jan08b.indd


scholarly communication 
Michael Furlough 

University
presses
and
scholarly

communication


Potential for collaboration 

“Most of the presses will die. They’ve clung 
to the past; they’re too traditional; they’re 
too afraid of big competitors.”—Anonymous 
librarian, quoted in University Publishing in 
a Digital Age 

When have university presses not been on the brink of disaster? Historians 
in the community recall golden days in the 
1960s, but it’s hard to tell if those were really 
boom times or if they were just slightly less 
difficult than the decades that have followed. 
Clearly, for the last decade their future has 
been worried over, questioned, and outright 
dismissed, as the above librarian suggests. 
It’s a safe bet that the anonymous librarian 
quoted above thinks his or her own library 
exemplifies opposing characteristics: thriving, 
forward­thinking, innovative, and bold. 

University presses may not be cowering in 
the basement, but they are scrambling for the 
bandwidth that would allow them to change. 
Still, while libraries’ campus­based roles re­
quire us to cast our net more broadly than 
many university presses, we haven’t solved the 
“crisis in scholarly communication” either. 

Open access 
The library community’s understandable and 
necessary focus on scientific, technical, and 
medical (STM) publishers, copyright, and 
open access has generated alarm from univer­
sity presses, as the Association of American 
University Presses’ (AAUP) Statement on open 
access suggests: “plunging straight into pure 
open access, as attractive as it may sound in 
theory, runs the serious risk of destabilizing 
scholarly communications in ways that would 

disrupt the progress of scholarship and the 
advancement of knowledge.”1 

Interpreted by some as a sign of AAUP’s 
resistance to an inevitable future, this docu­
ment might be more fruitfully read for guid­
ance on how open access could be expanded 
into disciplines and formats other than the 
sciences and journals. Readers will find 
the university press community’s primary 
concern to be with solvency (e.g., whether 
open access would undermine Project Muse, 
whose journal publishing revenue fl oats the 
monograph programs at some university 
presses). 

But readers will also find some willingness 
among university presses to consider ways 
in which revenue­generating activities might 
actually help open access programs: “AAUP 
believes it is important to keep an open mind 
about what constitutes open access, since 
some kinds of open access are compatible 
with a market­based model. . . . For university 
presses, unlike commercial and society pub­
lishers, open access does not necessarily pose 
a threat to their operation and their pursuit 
of the mission to ‘advance knowledge, and 
to diffuse it . . . far and wide.’ ”2 

This statement echoes John Willinsky in 
The Access Principle, where he writes “to 

Contact Joyce L. Ogburn—series editor, cochair of 
the ACRL Scholar y Communications Committee, 
and university librarian at the University of Utah— 
with article ideas, e-mail: joyce.ogburn@utah.edu 

M ichael Furlough is assistant dean for scholar y 
communications and codirector of the Offi  ce of Digital 
Scholarly Publishing at Penn State University Libraries, 
e-mail mfurlough@psu.edu 
© 2008 Michael Furlough 

C&RL News January 2008  32 

mailto:mfurlough@psu.edu
mailto:joyce.ogburn@utah.edu


dispel the idea that greater access to the 
knowledge represented by scholarly publish­
ing is an all or nothing proposition. The term 
open access may suggest that, like a door, a 
journal is open or it is not. The still­emerging 
realities of opening access to this literature 
are otherwise.”3 

STM publishing practices and dynamics 
have caused significant collateral damage to 
the monograph programs of university press­
es. The Ithaka report, “University Publishing 
in a Digital Age,” shifts the conversation to 
a wider range of pressures and ways to pre­
vent further damage. Authors Laura Brown, 
Rebecca Griffiths, and Matthew Rascoff assess 
the current health of university presses and 
prescribe a look inward, rather than outward, 
to align university presses more directly with 
the strengths and strategic goals of their host 
universities. 

As Brown put it in an opening plenary at 
the AAUP annual meeting in Minneapolis in 
June: “Ask: How do I solve my university’s 
problems. . . . No business fl ourishes when 
its owners don’t care about it.”4 This is easy 
advice if a press primarily serves its local 
campus community, but presses generally 
serve scholarship at large. Thus a majority 
of its funding comes from revenue generated 
from outside of its host institutions, and its 
authors primarily come from the outside, as 
well. Only a few more than 100 university 
presses exist at more than 1,000 master’s­level 
colleges and universities in North America. 
With this ratio, presses have become more 
distanced from their hosts, and arguably less 
crucial to their mission. Meanwhile, some 
research libraries, such as Ohio State, North 
Carolina State, Indiana, and others, includ­
ing my own, have begun to address the 
publishing needs of their campuses through 
new services. 

