Alt-UP v. Old UP

1. Alt-UP v. Old UP Rationales for New University Presses a.lockett@westminster.ac.uk

2. New • 4 June 2015: University College London Press, the UK’s ‘first entirely open access University Press’ launched with their first titles and catalogue. • June 2015 Cardiff University Press launch their first publication the JOMEC (Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). • 13 July 2015 Goldsmiths announce they will launch a new university press, "seeking to take advantage of digital technology.” • 16 September 2015 University of Westminster Press launch first publication, the journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. • 4 January 2016 The White Rose University Press run jointly by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York is launched partnering with Ubiquity Press.

3. “The university press is back in vogue” • Has it ever been away? • How many in UK? Who knows… not Wikipedia nor Oxford University’s intranet. • "Most of them have management-speak mission-statements, most are committed to excellence & innovation and "learning solutions" and such-like rubbish— essentially they're all academic publishers.””http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/uni-presses.html – uk (Three dead, one sold to McGraw Hill, all the new imprints missing) • Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_presses - United_Kingdom missing six, I mention today and includes one ‘dead soul’

4. (and in libraries) • US p. 47 ‘One in six [US] university presses now reports to a library. Pressesotherwise report to senior university managers or university or quasi university committees.(Cond p.47 ABF). Library Publishing Coalition. • Pattern elsewhere: Europe e.g. Stockholm UP whose chief executive is the Library Director and is part of library. In AEUP’s membership survey 34.2%members linked to library or library http://www.aeup.eu/aeup/wp-content/uploads/2015/06 AEUP_survey_results_October_20151.pdf • A library inspired ‘counter-revolution’ could be taking place. • In the frontiers of open access some publishing ground (arid fertile, resource rich) is being reclaimed –call it the ‘mild west’.

5. OA University Presses? • All the new UK UPs are open access. More on way? • Join likes of Chester, Exeter, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield, Plymouth, Policy, Wales to name only a few alongside biggies Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester. (Primarily not open access but most moving to or experimenting with OA). • Other campus based publishing: dormant presses, activity in form of departmental self-publishing, one-off publications, in-house teaching journals; increasing numbers of graduate journals. • Full extent of new UP OA push still unclear: high churn, healthy renewal or growth spurt? • New landscape – & more to report … G. Stone/JISC • A. Cond correct to highlight not secure development and need for , “robust financial planning, a long-term strategy for sustainability and bulletproof institutional politics will be the essential ingredients for their longevity)”The Bookseller, 18 August 2015

6. Rationales = Rational? • Top down: a strategic long term and principled commitment to fostering open access means of publication, making research outputs available. • Result of dedicated individuals: librarians, academics and administrators wanting to make a difference and save library budget costs in long term • Push from academics trying to revive creative agendas: new formats or alternative spaces away from the vexations of the prestige economy (Eve*) and the ‘academic publishing machine’.

7. Purpose • Encourage open access within home institution and beyond. • Promote new models of scholarly communication. • Encourage innovation via unconventional forms and content. • Encourage wider culture of research. • Join up university’s vision from research through to impact. • Offer outlet for projects struggling for light (humanities especially, some social sciences). • Profile-raising in the global market and in local community and generally. • Potentially a (graduate?) student recruitment tool.

8. People • New style librarians are leading with academic and some professional publishers/consultants. • Tiny operations in most part – between 0.6 to 0.8 seems to be median baseline starting headcount. • Serious multitasking – also ‘favours’ from colleagues. • University of Westminster Press: some respects nearer the world of self publishing than Routledge/T&F, OUP, Elsevier, Sage. • External partnerships of various kinds – e.g Westminster and Ubiquity> Lund and Manchester University Press where additional professional or technical expertise is laid on top of local contacts, knowledge, organisation.

9. Content • Diverse – looking beyond standard formats to embrace digital’s flexibility as costs come down and interfaces improve. • Huddersfield’s longstanding music label. • UCL have published very 21st century outputs like ‘Why We Post’ series on social media to the traditional picture heavy The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology : Characters an Collections – over 4000 downloads in 8 months. [4270 downloads of 'How the World Changed Social Media' since 29 Feb 2016!] • Goldsmith’s 'DIY modular post-textbook textbook’, creative writing and green open access model • JISC are supporting institutions working on textbooks: https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Institution-as-E-textbook-Publisher/Programme/ • Cardiff UP’s European Sources Online database • Many traditional journals & books but not yet big reference works/handbooks, may be left to the bigger boys.

