paperprocess, but also to a need for training. Editors andreviewers from different institutions gather once a year,often in locations without technology support, limitingthe opportunity for hands-on training. The libraryhopes to address this issue by developing a Web-basedtutorial.
Once BSI was underway, work turned to migrating a second journal, First Monday, to OJS at UIC.A monthly, First Monday began in May 1996 and hadpublished 137 issues with 860 papers. Ed Valauskas, the editor, was struggling to manage the influx ofmanuscripts through e-mail and his memory. Hewanted a system that would help him manage the
process and communicate more effectively with editors,reviewers, and authors. He was also interested inmoving from HTML to XML and PDF versions and inimproved search capabilities.
Valauskas is now using OJS to set-up and planfuture issues and to receive and distribute manuscriptsto reviewers. The journal is expected to be in fullproduction on the Journals@UIC site late in 2007. First Monday will also be archived through LOCKSS.
Due to the number of articles, migration of the back issues of First Monday will take almost a year. The original HTML files must be reviewed to updatelinks to the new site and then to create PDFs. The work is tedious and undertaken as time allows.
We have done little advertising to date ofJournals@UIC. One press release was issued when BSIwas ready to go. Most of the inquiries we have hadsince have been as a result of word-of-mouth amongeditors. Several editors have approached the libraryabout hosting their journals on the UIC site. We havetaken on a new journal, International Journal of InternetResearch Ethics, edited by a faculty member at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and several otherjournals are weighing the possibilities.
Some conversations have led editors to decide toinstall the OJS software on their own servers afterhearing how easy it is. Some editors on campus want to use OJS to manage the editorial processes of theirjournals even though the journals themselves arepublished elsewhere, including by commercialpublishers.
Technical issues for us and our editors haveresulted primarily from our decision to install OJS on a server managed by the academic computing center.While the library maintains its own servers for someactivities, 24–7 monitoring and the archiving andbackup services provided by academic computing areessential for ensuring the reliability of the system.Occasional glitches do result, however, from OJS beingencompassed within the university’s security systemand from delays in implementing upgrades as otherapplications sharing the PHP and MySQL platformsneed to be tested.6 Upgrades to the software takeplanning and testing, and changes to other entirelyseparate applications may bring down OJS. While thesedisruptions are minimal at this point, they do requirecareful monitoring.
The editors are largely pleased by the manuscriptmanagement that OJS provides. However, tools tocheck references, create links, and standardizeformatting are needed to free editors even more to focuson the content of their journals. A commercial productof such a tool has been tested, though we recentlylearned that an open source version is in development.
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The Question of SustainabilityThe library is devoting substantial non-technicalresources to its digital publishing and drawing onadditional resources in academic computing. A half-time Digital Publishing Librarian devotes 25% of hertime to the journals publishing initiatives. A programmerat the academic computing center has probably devoted10–20% of his time. While the Digital PublishingLibrarian need not be a programmer, it is essential thatthis person know enough about OJS and software logicto provide guidance to the programmer duringupgrades and troubleshooting.
Funding has been requested from the UIC Provostfor a full-time Digital Publishing Librarian and a half-time programmer. Theprogrammer would probablybe located in academiccomputing. Without the$100,000 requested, the librarywill need to be very selectivein taking on new projects untilfunds are found via reallocations and the full-timeposition is posted.
As editor of BSI, Professor Mattaini recentlypresented his perspective on sustainability, stating:
Going forward, perhaps our [the editorialboard of BSI] greatest concerns involvesustainability. The current arrangementappears to be highly dependent on particularindividuals (the Editor/Publisher, theUniversity Librarian, the Digital PublishingLibrarian, the head of ACCC, perhaps even theProvost). Personnel changes might result inchanging priorities, and there is not an obviousdeep bench in any of these areas. Even OJS, tomy eye, currently seems to depend on a verysmall number of dedicated individuals.7
The editor and editorial board’s concerns arelegitimate and highlight the longer-term challenge alluniversities face. To provide a sustainable publishingservice, it must be institutionalized. Publishing mustlink directly to the mission of the institution and befunded accordingly. We are early in that process at UIC,but we are taking steps to that end. As mentioned at thebeginning, the role of the library as electronic publisherhas been supported at UIC for over 15 years. We havearticulated scholarly publishing as one of the library’sstrategic priorities. We have reallocated funds to beginto expand our program and have engaged the academiccomputing center as a partner. Further funding ofrecurring dollars from the Provost would be a significantsign of a campus-level commitment to publishing withsupport for both the library and the computing center.