University presses are crucial 
Libraries should care about the health of 
university presses because publishers and 
publishing­related services are crucial to li­
braries’ own future. Many librarians now help 
students and faculty use digital content and 

Publishers and university presses 
may know little about how our 
faculties conduct research, but they 
know them very well as authors, and 
they know much better than we do 
how to cultivate their scholarship 
and bring it to light. Libraries have a 
lot to learn from them. 

technologies in their research and teaching, 
and we are supporting them in elaborating 
new and transformative uses of these ma­
terials. Increasingly we support more parts 
of the entire process of scholarship, and, 
especially in newer media, we are expanding 
our services to the process of authoring and 
creation, and then linking that to the process 
of presentation and archiving. Libraries have 
invested significantly in technology platforms 
to manage, provide access to, and (in time) 
preserve large digital collections. But presen­
tation means dissemination, not publishing of 
research, and librarians need to understand 
the scope of both to support scholarly com­
munication more effectively. 

Our principles of selection—for the mate­
rials we buy or license, or those we choose 
to digitize locally—are based on service to 
our local faculty and students, not on the 
same editorial principles that guide pub­
lishers. We think of our clients as “users” or 
“customers” rather than as “producers” and 
“authors,” but the latter identities are more 
important to our clients in establishing their 
career path. Our attempts to collect their 
research in institutional repositories could 
perhaps be more successful if we think of 
their needs as scholars and producers of 
research, not just users of our reference and 
archiving services. 

Publishers and university presses may 
know little about how our faculties conduct 
research, but they know them very well as 
authors, and they know much better than 
we do how to cultivate their scholarship and 
bring it to light. Libraries have a lot to learn 
from them. 

January 2008  33 C&RL News 



Both libraries and university presses are 
losing a large part of the authority that 
they have held as arbiters of quality and 
channels for content access as those 
roles have begun migrating to other 
agents. 

Collaboration between and among univer­
sity presses and libraries can enhance the ser­
vice mission of these organizations. A number 
of university presses now report to libraries, 
and many others report to the same senior 
administrative office as the library. Only a few 
examples of collaboration between presses 
and libraries can be readily identifi ed, but 
some promising conversations have begun. 

In June 2007, California Digital Library 
(CDL), the University of Michigan Library, 
and SPARC sponsored “New Structures, New 
Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press 
as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly 
Publishing.”5 

Much of the day was spent sharing initial 
efforts. CDL and University of California (UC) 
Press discussed their joint investigation of op­
portunities for shared services across the UC 
System, which has included traveling to all of 
the UC campuses together. Utah outlined their 
own investigation into the digital publishing 
needs of their institution, and highlighted the 
challenges for a smaller press attempting to 
step into this arena. Virginia’s press presented 
their experience in adopting and publishing 
a scholarly project incubated in the library. 
Michigan and Penn State discussed their 
efforts to collaborate across boundaries be­
tween the library and the press on publishing 
open access monographs. 

The summit helped to begin dialogue 
around the relationship of publishing to 
the research enterprise, the development of 
new forms of scholarship, and the requisite 
organizational and economic structures. 

Catherine Mitchell, CDL publishing ser­
vices manager, explains that they are explor­
ing ways of supporting “publishing projects 
that really lend themselves to a hybrid 

model—most specifi cally, interdisciplinary 
work that bridges worlds with quite distinct 
publishing practices, publishing programs in 
emerging fields, and those scholarly projects 
with complex technical requirements for 
publication.”6 

Some publishers—including some at­
tendees at this summit—remain uncertain. 
“I’m not sure what question we are trying to 
answer together,” said one to me privately, 
while another expressed skepticism that a 
collaborative publishing endeavor would 
gain much financial support from senior 
administrators, based on his experience with 
his university’s president. But for Mitchell, 
both the summit and the recent discussions 
sparked by the Ithaka report reinforce the 
need to respond to “the kind of scholarly 
work that finds an uncomfortable home with­
in the traditional structures of the scholarly 
publishing world.”7 

Both libraries and university presses are 
losing a large part of the authority that they 
have held as arbiters of quality and channels 
for content access as those roles have begun 
migrating to other agents. So what is to be 
done? The Ithaka report prescribes, among 
other things, increasing the capacity to scale 
academic publishing, including the develop­
ment of “a powerful technology, service and 
marketing platform that would serve as a 
catalyst for collaboration and shared capital 
investment in university­based publishing.”8 

Ithaka President Kevin Guthrie, in his in­
troduction to the report, makes it clear that JS­
TOR believes itself to be a potential developer 
of such a platform. Interestingly, many librar­
ians and publishers have responded coldly 
to Guthrie’s comment, perhaps because of 
our recent histories with conglomerates that 
have cornered certain markets in academic 
publishing. 

But the Ithaka report also promotes in­
trainstitutional collaboration, and includes 
an appendix outlining the complementary 
strengths and weaknesses of libraries and 
university presses relative to the business, 
service, and technology aspects of content 
creation and delivery. You might characterize 

C&RL News January 2008  34 



it as a matchmaker’s checklist, or as the fi rst 
half of a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Op­
portunities, and Threats) analysis. If libraries 
and university presses collaborate to support 
services, programs, and products on their 
campuses, they should complete this analysis 
to assess both the opportunities and threats 
in those collaborations. 

