Scholarly Publishing: Important, Mission-Centric Endeavor for Universities?
Ithaka published a report last week entitled University Publishing in a Digital Age that discusses how universities publish scholarly output in an environment of ubiquitous Internet access. They interviewed administrators, press directors, librarians, and others to learn that “universities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor.” In the past, university presses were the chief publishers of scholarly content, but in more recent years, scholars are using other means for distributing information in more informal ways including working papers/preprint sites, blogs, institutional repositories, etc. The report observes that, “These changes in the behavior of scholars will require changes in the approaches universities take to all kinds of publishing.” I believe that TDL and other such collaborations among universities hold promise as one solution for supporting the changing world of scholarly publishing.
Right after reading your post, I read a note on Open Access News, “More on the revived Rice University Press” that described another exciting avenue for addressing the problems that the Ithaka report describes: Press collaborations in the nature of experiments with results reported publicly to further the efforts of all scholarly publishers to find better business models for scholarly publishing. This post and anything else you can find on the subject, looks like it would be well worth a read.