Reactions
By Laura BrownThere are so many interesting strands developing in this online symposium that it is hard to know where to begin to respond.
Let me start with reactions to the conversation about the connection between universities and their presses. Several people have commented here about how it is wrong to have presses get closer to the intellectual ambitions and research environments of their parent institutions, arguing that this will compromise the credentialing role that presses play and turn them into vanity publishers. I agree that if presses primarily adopted that role, it would undermine their imprints and the contribution they have made, and can continue to make, to scholarly communication. But this is not an either/or proposition. In terms of monographs and journals, university presses can and should continue to serve the community by peer reviewing and publishing the work of scholars from a broad range of institutions. This old system works, and I would argue that it could work even better if presses developed a compelling electronic version of books and a more rigorous focus that specialized in fewer disciplines—allowing them to network deeply into the way those disciplines behave, select, peer review, and editorially develop the best scholarship, and create marketing programs that help that scholarship reach its widest possible market. I would also argue that drawing on the academic strengths of their parent institution allows presses to harness the expertise of the faculty as well as the reputation of the institution to which they belong. Looking at this from the vanity perspective, if a press is among the top three publishers in a field, scholars will seek out that imprint even if they belong to the same institution, and credentialing decisions will rely on the prestige and authority of that imprint even in the case of local authors. Philosophy faculty at Oxford and Cambridge publish regularly with the two top academic publishers in their field—OUP and CUP—despite their connection to the university.
But what if we move beyond monographs and journals? What happens when new digital content types are developed by scholars? Many of these projects are located at specific institutions (even though their author bases often extend well beyond that campus) and require a variety of university services to sustain them (library or IT technology, space, grad students, partial financial support, etc.). While many of these projects are built with grant funding and are informally disseminated, few of them benefit from the selection and vetting process, editorial development, marketing services, or long-term sustainability of formal publication. Presses, as part of their institutions, have unique windows into these projects and could help the ones that deserve and would benefit from formal publication to survive and flourish. So long as the presses don’t abandon the independence and rigor of their vetting process, this can be a win-win for the press, the faculty, and the university. Look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is run within the university. It carries the university brand. Its vetting process is highly respected. It has made a great name for itself and is heavily used. And it requires a long term, sustainable publishing commitment because its content is dynamic. SEP has taken one route to sustainability—endowment funding–that comes with a commitment to open access. But how many projects will be able to attract long-term (as opposed to launch) funding to support dynamic content creation, innovation, and open access? Not as many as deserve to prosper, I’m sure. Now imagine a SEP could not attract long-term funding and instead chose SUP as its partner. Suppose they worked to develop a joint publishing venture with a different business model that used SUP as the commercial face to the market? Would this make SEP a vanity project and compromise its authority or prestige? I doubt it.
All I am saying here is that university presses can get closer to their institutions while still playing an independent role in support of the credentialing process, and they can do this for traditional scholarship as well as the new content types that will develop.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Thanks, Laura. I think we would all agree that no one wants university vanity presses, but your response does not make clear to me any meaningful sense in which a university press of the future would be more closely tied to its parent university in terms of content. If this university, for instance, were ever to invest in a serious humanities digital humanities infrastructure (apparently not in my lifetime), how would PUP support that digital humanities center? Guaranteed digital publication of the products of the Center by PUP? Would/should Peter D. want that. Your SUP model is fascinating, but I fail to see what the necessart connection to Stanford faculty or content would be. I am clearly missing something here.
October 29th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Stan, you ask about how the Stanford faculty is engaged with the SEP. Several ways. The idea for the project arose from within the philosophy department, incubated there, and I believe key Stanford faculty continue to be the final vetting authority. When I spoke with the Stanford provost, he described the project as deserving of the Stanford name because the faculty took responsibility for the intellectual merit of the work.
As for your question about how Peter D might be involved with a Princeton faculty-sponsored digital initiative, let me give you an example that is now on the drawing board at another university. This initiative is a joint venture involving the university’s press, a civil rights center at the law school, the library, and an oral history program on campus. The idea is to build a focused digital research environment for study of the topic (including special collections at the library and the oral history center), a platform for collaborative study (local and international) and informal dissemination of materials growing out of the project, and a formal peer-reviewed publication component that, in addition to print editions, experiments with enhanced digital editions of books and dynamic database publishing. In this hybrid model, the library will take the lead in digitizing the pertinent primary source material, creating the metadata and tools, and helping to build the electronic platform. The academic departments will build the connections to other institutions and scholars, sponsor conferences, involve graduate students directly in research, and, along with the press, help to conceive the publishing program. The Press will be responsible for formal peer-reviewed publication of appropriate work that grows out of the project (note that this will probably be mostly the work of non-university scholars), as well as help in all phases of the development of the informal dissemination networks. Would the press be forced to publish everything? Absolutely not. Presses exist to select, referee, refine, and promote work meant to last–not spend their time enabling digital dissemination of all the material generated in the academy. But the press would help with the marketing of the initiative’s work–the continuum of formal and informal publications and the free and fee-based material that grows out of it.
It will be interesting to watch how this experiment develops, but it is the best example I’ve seen so far of how a press might get closer to the academic priorities of its parent institution, as well as the new informal channels of content creation and distribution that are leaving university presses behind.
Right now Peter D. is spending time talking with university departments about some of the lecture series they sponsor and whether any of them might lend themselves to print publication. His judgement about what fits with PUP’s publishing expertise and priorities, as well as what is appropriate for publication, is a great collaboration between the university and the press. Imagine he brought an equal expertise in digital technologies and publication networks to a digital humanities center at Princeton? I’d be really curious to see what he could do with that.