A next major step is to integrate the digitalpublishing operations into the library organization. To date, the Digital Publishing Librarian has reporteddirectly to the University Librarian. This is not ideal and reinforces the view of the dependence on certainindividuals, but it is due primarily to the fact that therehas not been a head of information technology for thelast couple of years. With that position to be filled bythe end of the year, we look forward to an analysis of the needs of a digital publishing unit and itsintersections with other operations in the library.
But institutionalization is more than just financialand organizational. The role of library as publishermust be embedded in the culture of our organization.
Our bibliographers haveembraced the idea thatconversations about scholarlypublishing with faculty are acritical part of theirresponsibilities. One of ourbibliographers is in fact one of
the journal editors using OJS to help manage themanuscript flow for a journal currently publishedelsewhere. She has been discussing open access with theeditorial board and perhaps we will see the journalmigrate to Journals@UIC in the future. It is also throughone of our bibliographers that the University Librarianfirst met Professor Mattaini. And another has begun aproject to identify the journal editors on campus.
Libraries are generating and collecting substantialamounts of digital information and the UIC Libraryaccepts that we have a responsibility to archive andmanage these resources for the long-term. The libraryguarantees editors that we will do everything possible to ensure that the content that we distribute throughJournals@UIC is archived and will continue to beavailable. As stated above, we are currently usingLOCKSS for the journals we have on our OJSinstallation. Should our program grow significantly, wemay explore an agreement with Portico. As a member ofthe Committee on Institutional Cooperation, we are alsoexploring investment in a shared digital repository forGoogle-digitized books that would eventually beavailable to store locally created digital files, as well.The FutureAt this point, the UIC Library is functioning more as an electronic distributor than a full-fledged publisher.Ahead, however, are a number of decisions to be madethat will affect the robustness of our efforts. Do weprovide a free or fee-based back-issue conversion servicefor journals migrating to Journals@UIC? It would bemost advantageous to users to have the entire back-rundigitized if we have the rights to do so. What unitwould be responsible for this digitization and how
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…institutionalization is more than justfinancial and organizational.
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would it be integrated into our own priorities fordigitizing library content? We will also need to decide if we are willing to take on subscription-based journals.OJS includes a subscription module and we have hadpreliminary discussions with some subscription-basedjournals. In addition to the philosophical issues, whatare the operational and fiscal implications? Should weseek out monographs? If so, what system should we useto make them available? (We have just mounted ourfirst monograph on our institutional repository, an out-of-print work by one of our history professors oncampus.)8 Should we establish our own imprint as anumber of other libraries have done? Do we want tohelp editors find and facilitate their relationships withsmall-run or print-on-demand printers? Do we want tofocus our acquisitions of content on a few key areas, forexample, titles centered on the Internet or titles in socialwork? And how far are we willing to go to help findnew editors of journals if the current board members areready to step down?
For now, the journals publishing program at UIChas modest goals. The first is to provide an easy-to-use,cost-effective platform to help editors sustain openaccess journals. If we can keep titles, especially thosesympathetic in principle to open access, from moving tocommercial players, we will have been successful. Thesecond goal is to connect with faculty in one of theirmajor professional roles where we have the opportunityto address such strategic issues as copyright, openness,findability, accessibility, and long-term preservation.Engaging with faculty as partners in publishing alsohelps us better understand disciplinary differences andmonitor new developments in research and communi-cation. Third, the journals publishing program will helpus build staff expertise in content acquisition, editorialprocesses, and electronic distribution—all skills that willbe invaluable in the library’s own digitization efforts.And fourth, these efforts will affirm our leadership roleon campus in facilitating action toward creating newsystems of scholarly publishing.
We look forward to continued development ofJournals@UIC and to learning from colleagues whoundertake such publishing programs at their owninstitutions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0United States License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/.
1 This article is based to a great extent on the presentations byMary Case, Mark Mattaini, Ed Valauskas, and Nancy Johnat the First International PKP Scholarly PublishingConference held in Vancouver BC, in July 2007. Thesepresentations are available on the PKP Web site athttp://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/viewabstract.php?id=17.