Libraries and publishers sharing risk 
Collaborations require compromise and the 
loss of complete control, which may raise 
anxieties about identity loss, autonomy, and 
mission creep. For libraries and publishers 
such anxieties will surface over the content 
itself. For university presses, controlling ac­
cess to content is crucial—required to focus 
on their bottom line, they often have differ­
ent perspectives from libraries on matters of 
copyright, electronic reserves, and Google’s 
libraries project. To work together, both 
librarians and publishers will have to com­
promise on intellectual property and access 
controls, and reflect on how the positions are 
tied to their mission and values. Can you re­
ally protect your investment without owning 
copyright? Can you really give the content 
away and still sell some copies? 

A university press’s imprint and brand 
identity confers the authority of peer approval 
for scholars and their promoting and tenure 
committees. Editorial and marketing staff will 
be concerned with protecting their brand 
from dilution, especially when collaborating 
on a project that bypasses a process of peer 
review. Similarly librarians may worry that 
any efforts to limit access to their content 
and commodify it may undermine the goal 
of broad and unlimited, if not open, access. 
But it is worth remembering that neither 
party is pure: university presses have readily 
entered the nonscholarly regional and trade 
markets, and libraries have allowed the likes 
of ProQuest and Alexander Street Press into 
their archives for years. 

The real opportunity in collaborations 
between presses and libraries lies in sharing 
risk and leveraging their wagers on the future 
of scholarship in the academy. By linking 

up the processes of scholarly creation with 
access and stewardship, libraries have an 
opportunity to truly attend to the entire life 
cycle of scholarship. 

Publishing consultant Joe Esposito has 
suggested that university presses have a 
chance to get back into scientifi c publishing 
by looking into the primary materials, rather 
than the secondary analyses, of research: the 
identification, management, marketing and 
distribution of primary data sets created in the 
pure and applied sciences.9 A surprising rec­
ommendation, especially when you consider 
that most libraries are only just beginning to 
investigate the question of how to manage 
and preserve such data ourselves. 

The primary materials in our archives are 
the future datasets for humanists and social 
scientists, and our publishing colleagues can 
help us analyze our markets, think through 
our own principles of content selection, 
and identify opportunities for added value, 
especially when it comes to identifying and 
selecting the stuff that Google isn’t planning 
to scan. It’s easy to talk about what scholar­
ship of the future might look like: dynamic, 
networked, immediately accessible, and 
quality­controlled through computational 
systems as well as human assessment. But we 
don’t know all the small steps to get there, 
and we need more partners to help us do 
so—and not all of these partners should be 
found in our computing departments and IT 
organizations. 

Conclusion 
While I don’t think that all university presses 
are ready to engage in this type of collabora­
tion (and some never may be), our colleagues 
at university presses shouldn’t be dismissed. 
Both of us are redefining ourselves, and we 
both need to refocus on all the core elements 
of scholarly creation and communication to 
understand the whole cycle more completely. 
We can’t do that independently in librar­
ies, and university presses bring value and 
needed expertise to our profession’s attempt 
to assert new roles in relation to publishing. 
Information technology has given us great 

January 2008  35 C&RL News 



opportunity to blur previously distinct roles, 
and it has given commercial publishers even 
greater leverage to control scholarly content 
and move it directly to the desktops of our 
faculty and students, potentially bypassing 
the library. 

Hosting the publishing of a journal in our 
libraries may not lower journal costs overall, 
and open access will likely coexist with tra­
ditional commercial publishing services (not 
necessarily content) and business models that 
will continue to place stress on our collections 
budgets and challenge our principles of fair 
use and sharing among libraries. But this is 
an opportune moment for both librarians and 
publishers: we should exploit our common 
interests and complementary strengths to cre­
ate a healthier ecosystem for our researchers’ 
scholarly communication. 

Notes 
1. American Association of University 

Presses, “Statement on Open Access,” (New 
York, NY: American Association of Univer­
sity Presses, 2007), 1. 

2. Ibid. 3, 5. 
3. John Willinsky, The Access Principle: 

The Case for Open Access to Research and 
Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 
2005), 28. 

4. Laura Brown, and Joseph Esposito, “Ple­
nary Address: Putting the University Back into 
the University Press,” in 2007 AAUP Annual 
Meeting (Minneapolis, MN: 2007). 

5. See the wiki for the event at acadpub­
summit.pbwiki.com/. 

6. Catherine Mitchell, E­mail, October 
18, 2007. 

7. Ibid. 
8. Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffi ths, and 

Matthew Rascoff, “University Publishing 
in a Digital Age,” (New York, NY: Ithaka, 
2007), 1, www.ithaka.org/strategic­services 
/Ithaka%20University%20Publishing%20Re 
port.pdf. 

9. Joseph J. Esposito, “The Wisdom of Oz: 
The Role of the University Press in Scholarly 
Communications,” Journal of Electronic Pub­
lishing 10, no. 1 (2007), hdl.handle.net/2027 
/spo.3336451.0010.103. 

C&RL News January 2008  36 

www.ithaka.org/strategic-services
http:summit.pbwiki.com