Cork University Press

Cork University Press signs contract for e-books

Cork University Press will join with 60 other University Presses to provide e-books to the worldwide library community. The University Press Contents Consortium (UPCC) will be run by project MUSE, which is the leading e-journal in the humanities and social sciences. The UPCC will launch in January 2012 with an expected collection of over 30 000 books.

 

This new initiative will adopt a collection-based pricing model which is decoupled from print pricing. The UPCC value-based collection list price will be based on an average price per title and will be determined by market-driven factors such as collection size and library budgets.

The feedback from the library market has been overwhelmingly positive. The goal is to deliver the largest collection of high quality university press e-books to the widest possible audience. In this age of shrinking library budgets, the market research revealed that libraries would object to purchasing the same e-books multiple times in various collections and aggregations.

Reference

http://muse.jhu.edu/about/new/ebook_collections.html

Association of American University Presses annual meeting

Late last week the Association of American University Presses held its annual meeting in New Orleans.  While the word “digital” and its variants appeared in the title of many a session, it is clear that new media can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the association has been able to increase the visibility of its members’ output through the Books for Understanding Web site, which offers a convenient and reliable guide to academic titles on topics of public interest.  At the same time, the market for university-press titles used in courses has been undercut by the ready availability of secondhand books online.

And then there’s Google Book Search. The AAUP has not joined the Authors Guild’s class action suit against Google for digitizing copyrighted materials. But university presses belong to the class of those with an interest in the case — so the organization has incurred legal expenses while monitoring developments on behalf of its members. One got the definite impression that the other shoe may yet drop in this matter. During the business meeting, Givler (the association’s executive director) indicated that the association would be undertaking a major action soon that would place additional demands on the organization’s resources. I tried to find out more, but evidently its Board of Directors is playing its cards close to the vest for now.

Taking Textbooks to the House: New Legislation for Textbook Pricing

As prices for textbooks continue to climb, forcing many college kids to buy used editions or to go online to purchase discounted textbooks, new state legislation might make buying textbooks easier and a bit cheaper.

For example, a bill in the New York Senate would simply require college bookstores to put their inventory online, including ISBNs, providing students with easy access to information for the books they need. New York Senate Bill 6804 would also not allow stores to sell bundles—two or more books packaged together and unavailable separately—unless the bundles are ordered by the professor.

OUP in landmark library reference deal

Oxford University Press has signed a deal with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to supply a raft of online reference resources to public libraries across England.

Under the agreement, library members will have free access to online resources including the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, either from libraries or at home using their library card number.

The deal was brokered through the MLA as part of its Reference Online central buying initiative, with the cost to be shared by England's 142 public library authorities. All authorities have signed up for online versions of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Reference. Some 127 also signed up to Grove Music and Grove Art.

The MLA said: "By negotiating on [their] behalf, the MLA has been able to secure a special national offer, enabling libraries to extend the range of online resources they can make available to their members."

OUP chief executive Henry Reece said: "The Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are works of great national interest and standing which OUP has developed over many decades, and which exemplify our mission to disseminate excellent and authoritative scholarship as widely as possible.

"The great success of the OUP/MLA national offer means that that these works, alongside a selection of other online reference resources from Oxford, can be consulted and enjoyed by millions of library members in England both in their local libraries and from home."

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From Board Cafe

Georgetown University Press, Library Team Up for Digital Books

A partnership between Georgetown University Press and the Georgetown University Library will offer free access to a small number of the press's books, and that program likely will expand. Georgetown University Press director Richard Brown told the LJ Academic Newswire that the press and library have teamed up for Digital Georgetown, which will offer several volumes of the Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) series free on the web to Georgetown faculty, staff, and students. Brown said the program was the "tip of the iceberg" for the press/library collaboration, although he was not sure how quickly the program would develop new offerings.

"We're looking at a number of questions," Brown said. "It's evident that presses need to be putting things online for electronic access. But can you make any money doing it?" By charter, Georgetown University Press must be self-sustaining, sot the question of which offerings will go online for free is a critical one. "For our specialized titles that have sold what they can sell in print, we'll do a lot more of those," he surmised. As for the press's top sellers, it will take some time. University librarian Artemis Kirk said she hoped the press/library partnership will "begin to establish the model by which digital publications can be produced, disseminated, and preserved for posterity." It's a prime example of synergy among academic enterprises on campus. The Press offers editorial content and its backlist, and the library offers digitization, web site development, and research tools. In addition, Brown, added, the library adds "instant credibility" to the program, citing the library's reliability and its "closeness to university community."