2 An overview of some of these early efforts can be found in Nancy R. John, “Putting Content onto the Internet: TheLibrary’s Role as Creator of Electronic Information,” FirstMonday 1, no. 2 (1996), http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2/content/.
3 Open Journal Systems (OJS) was developed by the PublicKnowledge Project at the University of British Columbia. It was launched in November 2002 and is currently used byabout 1,000 journals from around the world. Today, OJS ismanaged by a partnership among the PKP, the CanadianCenter for Studies in Publishing at Simon FrasierUniversity, and the Simon Frasier University Library.
bin/ojs/index.php/bsi/index6 Details on these issues can be found in Mary M. Case and
Nancy R. John, “Opening Up Scholarly Information at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago,” First Monday 12, no. 10(2007), http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1956/1833.
7 Mark A. Mattaini, “Liberation and Struggle: AnEditor/Publisher’s Experience with Open Access & OJS,”presented at the First International PKP Conference onScholarly Publishing, Vancouver BC, July 12, 2007, textprovided to the authors.
8 Michael C. Alexander, Trials in the Late Roman Republic, 149BC to 50 BC (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press,c1990), http://hdl.handle.net/10027/99.
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SYNERGIES: BUILDING NATIONALINFRASTRUCTURE FOR CANADIANSCHOLARLY PUBLISHINGby Rea Devakos, Coordinator, Scholarly CommunicationInitiatives, and Karen Turko, Director of Special Projects,University of Toronto Libraries
Editor’s note: In early 2007, the Canada Foundation forInnovation awarded funds to two digital library projects, eachwith a focus on the social sciences and humanities. The projectsare the Canadian Research Knowledge Network and theSynergies project. Synergies will bring more Canadian researchonline and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network willhelp fund online access to social sciences and humanitiesliterature from around the world. Both projects will receivematching provincial funding, with additional funding providedby the participating institutions. The following article reportson the four-year Synergies project that is addressing publishingand access to journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Smaller multilingual countries face particularchallenges in addressing the crisis in scholarlycommunication. Yet a nation’s voice is often
defined, and refined, through its literature, includingthat of scholarship and research. Fortunately theacademic community has benefited from a series ofrecent and emerging partnerships in the production anddissemination of new knowledge. This paper describesa collaborative project addressing publishing and accessto research whose contribution will include testingscalability and generalizability. During its four-yeargrant term, Synergies will not only develop publishingservices and expertise within Canadian libraries, it willdeliver production-level services to publishers andeditors. Synergies is a national project whose practicalfocus is building technical capacity, but whose intent isto provide a platform for the potential transformation ofthe Canadian scholarly record.OverviewThe Synergies project jointly addresses two majorcomponents of scholarly communication: electronicaccess to research published in Canada and digitalpublishing services. Synergies will develop adistributed national network for production, storage,and access to digital knowledge. Formats will includepeer-reviewed journal articles, data sets, theses,conference proceedings, scholarly books, and grayliterature. Leveraging the dual foundations of Éruditand the Open Journal Systems (OJS), Synergies has aninitial focus on social sciences and humanities serials.The 21-university consortium is led by the Université de Montréal and five regional lead institutions.1
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SYNERGIES LEADINGREGIONAL PARTNERSQuébec: ÉruditÉrudit, the Québec node of Synergies, is a not-for-profitorganization with a mission to produce and disseminateboth backfiles and current issues of scholarly journals.Founded in 1998, Érudit is an inter-institutionalconsortium composed of the Université de Montréal,Université Laval, and the Université du Québec àMontréal. Services offered include:
• digital publishing of current issues in XML, PDF, and XHTML formats;
• management of institutional and individualsubscriptions;
• digitization of backfiles in XML and PDF formats; • preparation of the articles’ descriptive data and
delivery to bibliographical databases.Érudit already offers over 30,000 articles in 46 journals
in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Thanks tofunding from the Québec government, digital publishingof the journals is done to XML standards using a softwaresuite developed by Érudit, which automatically handles90% of the editorial treatment of articles. This ensures ahigh quality of editorial production that conforms tointernational norms at low cost. Agreements betweenÉrudit and other providers permit access to a distributedcollection through one or the other of the portals. Forexample, the journals of both the Persée platform(http://www.persee.fr/) and the Press of the NationalResearch Council of Canada (http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/)are available through the Érudit platform. Moreover, theÉrudit data model, under open source license, is used byfive journal platforms, both private and public, whichgroup together over 200,000 learned journal articles inEurope and in North America.
