Report Cites Rough Patches in Scholarly Presses' Transition to Online Access

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

Annual reports aren't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in the current condition of scholarly communication, the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — particularly the essay on "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel — is a page turner.

The foundation's deep pockets and commitment to humanistic research give Mellon a unique role in the university-press world. It's part fairy godmother, part life coach, and part enigmatic guru. When Mellon speaks, presses listen — and this year Mellon has spoken more frankly than usual, pushing its constituents to learn how to work better together, while reassuring them that what they do is vital and should endure.

Nearly a year has passed since the foundation made the first awards in two new series of publishing grants: one designed to get presses to collaborate on new series of monographs by junior scholars in underserved areas of the humanities, and the other to persuade presses to partner with their home institutions on projects that further the scholarly agendas of both.

The Power of Positivity

"There are difficult problems in scholarly publishing, and as we mentioned in our essay, the language of 'crisis' has a very long history," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview. "However, our view is that it is more useful to analyze problems constructively and systematically rather than to characterize the system generally as 'in crisis.'"

Mr. Waters leads the foundation's scholarly communications program; Mr. Meisel helps oversee its agenda for bolstering research universities and humanistic scholarship.

University-press output, the authors remind readers, amounted to just 5 percent of the total number of books produced by U.S. publishers in 2005. "However, the significance of university press publishing is far greater than its niche position in the larger publishing industry would suggest," they write. After the September 11 attacks, for instance, "the three best-selling books in the United States were all published by university presses."

That doesn't change "the steady decline in average sales of scholarly titles," however, which has fueled an equally steady stream of crisis talk. And Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel confirm what many observers have already concluded: The transition to e-books has not been as smooth and as rapid as Mellon (and many others) thought it would be.

In the late 1990s, the foundation decided "that books would quickly follow journals into online distribution and access," so it put money behind two e-monograph projects, Gutenberg-e and History E-Books. The results were, to say the least, mixed.

The Gutenberg-e monographs "proved far too expensive to sustain," the report notes, and journal editors resisted reviewing them. Gutenberg-e authors also failed to get as much professional bounce from the project as the foundation had hoped; so far, only 12 of the 22 published in the series have landed on the tenure track.

The History E-Book project — now called Humanities E-Book — fared a bit better, but the report mentions that "after almost nine years, authors have produced only 55 of the promised-85 new e-books." At least that project has become self-sustaining — a goal that Mellon strongly encourages grant recipients to strive for — and its digitized backlist has proved popular with subscribers.

"Both projects have been extremely valuable in demonstrating the capabilities and requirements for publishing monographs authored specifically for electronic media," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel write. "But neither of them succeeded in establishing the core hypothesis that such books would be cheaper to produce and distribute than those designed for print media."

Collaboration Over Coercion

Mellon has steered clear of attaching digital expectations to its most recent university-press grants. In their interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel acknowledged that "these programs, in keeping with our understanding of the general needs, make no assumptions about the technologies of production and distribution." Instead the foundation has opted to support interpress monograph series collaborations and intra-university partnerships with a publishing angle — but it has imposed no digital requirements.

In the biggest grant made in the first category, five presses, led by New York University Press, will get $1.37-million over five years for a new series called the American Literatures Initiative. In the second category, one finds entries such as "Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement," coordinated by the University of North Carolina Press; it also involves the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, the university law school's Center for Civil Rights, and the Southern Oral History Program. Mellon awarded a three-year, $937,000 grant to that undertaking. Such experiments "reduce the cost and risk of exploring new areas of collaboration," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle.

"We knew the first year would be challenging, because we have so many procedures and practices to set up," says Steve Maikowski, director of New York University Press, when asked how the American Literatures Initiative is shaping up. Mr. Maikowski's press heads the effort, which also includes the presses of Fordham, Rutgers, and Temple Universities, and the University of Virginia.

Almost every decision — hiring an outside managing editor to oversee the series, settling on an interior book-design template, agreeing on a copy-editing budget and standards — involved a debate. But real work has begun on what Mr. Maikowski calls the "transformative elements" of the collaboration.

At the University of North Carolina, whose press leads the Mellon-financed, intra-university project on the "Long Civil Rights Movement," the collaborators have big dreams.

So far, enthusiasm has carried the day. "It's been a very open kind of conversation," says Sylvia K. Miller, the project's director. Ms. Miller came onboard in early June. The group's first goal is to inventory all the campus resources that could be included in the project. An interdisciplinary conference is in the works for next spring. There's talk of creating an online, multimedia journal and a publishing platform that would allow formal and informal peer review.

Hands On, Hands Off

Many who have worked with Mellon on the new grants describe the foundation as "hands on" during the application process. But after it accepts a proposal, the foundation does step back.

"Mellon appears determined to stay the collaborative course, with program staff authorized to "seek high-quality proposals in each area" through next year. Another call for proposals went out in May.

Asked how the foundation would decide whether the collaborative grants had been money well spent, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle that they would "be looking for evidence of improvements in the number and quality of monographs that are produced, as well as in the production and distribution of monographs." In the intra-university partnerships, they want to see "evidence of sustained capacity of the presses to support the academic priorities of their home universities."

Time, as they say, will tell. "It's been a learning process for a number of us," Mr. Maikowski of NYU says. "But in the end, the prospect of everything we can accomplish — that can create some sustainability — is what we're hoping for."