Friday July 14, 2006

All-digital university press at Rice

Okay, I'm completely excited about this. A piece in today's Inside Higher Ed reports that Houston's Rice University has revived its scholarly press.

But this time, it's digital.

I've wanted to see an all-digital university press for a long time. Rice's press is going to maintain high standards of peer review, and it'll easily be able to publish art history books with high-quality images and musicology books with built-in sound files.

As for the economics of it, I bet it'll be cheaper in the long run for universities and more profitable for scholars, too, both in terms of royalties and reputation (which is the real currency in academe). The articles I've published are posted online on my website, and I get a lot more "action" from having them there in terms of queries from scholars than I do from having them in the print journals. No one ever emails me (much less snail-mails me) and says, Hey, I read your article in the Yeats Eliot Review, but I get emails from people every once in awhile who say, Hey, I read your article online. And we then have interesting conversations, productive of learning. What's not to love?

I'm trying to get my dissertation published now, and I've gotten rejection letters that give my work unqualified praise, but cite the "difficult economic considerations that face university presses" as their sole reason for rejecting my proposal. I'm a little hampered by the fact that I really do sympathize. Why should they publish my dissertation as a book when any half-serious scholar can read it through DAI and any yahoo can find it on the internet? Granted, I'm making some major revisions to it, but still. If the economic burden to presses and libraries is decreased enough, it will mean that scholars like me can get the higher level of credentialization that publication (really, peer review) affords based more on the merit of the work than on the financial difficulties of the scholarly publishing biz.

bepress, which is the major (first?) digital publisher of academic journals, makes for an instructive comparison. There's an interesting table there that shows that the per-page subscription costs for bepress journals have decreased from 83 cents per page in 2001 to 36 cents per page in 2005. That's a 56% decrease in four years. I'd bet that the new Rice press will see something similar; at first their operating costs and the concomitant cost of their books will be pretty high, but they'll decrease dramatically very quickly.

I will say that I don't think that a digital revolution in scholarly book publishing will do much to make it easier for junior scholars to get tenure. Digital university press publishing will make it easier to get a book published, yes, and that's a good thing even though there's more and more being published every year, and less and less of it being read, probably. But I think it's a good thing for that scholarship to enter the permanent record, credentialized by publication if it deserves it, because the "long tail" will ensure that if someone needs it sometime, it'll be there. But there are other gi-normous economic considerations driving the overpopulation of graduate schools and the adjunctification of the academic profession, and it's those factors, really, that make it tough to get a tenure-track job and subsequently to get tenure.

One final comment. Note that it's University Librarian and Vice Provost Charles Henry who will be in charge of the new press at Rice. Lots of librarians think that it's not appropriate for libraries to get into the publishing biz, and lots of university publishers think that it's not appropriate for their work to be done by the librarians. I can see that point, but on the whole I think it's a good idea for university libraries and presses to merge, especially when you're talking about digital publishing. Somehow the gap between the task of producing the book and the task of preserving the book narrows in the digital realm. Maybe it's that you need about the same resources (e.g., servers, programmers) to deal with the digital book no matter which one you're doing?

More importantly, I think that university presses and university libraries have more in common with each other (or should) than do university presses and commercial presses. Call me an idealist, but I think that it is part of the research university's overall mission to provide knowledge to the world for its own good, not for a profit. University libraries and presses can cooperate on that mission.