As part of the Synergies project, Érudit will not onlyfurther develop its journals-production capabilities but also add modules for data sets and monographs. More than95% of the content in Érudit is open access. Érudit receivesa monthly average of 300,000 visits and 1.2 million documents(page views) are consulted per month. Érudit journals areindexed by sources including Google Scholar, PubMed,Repère, Francis, OCLC, Cambridge Scientific Abstract,Chemical Abstracts Service, Elsevier, National InquiryServices Center, ProQuest, Philosophy Document Center,and Nines. Érudit is LOCKSS-compliant. British Columbia: Public Knowledge Project The British Columbia node of Synergies provides supportfor journals in several ways. The Public KnowledgeProject (PKP)—a partnership of the University of BritishColumbia and Simon Fraser University’s Library andcontinues on page 18
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Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing—managesongoing development and support of three, key, opensource software components—Open Journal Systems, OpenConference Systems (OCS), and the OAI-MHP–compliantmetadata harvester—that will be used extensively by theother Synergies nodes. Simon Fraser University Librarywill coordinate these activities, in addition to supportingother academic digitization and repository projects.
Open Journal Systems (OJS) was originally developedat the University of British Columbia under the leadershipof John Willinsky. In seven years, OJS has emerged as theworld’s leading open source journal publishing systemand was recently recognized by SPARC as a LeadingEdge Project. Over 1,000 not-for-profit, commercial, andopen access journals use OJS in a variety of settings,ranging from single silo journals to national scholarlypublishing portals. The software is a robust, standards-based, publication-management system for scholarlyjournals, providing editorial workflow management,online article access, full-text searching, and interactivereading tools. The PKP community also ranges fromindividuals with a professional interest in the project tolarge organizations, such as the Instituto Brasileiro deInformação em Ciência e Tecnologia and now Synergies.
PKP has established working relationships with GoogleScholar, LOCKSS, SPARC, and other organizations toensure that its software is designed to serve the largerscholarly community. OJS has received funds fromSSHRC, the Max Bell Foundation, the Soros Foundation,the International Network for the Advancement ofScientific Publishing, and the MacArthur Foundation. Atlantic Scholarly Information Network: Integrating Érudit and OJSThe Atlantic Scholarly Information Network (ASIN),under the leadership of the University of New BrunswickLibrary, has begun integrating the Érudit XML-basedprocesses, including the Érudit rich metadata description,with the journal management and delivery services ofOJS. Currently, 12 journals are either being publishedunder this combined model or have reached agreement to do so. ASIN will also investigate new models forinstitutional repositories, seeking to make them morerelevant to researchers. As part of this initiative, theElectronic Text Centre at the University of NewBrunswick is developing an automated metadata-generation application for DSpace.
Atlantic Canada’s Synergies institutions will haveconsiderable latitude in how they contribute, but this will work within a tightly knit regional framework ofstandardized repository and journal services andprocesses. Research results will be distributed through ascholarly communication module of the ASIN portal.Guided by a regional journal advisory committee, Atlantic
Canada will be providing a series of publishing servicesfor back and current issues to journal editors. Thesewill range from hosting an OJS instance at theirinstitution of choice to offering full XML article markup with HTML delivery integrated into OJS. Prairies: Preservation Led by the University of Calgary Library, the Prairiesnode of Synergies will be responsible for developingthe Synergies preservation program. Leveragingexisting technologies, the intent is to establish aframework for trusted Canadian repositories. Initially, this node will focus on social sciences andhumanities journals published through Synergies asthe preservation test bed. Looking ahead, theinfrastructure can be extended for institutions to store and preserve source documents, raw data, andmultimedia content and material licensed through theCanadian Research Knowledge Network and othernational initiatives. The Prairies node includesAthabasca University and the Universities ofSaskatchewan and Winnipeg. Using the OJS software, the Prairies node will be working closelywith Athabasca’s International Consortium for theAdvancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP). Ontario: Scholars Portal Ontario will be offering a centrally operated publishingservice that is tightly integrated into the Ontario Councilof University Libraries Scholars Portal services, yet withdecentralized institutional identity and support. Fouruniversity libraries are involved in the Ontario node:University of Toronto (Ontario lead), University ofGuelph, York University, and the University of Windsor.Services will be based on OJS, the Open ConferenceSystems, and DSpace. By seamlessly incorporatingpublishing services with Scholars Portal services, theOntario Synergies partners will be able to provide more effective and a greater degree of informationdiscovery and dissemination than would otherwise bepossible. Specifically journal, conference proceedingsand repository content will be integrated and/orexposed to Scholars Portal and other search services.
