University Presses," says the blurb at the head of the Association of American University Presses' Web site, "are at the cutting edge of electronic publishing." Peter Givler, the association's executive director, adds, "There's no doubt that many of our members are in the forefront of what is being done today with the possibilities of new ways to distribute scholarly research.."
What this does not mean, in general, is the kind of flirtation with e-books and sample online chapters that seems so to beguile commercial publishers. University presses, as offshoots of universities and close colleagues of lavishly stocked—and technologically savvy—academic libraries, are prone, above all, to networking, forming cooperative groupings to promote online information exchange in different academic areas. Since UPs are also notably collegial, and see no commercial rivalries in such endeavors, it is not uncommon to find several grouped together to form specialized networks. As they are also nonprofit, and inveterate seekers of grants, some of their most successful arrangements to date have been generously funded with foundation monies.
One of the oldest such operations is Project MUSE (muse.jhu.edu), originally launched six years ago, with funding from both the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, at Johns Hopkins University Press, working in conjunction with the university library. The aim, says the JHUP's Mark Nolan, is to provide worldwide subscription access to the full text of over 100 scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences and mathematics. This became self-sustaining after three years, and in 1999, in search of a larger database than could be offered by its own publications and access through the Johns Hopkins library, the press approached other university presses and owners of scholarly content.
The additional materials thus brought aboard succeeded in attracting further subscribers, and there are now about 1000, buying a variety of packages, ranging from material in just one area of specialization to the full database. About 70% take the whole package, says Nolan, at a cost of about $12,000 a year. However, in true academic fashion, most users participate through consortia offering discounts. In fact such is the concentration that last year 85% of MUSE's revenues came from just 17 invoices, reports Nolan.
How it works financially, for both MUSE and the contributors to the database, is that they share a significant royalty pool, with the surplus beyond costs distributed according to the size of the contribution. "This income reimburses the journal publishers for any loss of revenue they may suffer from print subscriptions." In any case, Nolan says, "rumblings from the library market" about the cost of print subscriptions make it clear the online alternative is welcomed, and he feels that online is the preferred medium for a younger generation of scholars.
As for himself, "I've been involved in electronic information technology for a decade, and I still prefer to read in print—though I'll do my research online."
The Columbia Network
At Columbia University Press, Kate Wittenberg, director of electronic publishing initiatives, sits at the center of a web of sites and relationships, embracing several subject areas and an effort to expand the reach and acceptance of electronic publishing by a series of awards to authors for multimedia creations.
First, the sites. Working with the university library, Columbia is now involved in e-publishing projects involving the earth sciences, geography and geology; international affairs and history.
Columbia Earthscape (www.earthscape.org), originally funded by the National Science Foundation, with help also from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, aims to link researchers, teachers, students and people involved in public policy decisions. It selects, gathers and links what it calls "the widest range of resources available online in earth systems science," and makes them available to subscribers. It is, says Wittenberg, an interdisciplinary linking of environmental policy and politics with the science involved—and in accordance with the university's guidelines, it has become self-sustaining.
Another Columbia project is Ciaonet, from Columbia International Affairs Online (www.ciaonet.org), a major source for theory and research in international affairs, publishing scholarship from the past decade, including workshop papers, conference proceedings, and research projects funded by foundations. This, too, says Wittenberg, is now funded by subscription sales.
Columbia is also a partner, with the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, NYU, North Carolina, MIT, California, Michigan, Oxford and Rutgers in HistoryEBook (www.historyEBook.org), a collaboration designed to publish history monographs in electronic format. This was also funded, by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, and is now in the second year of an initial five-year program. During this time it plans to publish some 85 titles, and is currently at work on about 35, with authors having already expressed an interest in 30 more. Authors are professional historians whose work goes through the usual selection process, and who then work with one of the participating presses in preparing the manuscript for e-publication. There is also a plan to issue up to 500 particularly valuable backlist history titles as part of the project, and suggestions for these have been solicited from a number of historians.
The first publications by HistoryEBook are expected this summer. All the works selected for the project can be individually or collectively searched, and a particularly useful adjunct will be the addition of reviews or review excerpts to the backlist texts.
