CAUL response to
Book Industry Collaborative Council
Scholarly Book Publishing Expert Reference Group
on the future of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social
sciences
Prepared on behalf of CAUL by:
Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, The Australian National University
Ross Coleman, Director, Collection, Digital and eScholarship Services, The University of
Sydney
and
Philip Kent, University Librarian, The University of Melbourne
For further information, please contact:
Philip Kent
philip.kent@unimelb.edu.au
03 8344 5368
1. Background
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) welcomes the invitation of the
Scholarly Book Publishing Expert Reference Group to contribute our views on the future of
scholarly book publishing within the humanities and social sciences in Australia. University
libraries provide a view on scholarly book publishing from the perspective of providers of
scholarly information resources to the university community and as participants in
university publishing.
Australia’s university libraries provide essential infrastructure in support of their
institutions’ research, teaching and learning and community engagement objectives. There
are more than 45,000 research and teaching staff and 1 million students supported by the
39 university libraries.
In 2011, Australian university libraries provided collections of over 33 million titles. Over
1.3 million eBooks and 1.3 million non-serial items (primarily books) were acquired by
Australian university libraries in 2011. This suggests that the era of eBooks has matured
very rapidly.
Researchers are heavily reliant on their university libraries for resources. A recent study1
has found:
•
If the library were unavailable, value to academic work would be lost as 17% of the
information obtained from the library would not be obtained from another source.
•
The library is not the main source of book readings; instead, academics are more
likely to purchase books or receive them from a publisher.
Of the 448 hours per year spent on scholarly reading, the average academic staff member
spends 187 hours reading library-provided material, confirming the value of the library’s
collections.
Community acceptance of eBooks for trade publications has reached maturity. The
Bookseller2 reported sales of around 10,000 downloads a day for Yann Martel's Life of Pi in
2012. The novel “sold 250,000 digital units as a 20p eBook (since Christmas 2012) — five
times the number of physical copies it has sold at UK booksellers over the same period
according to Nielsen.”
1
Tenopir, C., Volentine, R. (2012) UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resource. London: JISC.
http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Reports/ukscholarlyreadingreport/
2
http://thebookseller.msgfocus.com/q/1MUSJ3FuKv0DlQ/wv
2
Technology is changing the way research is carried out, particularly in the humanities and
social sciences3. There are new ways of delivery as ‘publication4’. Traditional differences
between monographs, articles, papers, data and collaboration are less clear in the online
environment.
2. Models of scholarly publishing
Open access publishing is now a permanent feature of the publishing landscape. Studies
show that open access material is used more, both in citations and downloads. Open
access is a ‘game changer’ presenting new opportunities for monograph publishing. The
Finch report5 in the UK has fuelled debate and commentary on implementing open access
models. Although Finch concentrates on subscription publishing, Recommendation viii
advocates that:
universities, funders, publishers, and learned societies should continue to work together to
promote further experimentation in open access publishing for scholarly monographs.
A recent study6 suggests that open access will increase the rate of return on public funding
of research in Australia by at least 25%, an AUD165 million per annum increased return to
government expenditure on research and development.
The open access mandates instituted by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the
National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) are important steps in creating
greater access to, and a greater return on, publicly funded research.
CAUL has, for the past five years, worked to ensure efficient and effective repository
practices. This has assisted both in discussion with the ARC and NHMRC and ensuring good
practice across the sector which can support the implementation of these mandates. It is a
complex arena.
Open access is not limited to the presses of publicly funded institutions. Bloomsbury7,
Routledge, Springer, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis all now publish open access books.
3
see One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub151
4
see Anvil Academic Publishing http://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/anvil-academic-publishing
5 http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf It concentrates
on subscription publishing, Recommendation viii advocates that accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand
access to research publications.
Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings http://www.researchinfonet.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf
6
Houghton, J., Sheehan, P. (2009) “Estimating the Potential Impacts of Open Access to Research Findings”.
Economic analysis & policy, vol. 39 NO. 1, MARCH 2009 Link
7
For example http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba9781849666275.xml;jsessionid=D5424F890EC1ECBB26027CA4DC58A0FE,
http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/view/index.html, http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/openaccess-options
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3. Business models
A key to success in publishing will be business models that support open access publishing
and alternate forms of publishing. Current ARC and NHMRC practices allow for funding
applications to include a small sum for dissemination of research. Allowing funding for
publication as well as wider dissemination activities would assist access to the results of the
funded research by the community.
Funding access to research outputs would potentially solve the problem that has arguably
contributed to, at least in part, the current crisis of limited monograph (book) publication
and even more limited access to these scholarly outputs.
The Scholarly Book Publishing Expert Reference Group has highlighted reduced library
purchasing on scholarly monographs. Despite pressures on university library budgets,
alternate and cheaper publishing models are being pursued by libraries.
Concern over the reduction in scholarly monographic publishing opportunities has been
widely raised in the library and research community, particularly for early career
researchers in the fields of humanities and the social sciences. University presses have
closed due to the pressures of financial sustainability, limiting opportunities for scholars to
have monographs published.
A number of university libraries, like their peers overseas, have been experimenting with
book publishing models that utilise emerging information and communication technologies
to provide dissemination channels for their institutions and content from the broader
academic community. These presses have innovated, explored links with other
components of the scholarly communication chain, worked closely with creators to explore
new ways of presenting their content, reduced publication times significantly, published
directly to the Web, provided additional content and data not included in more traditional
publications and operated efficiently.
The largest of these, ANU E Press, publishes approximately 80 open access scholarly eBooks
a year, all available print on demand. Increasingly, many university libraries have engaged
with the management and dissemination of data produced by research.