Scholars Portal is a resource-discovery servicehousing over 100 million citations and over 12 millionfull-text documents from all disciplines. From January2005 to April 2007, 20 million searches were conductedand 12 million articles from 8,000 electronic journalswere downloaded. Scholars Portal services areavailable to faculty, students, and staff in Ontario’s 20 universities. Services will also include the securearchiving of published journals and conferences. Weanticipate that Scholars Portal’s traffic will generateadditional use of Synergies-supported publications.
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Synergies includes participants from the variousmilieux of the Canadian research community. Theseinclude faculty, journal editors, scholarly associations,directors of research centers, Canada Research Chairholders, librarians, publishers, and technical experts.Each of the leading regional partners brings different but complementary expertise:
• the Université de Montréal with Érudit’spublishing and portal technology;
• Simon Fraser University Library with OJS, OpenConference Systems (OCS), metadata harvesters,and open source software development;
• the University of Toronto Libraries with itsintegration of OJS, OCS, and repository contentinto Ontario’s Scholars Portal;
• the University of New Brunswick Library with its growing expertise in marrying elements ofÉrudit and OJS; and
• the University of Calgary Library with its focuson preservation and journals with limitedcirculation.
See the accompanying sidebar for a summary of the expertise, roles, and contributions of the Synergiesleading regional partners.
Each regional leading institution will, in turn,collaborate with several universities. Local Synergiespartners—currently 16 Canadian university libraries—will be able to choose from a variety of platforms andassociated production tools to create and maintain content.The five regional nodes address different developmentsegments of the overall project and will collectivelyprovide expertise to develop, support, and coordinate theuse of these systems by the local sites. In turn, the regionalnodes will work closely with the Université de Montrealas the lead node to identify, develop, and implementappropriate standards and interoperability mechanisms to provide a consolidated central platform that will collectand present these resources in a comprehensive, seamlessmanner to all users.
A regional structure allows responsiveness to local publishing realities and reflects Canada’s twoofficial languages. A certain level of duplication andcomplementarity has been built in to promote face-to-face interaction with journal staff, other publishers, and researchers to distribute expertise nationally and to ensure content integrity and preservation. After theinitial year of this four-year project, other interestedinstitutions will be invited to join.
A wide range of tools to support the creation,distribution, and archiving of digital objects will beoffered. The flexible infrastructure, while encouragingopen access, also allows journal editors and publishersto structure subscription options and maintain revenue
control. Any code developed during the project will bereleased open source. The appropriate license is currentlybeing investigated recognizing the complexity arisingfrom existing legacy projects, and hence licenses.Program DescriptionThrough a national portal, Synergies will present aconsistent and powerful interface to Canadian socialsciences and humanities publications. The system willoffer a variety of indexing and discovery options andstrive for further innovative approaches. Synergiestechnologies will support metadata standards thatcomply with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol forMetadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), such as unqualifiedDublin Core, and other subject and discipline-specificmetadata structures as appropriate and when theybecome available. Synergies will provide language-localization options, both for searching and displayingcontent, in English or French. Aims of the Synergies ProgramMoving Research and Scholarship OnlineFor many Canadian journals, online presence is restrictedto aggregators such as ProQuest and EBSCO. The SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)spends $2.2 million allocated to research and transferjournals to pay for quality assurance (peer review andprofessional editing and layout) and the creation of apublic record. SSHRC support together with subscrip-tion income, in general, has been insufficient to fund theadoption of technologies that maximize the impact ofscholarly communication. Complementing this supportfor journal publication is more recent institutionalinvestments in centers of excellence, many of whichhave modest publishing programs. Even more recently,institutions have begun funding institutionalrepositories.