Columbia's very own project, along somewhat similar lines but with the aim of establishing e-publishing as a viable force in the history field by offering awards and publication to specific books and authors, is called Gutenberg, and was also launched with backing from the Mellon Foundation (www.columbia.edu./dlc/gutenberg/). The prize-winning works to date—six will be chosen each year— cover South Asian, African and Latin American history, and Wittenberg points out as a particularly innovative use of the medium a study of the uprisings at Soweto, South Africa, told onscreen from three simultaneous points of view: the people participating in it, the government and the police and military. The book is I Saw a Nightmare by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick. "The authors are experimenting with styles, and that's what we want to see," she says. "We're experimenting with the whole environment of electronic publishing, trying to see what you can do if you break down some of the categories imposed by the printed book."
California Dreaming
A the University of California Press, associate director Kim Withey speaks of a three-pronged approach to the marketplace for electronic materials.
First, also funded by the ever-generous Mellon, is a project for creating electronic editions of the UCP's journals; about 30 have been so rendered so far, most in the humanities and social sciences.. Another 60 works, scholarly monographs in international affairs, have been put online through the library at the University of California at Berkeley. So far these are simply compilations of material, unpaginated, and are available for free browsing, said Withey, though printable versions that can be sold are on the way. By the end of the year the press expects to be selling complete books as well as chapters online, working with outside vendors
There has been an ongoing collaboration for the past year with the California Digital Library, which has been busy acquiring digital materials and has even begun doing some publishing itself, with UC Press doing distribution and publicity. CDL's program began with its interest in the Los Alamos pre-print project in high-concept physics, Withey says, and has gone on to investigate the needs of its scholarly readers. The library has a large repository of working papers in international studies, which can be "clustered" to form book-like reading collections. Authors can submit papers for peer review.
Withey says that one of the library's most significant archives consist of materials on the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, and this could be formulated in such a way as to appeal to teachers and students in this area. It could also form the basis of a research series, with UC pulling together a group of scholars to discuss the material. Other possible areas where research materials could be gathered for publication are the tobacco industry and the environment, with a journal on environmental studies a possibility. "Research libraries have been jumping into this area," said Withey. "I think we're ahead in trying to come up with solutions."
Lastly, California has been one of the more active presses—MIT Press is another—in licensing electronic rights in its titles to NetLibrary. So far it has licensed about 1500, and continues to do so.
Chicago: Homeric Efforts
According to Bruce Barton, manager of information systems and books at the University of Chicago Press, that press has been considerably less active in supplying titles to NetLibrary, and has sent only about 100 so far. "It's been a question of making sure the rights are clear, in many cases," he said.
The press has, however, been electronically active in a number of ways. It has had an electronic publishing program for its journals for five years—with a number of publications in the sciences, medicine and astronomy—and plans to begin publishing soon in the humanities.
On the book side, there is The Founder's Constitution, an online version of a five-volume reference work consisting of primary source material on, and by, the Founding Fathers. This has been put together in collaboration with the Liberty Fund, and is a free resource.
Now in beta testing is an ambitious project on Homer, which would allow scholars to seek out patterns in the Homeric Greek text and systematically query its structure. It offers tools for analyzing the text from the viewpoint of the gender and "immortality" of each speaker, for instance, and can be seen as an example of the kind of electronic scrutiny to which many classic texts can be submitted. This is expected to be available to scholars in September.
Barton described, too, the press's work on a book about the recent Presidential election (see sidebar below).
Barton was one of the prime movers in the AAUP's pioneering effort five years ago to put the catalogues of all its members online, available for online ordering, but acknowledged ruefully that the site had not attracted sufficient traffic to justify its costs. "People have got used to going to Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com to do their shopping," he says. "But at least we got them familiar with the idea of online ordering."
A footnote: Universities are hotbeds of online discussion, and the University of Pennsylvania, no exception, has just issued a list of recommended books that, according to director Kerry Sherrin of the university's Writers House, "reflects the changes in the literary canon that we don't always see on bestseller lists or lists of the century." The list, whose titles range from Aristotle's Poetics to contemporary works by Julian Barnes, Haruki Murakami and Toni Bambara, was compiled after a long online discussion among the members of Writers House. The list, and the e-mail discussions that gave rise to it, are on view at www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/.
