Notes from Discussion Groups: Objective 7. Operate an electronic publishing program capable of systematic production and distribution of journals, monographs, and multimedia compositions and foster alternatives to conventional publishing .
Group #2883
Facilitator: Joy Paulson
Note-taker: Beth Katzoff
LMT: Jean Poland
Attending: Adam Chandler, Paul Houle, Elizabeth Perenyi, David Ruddy, Patrick Stevens, Elizabeth Stewart-Marshall, Mary Wesche
The objective
- Question – How does this session interact with session 1? (Develop an integrated framework for CUL’s digital collections). Response- They do not necessarily go together, but sessions 1, 2, and 7 are related.
- An important part of this session is the issue of publishing and the Library’s work in becoming a publisher of journals and books.
- Issues to consider – competition, building an infrastructure, we know how to purchase, but do we know how to publish?
- The audience in this session is different from the others
- Scholarly publishers need to maintain the credibility of publishing – through referrals and reviews
- There is a question about the statement itself and the issue of alternatives to conventional publishing – why are we at this point? Response – in part we have found ourselves here as a response to Elsevier. Perhaps the question is now that we find ourselves here, do we continue? We are moving away from particular publishers and looking at ourselves as the solution. There has been a progression due to 1. Cost of journals 2. Consolidation
- The crisis in university presses – are we trying to replace university presses?
- This gets the Library into areas of expertise that we do not have – such as marketing. Example of HighWire Press (Stanford) providing free online full text articles. Although it is larger than what we would become, are we trying to do a similar thing?
- Status of DSpace – DSpace is finding it difficult to get content. Need to create a community and legitimacy for this. Quality of peer review, sharing space, all of this has not yet happened for DSpace. People are busy and the faculty work in different fields so they don’t see themselves as part of Cornell the institution. What is the motivation for this service? Members of the faculty need to consider their careers. Once again the issue of “Branding” comes up. Profession vs. Institution. Example: Icelandic series, tied to the 100-year-old Fiske Collection at this institution, but traditional publishers not interested in it. It demonstrates the advantages of the electronic route.
Implementation
- Any model we have for electronic publishing also needs to be supported by a hard copy. This needs to be built into whatever business model we use.
- We should account for resources for support. The level of infrastructure does not go away just because we have moved into e-publishing
- What does it mean to be a publisher? Euclid - don’t want to develop content, offer the means of distribution, publishing is not monolithic anymore, should we offer more services? Consider language issues for non-roman languages
- Electronic means as a way to lower costs. But, it is cheap because we do not provide services (peer review, etc.)
- With a business model, we recover our costs – Example: we charge for Euclid.
- Having alternatives is in general a good thing for scholarly publications.
- Is the Management Team open to shifting funds for collecting?
Potential partners
- CU Press: CU Press does not do journals or digital work, but they do have publishing expertise. The first step in our relationship is to allow CU Press to explore the business and technical part and if it works, we can continue. They are interested in digital work.
- Why does the library need to do this? Shouldn’t our partnership be a closer working relationship?
- We don’t want to reinvent the wheel
- Need to outsource (editing)
- Some University presses are financially stable some are not.
- Faculty: Need larger discussions with faculty on the CU campus. Is faculty willing to quit publishing in larger places if something like this is in place at Cornell?
- Develop ties with faculty on a broad spectrum that would include publishers. Example: Curriculum Committees. Should we target them concerning publishing?
- In theory this is fine, but faculty don’t want to give up anything
- Ph.D. Students
Measures of success
- How do we evaluate what we’ve accomplished?
- All financially based
- Feedback from scholarly researchers – quality, peer recognition (from other libraries), are the articles being cited