Electronic publishing models for the disseminationof scholarship present new opportunities for increasingthe impact of Canadian research but lack the under-pinnings that traditional print models have—preservationand permanent identification are but two key elements.Without this, concerns about the value of electronicdissemination will continue to be raised. This is inmarked contrast to the social sciences and humanitiestraditional roles as gatekeepers, guardians, and servantsof our social, historical, and cultural heritage. Synergiesprovides a long-term commitment to electronicpublishing. The past activities of the five leadinginstitutions attest to their commitment. Enhancing Access to Publicly Funded Research Several Canadian funding agencies are actively pursuingpolicies in support of open access to publicly fundedresearch. The Canadian Institute of Health Research has
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budgets; some report to vice presidents of research whileothers report with their university presses. Servicelevels also vary as does focus on open access publishing.
While the initial focus is on scholarly journals in thehumanities and the social sciences, the project willsupport a variety of publication types and all disciplines.By providing robust and persistent infrastructure, it isthe intent of the Synergies project to foster experimentationin scholarly communication forms and norms. ConclusionSynergies bears some striking overlaps with keyrecommendations contained in the Ithaka report,“University Publishing in a Digital Age.”2 Among theirrecommendations, the authors call for a “powerful
technology platform” and“shared capital investment” in order to develop onlinepublishing capabilities. Keyenablers include strategicinvestment, the development of online publishing capacity,scalability, appropriate
organizational structures, collaboration, and theinclusion of multiple medias and formats. The projectalso bears some resemblance to Crow’s call forpublishing cooperatives.3
But there are also some striking differences. Key is a national scale and initial focus on social sciences andhumanities journals. Synergies partnerships, whilesituated squarely within libraries, cross sectors. Whilepromoting a unified Canadian corpus is an intent, thestarting point is the provision of a robust technicalinfrastructure. This project is also deeply embedded inthe public sphere and shares a commitment to exploringand furthering new business models, such as opensource development and open access. Synergies is a“grand experiment”—one we hope will benefit Canadaand the world for years to come. Project URLsSynergies: http://www.synergiescanada.org/Érudit: http://www.erudit.org/Public Knowledge Project: http://pkp.sfu.ca/
1 The Université de Montréal is both the national leadinstitution and the regional lead for Québec.
2 Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, Matthew Rascoff,“University Publishing in a Digital Age,” Ithaka Report,July 26, 2007, http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing/.
3 Raym Crow, “Publishing Cooperatives: An Alternative forNon-Profit Publishers,” First Monday 11, no. 9 (2006),http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/crow/.
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recently mandated publication in an open access journalor deposit in a repository for research grants. SSHRC’s“in principle” support of open access has beenhampered by lack of national infrastructure. Building Persistent Public InfrastructureMany countries have already developed public infra-structures for disseminating research results. However,their infrastructures are often limited to only onediscipline or publication genre, such as theses or journals.Synergies will be the first infrastructure to include alltypes of university publications and results of research.
The complex distributed environment represents apolitical and social achievement. The project aims tobuild publishing, archiving, and dissemination capacityat the 21 participatingCanadian universities, andbeyond. Synergies will alsoestablish direct links withdissemination platformssuch as Project Muse in theUnited States, Persée inFrance and, at the provinciallevel, Ontario’s Scholars Portal and the AtlanticScholarly Information Network.Building Cross-Institutional and Cross-Sectoral CollaborationEffectively altering the face of scholarly publishingrequires continual communication across and betweeninstitutional and sectoral divides. The Synergies grantapplication was successful, in large part, because of theparticipation of key stakeholders such as grantingagencies, scholarly associations, and publishers.Stakeholders continue to be integrated into decision-making processes through national, regional, and localgovernance structures. Indeed, Synergies has created amuch needed dialogue between participants whoseprevious relationships could be described as competitiveor minimal. Synergies will also provide an invaluableenvironment for new research questions in fields such astext analysis, bibliometrics, and knowledge mobilizationbeyond academic circles to contribute to informedcitizenship and the professional and public good. Developing Open and Robust Innovation PracticesTransformation requires scale—both in infrastructureand diversity. The diverse approaches offered bySynergies partners will provide a solid core ofexperience. Not only are different technology platformsutilized, the member institutions have vastly differinghistories and approaches: some have long-standingscholarly communication programs while others haveyet to launch; some are situated within the library asseparate cost-recovery units or integrated within librarydepartmental structures and funded through operating
Synergies is a national project…whoseintent is to provide a platform for the
potential transformation of the Canadian scholarly record.