10. Price and access • Springer’s Journal of Economic Inequality. Open Access Fee for author is US$ 3000/EUR 2200 (excl. VAT). (‘Or you can choose to pay by credit card or to receive an invoice’.(£29.95 to read an article.) • Richard Fischer*s line in Scholarly Kitchen (following Crossick) – not substantially more difficult (as academic) to get high quality monograph published now or to get hold of such. • Only 10per cent of respondents felt that it was difficult or very difficult to accessmonographs,, leading to his conclusion that, ‘any significant growth in readership … will come from outsideits conventional audience, regardless of new distribution strategies.’ A. Cond p. 50 in ABF based on a OAPEN UK/JISC* study. • But remit of questionnaire restricted – respondents were not even asked about price. Profound frustration at high pricing of own books, if not always everyone else’s.

11. Price and exclusion • Issues of inequality (individual, institutional), of global access (or lack of it). • Iron paywall curtain that has descended between university staff and students and post-HE public that seems dangerous in an impact and relevance-driven world. (BBC? Health Research Agency?) • ‘The British Library surveyed nearly 3,000 academic researchers of whom 43.8 per cent said that they would have not achieved all their research aims without The British Library’s collections‘M. Mariceivic p. 63 fn 1 ABF. Implication is that a lot of titles are practically out of reach of many academics in many institutions. May be too embarrassed or weary to say. • A crisis of readers not writers? (OPAEN-UK ISC/Fisher) though clear authors in some subjects do find difficulty in getting published. • Self-limiting behaviour as readers – lack of aspiration to read anything other than as a means to produce another article. (OAPEN-UK/JISC). Price not helping.

12. Price - opportunities • ‘… [direct?] sales of ebooks are growing, albeit slowly (according to analystsSimba, they still only represent 6 per cent of sales).J. McCall & A. Bourke-Waite p. 33 ABF. • Flexibility of ebook prices in trade compared to academic: daily deals, discount windows, low price launches, genre specific price points, experimentation at individual level. • Huge disparity in interest in quantity of downloads in open access. • Cross-overing? Not a done deal that there’s no potential for readers outside academy. • Impact agenda – reality we just don’t know. World of aggregators, big deals, proprietary sales data means a lot of information here is closed book or restricted to a company or institution • Lesson from trade publishing and more experience of OA publishing may point to a much more fluid response, a better ability to differentiate read audiences, more varied formats. • More to do – beyond secret big subscription deals with big players – small university presses may be people to try.

13. Costs • University Press need not cost a vast amount. • Ithaka S+R study* on US monograph costs notes,‘the smallest presses have the lowest average costs per title, and the largest have the highest costs’. Some of the very high costs per monograph listed there suggests still work to be done. • Another report (p. 38 Kennison and Norberg*) suggests that,‘considerable efficiencies within the US system could be found to lower costs”; elsewhere others have suggested that transparency of Ubiquity’s APC fees has exerted downward pressure in the overall market. • Need to heed Frances Pinter's warning of, ‘sunken investments in existing scaffolding within the ecology, entrenched interests in the status quo .p.40 ABF.

14. Performance • Vital to demonstrate reach and impact of Open Access. • Gatti Open Books blog* - interest in titles in OA is sustained for titles published (v. recent titles) over five years ago. There is no drop-off. • His projection for 10 years based on existing figures suggests average 100 times more visits/reads compared to monograph book sales for similar titles published. • See also: UCL figures* where downloads after a few months are averaging (mean) 2000 copies per title.

15. Finally • Low cost; high impact; modest mission. • Holy grail of ‘the’ new business model - in the mid term revenues to looks like coming from varied combinations of traditional sales, consortial support schemes, and publishing fees. • Not old v. alt; no one type of university press (or even two). (See Cond ABF) • Big players need not be worried … but a more diverse publishing environment should drive innovation and choice. • The possibility: a richer more diverse; more global and local, integrated and equitable publishing ecology.

16. Reading/references -1 • Martin Eve Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (CUP, 2014) accessed at http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9781316161012 • Richard Fisher on the Monograph, Scholarly Kitchen bloghttp://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/11/16/guest-post-richard-fisher-on-the-monograph-keep-on-keepin-on-part-two/ • Rupert Gatti ‘Open Book Publishers Blog’http://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/introducing-some-data-to-the-open-access-debate-obps-business-model-part-one/ • Ithaka S+R ‘The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Towards a Transparent Methodology’ (2016) • http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/SR_Report_Costs_Publishing_Monographs020516.pdf

17. Reading/references - 2 • Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg, April 2014 KIN Consultants, New York A Scaleable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences http://knconsultants.org/toward-a-sustainable-approach-to-open-access-publishing-and-archiving/ • R. E. Lyons and S. J. Rayner (eds0 The Academic Book of the Future, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 accessed from http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-137-59577-5 • Pinter, F and Magoulias, M, The small academic press in the land of giants, Insights, 2015, 28(3), 56–61; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/uksg.261 • UCL Press newshttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/ucl-press-news/open-access-reaches-readers-round-the-world