From LJ Academic Newswire

Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities

The product of a joint task force made up of representatives from AAUP, AAU, AAP and ARL, this guide to the issues for colleges and universities in setting policies governing the creation, distribution, use and management of copyrighted works is now available on the AAUP
website.  Thanks to Sarah, who is managing the website while Brenna is taking a few days off, there's a link on the AAUP homepage, or you can go directly to
<http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf>http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/Campus_Copyright.pdf

We will also be getting a supply of printed copies here in a day or two; I'm not sure how many we're getting , but we'll send two copies to each press.  AAU is taking care of distribution to Provosts and university counsel, and ARL to their members; you may want to send a copy to your boss, if she's not one of the above.  Any additional print copies will be available on request on a first-come, first-served basis, and you can copy the .pdf from the website if you want to make further copies for local distribution.  We encourage promiscuous distribution!

The Shift Away From Print

For most scholarly journals, the transition away from the print format and to an exclusive reliance on the electronic version seems all but inevitable, driven by user preferences for electronic journals and concerns about collecting the same information in two formats. But this shift away from print, in the absence of strategic planning by a higher proportion of libraries and publishers, may endanger the viability of certain journals and even the journal literature more broadly — while not even reducing costs in the ways that have long been assumed.

Although the opportunities before us are significant, a smooth transition away from print and to electronic versions of journals requires concerted action, most of it individually by libraries and publishers.

In reaching this conclusion, we rely largely on a series of studies, of both publishers and libraries, in which we examined some of the incentives for a transition and some of the opportunities and challenges that present themselves. Complete findings of our library study, on which we partnered with Don King and Ann Okerson, were published as The Nonsubscription Side of Periodicals. We also recently completed a study of the operations of 10 journal publishers, in conjunction with Mary Waltham, an independent publishing consultant.

ALPSP Open Access Study Seeks Facts to Go With Rhetoric

For much of the early and often heated discussion surrounding open access, there has been little evidence to support or disprove its viability. "Discussion of open access," notes Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Chief Executive Sally Morris, "tends to be strong on rhetoric but short on facts." But after more than five years of progress and thanks to ALPSP and several sponsoring partners, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and HighWire Press/Stanford University Libraries, the first "substantial study" of open access is now available in a jam-packed 135 page report. Compiled by the Kaufman-Wills group and released last month, the study purports to offer "a substantial body of data about different forms of open access publishing, and a baseline of comparison with traditional subscription publishing." The study was compiled based on surveys completed for nearly 500 journals, both traditional subscription and open access. That was followed up by interviews with more than 20 publishers representing over 5000 journals. The study investigates not only financial aspects but also editorial, copyediting, peer-review, and impact issues as well. Still, for most the financial reality remains the hot button issue. In releasing the report, Morris stressed that there was still too little history to make broad predictions about the future of open access. Nevertheless, the initial data offers some interesting snapshots of journal publishing. For example, over 41 percent of the open access journals in the survey reported shortfalls and just 24 percent were breaking even. Among non-open access journals, on the other hand, 81 percent of the HighWire and AAMC journals reported a profit and 75 percent of the ALPSP journals were in the black. "From the evidence it seems by no means certain that Open Access publishing is a financially viable model for all," Morris writes in her introduction, "however, there is clearly widespread recognition that a better model (or models) is needed to provide wide and speedy access to research findings in the interests of science." And clearly, as the survey reflects, a "considerable amount" of experimentation with alternative publishing models is taking place. "We hope this report will aid further discussion of alternate publishing models by adding to the evidence-based research," Morris noted, adding that the study should be repeated every few years. The full study, The Facts About Open Access: A Study of the Financial and Non-Financial Effects of Alternative Business Models on Scholarly Journals is available as a free to download PDF file at www.alpsp.org.

From The Library Journal

An Open Letter to All University Presidents and Provosts

Two California economists have penned "An Open Letter to All University Presidents and Provosts," suggesting a new way to deal with rising journal costs: charging back "expensive journals" for things like editing and peer review, essential services that most faculty have historically provided journals either for free or for a nominal fee. "It is time to recognize a simple fact," write U. of California Santa Barbara's Ted Bergstrom and California Institute of Technology's Preston McAfee in an open letter. "The symbiotic relationship between academics and for-profit publishers has broken down. The large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear." Bergstrom and McAfee suggest the formation of a "list of expensive journals," for which a university would ultimately set its own policy on recovering overhead expenses. Based on rough estimates of manpower, space, and other materials, the authors suggested that a charge of "at least $12,000 per year" would
be an appropriate charge for an "expensive" journal. Journals that remain below such a threshold, however, would not be charged. Making that list of "expensive journals," could be a challenge, however, as bundled deals for electronic access, consortial buying, and access
terms unique to each school would complicate such a task.