Outside of government funded research, Crowdsourcing is perhaps the newest to generate
funding for books. While Kickstarter is probably the best known example of this type of
funding, with over USD500k raised for the latest Ryan North book8, Australian researchers
are using this mechanism for funding scholarly work such as The Black Islands - Spirit and
War in Melanesia9.
A venture based on library funding is seeking in particular to focus on the library purchasing
market as an alternative funding model. Knowledge Unlatched10 is a not-for-profit
8
9
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-adventure
http://www.emphas.is/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=765
10
http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/
4
community interest company (CIC) based in the UK with a new business model enabling
publishers to cover their fixed costs (including an operating margin) focused on the costs of
the first copy. Over 20 international academic publishers are participating in the first stage
of the pilot.11 The Australian founding partner, Queensland University of Technology, is
working with the libraries of the Universities of Western Australia and Melbourne to trial
the concept in the Australian environment. Through the participation of these university
libraries, the Council of Australian University Librarians will monitor the trial and
promulgate outcomes more widely.
Other business models being explored by scholarly publishers world-wide include bundling
of eBooks into discipline based packages, patron driven selection of eBooks from large
databases of titles integrated into library catalogues, digitisation and bundling of extensive
publisher back lists of monographs and licensing of large ‘mashups’ of scholarly content
including books, journals and reference materials, all accessible through a single search.
4. It’s not just one big book
The digital environment offers the opportunity for different types of books to be published.
Short-form monographs12, e-textbooks13, interactive learning objects and new media are
ripe for exploration. The new scholarly publishing industry cannot be based around
translating the print solution into the digital environment. The rise of Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online education delivery must inevitably lead to new
publishing opportunities that have not yet been fully explored. Apple, for example,
provides a free iBook authoring application that allows academics to create textbooks and
academic resources that integrate multimedia and distribute it widely for little or no cost.
Mass digitisation projects overseas have assisted the scholarly community to rediscover
historical works and to explore new forms of e-research or ‘digital humanities’ work such as
textual analysis. Great research libraries are syndicating their digitised book collections and
sharing these online through organisations such as HathiTrust. Apart from Commonwealth
and State funding for digitisation of cultural collections at the National and State Libraries
(e.g. newspapers), Australia has not funded projects such as this in the higher education
sector. The Australian Academy of Humanities has advocated funding for mass digitisation
as an important input to the scholarly process. CAUL endorses this stance and is ready to
launch a national project should funding become available.
Developments such as these should be assessed at a local and international level.
At present innovations in new forms of publishing are only progressed within current
funding mechanisms for subject based research. Learning what these forms of
11
Further details on the Knowledge Unlatched publication process is available from
http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/about/how-it-works/
12
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/05/short-form-publishing-a-new-content-category-courtesy-ofthe-internet/
13
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/05/short-form-publishing-a-new-content-category-courtesy-ofthe-internet/
5
communication could bring in terms of increasing the impact of scholarly research is an
area that requires investment.
5. Access and measurement
Any discussion on the future of scholarly books needs to consider how these can be
accessed by the community, not just whether they are open access or not. Present
discovery tools are based around siloed publication enterprises, with the National Library’s
Trove providing a free national resource discovery channel. Finding new research material
on the Internet remains a difficult and frustrating experience for many – with reliable and
unreliable material available side by side through search engines. A service through which
the public and research communities could access, from a single point, scholarly research
generated by the nation, is lacking. This will require quality metadata such as that produced
by libraries. Interoperability between disparate systems should be facilitated by standards
to widen access and improve the user experience.
In the print environment Australian libraries have facilitated collection sharing and
improved access to books. However the regulatory environment stifles similar
opportunities in the digital environment. We cannot share eBooks in the same way that we
share print.
Measuring the impact of research, including that published in books, requires further
consideration. Current measurement is focused on quantitative rather than qualitative
measurement. New developments such as Altmetrics are essential to enable an
understanding of the impact of monographs.
6. Data
A fundamental question in the future of scholarly communication is the definition of
monographs and other forms of communication. With the move to the digital environment
will the differences be as evident as in the physical world between physical forms. When
does data become “published”, when is a compilation of elements a “book” or “article”?
Does it matter?
The increasing work on providing access to data and its compilations, such as the projects
funded by the Australian National Data Service, suggests that we will need to
reconceptualise publishing to manage, provide access to, and preserve a wider range of
scholarly outputs.
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7. Conclusion
The scholarly monograph is under threat as a print form. Reporting to government on
publication outputs currently requires, for a monograph, that it be available in print. This
will inevitably change as eBooks increasingly become the means of significant scholarly
communication.
Is Australia positioned to support those who have traditional published in book form,
particularly in the humanities and social sciences? A new approach that integrates
publishing services with other e-research infrastructures is required.
It will require more support to enable researchers to understand other forms of publishing
– creative works, databases, dynamic web platforms. Research is also required into real
costs and benefits14.
We must think globally – developments that support research can only work when
considered across the whole research community15. Is it time to consider a Public Library of
Humanities Australia (PLOHA) integrated into an international framework?
Australian scholars need a system that supports, measures and funds innovation in forms of
scholarly publications that go beyond print books. This will involve change for all parties
and will take time – a roadmap which includes all publishing options needs to be
developed.
Libraries are a vital part of this discussion because of their expertise in managing research
materials – providing access, preservation and publishing.
The Council of Australian University Librarians would be pleased to provide further advice
and support in helping implement sustainable programs of further work to reform scholarly
communication, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
14
recent example of such analysis is Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and
Clarifications on "Going for Gold" by John Houghton, and Alma Swan
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/houghton/01houghton.html
15
For example SSRN (Social Science Research Network – http://www.ssrn.com/) and the Public Library of
Science (http://www.plos.org/)
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