Comments on: profit, publishing, and the university mission

By: Fred Moody

Fred Moody — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:59:55 +0000

It’s worth noting, re author subvention, that they are potentially corrupting: proposals from authors now often note that they come with a subvention, the suggestion being that that financial opportunity should factor into the publisher’s decision whether to accept the manuscript. No publisher, of course, would ever admit to factoring subventions into their evaluations–just as no politician would ever admit that campaign contributions exert undue influence on law-making.

By: Jim Ottaviani

Jim Ottaviani — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:48:04 +0000

Regarding note 5.13, when you say “We can all understand the ludicrousness of asking a neuroscience lab to become self-sustaining…” I think that mis-characterizes the funding of many labs, at least at research universities.

A large portion of the start-up costs for such a lab is of course borne by the university — the scientist typically doesn’t have to worry about paying for the building itself, and maybe not for some of the most basic equipment. (Humanities scholars don’t have to write checks to roofers, plumbers, electricians, or plasters either.)

But beyond that almost everything from specialized equipment to research assistant salaries to the large overhead (a.k.a. indirect) costs that cover things like administrative support and utilities are written into and paid for by grants. So in that sense, they are self-sustaining. And if the researcher in charge doesn’t continue to get grants the lab itself might not go away but the researcher sure will.

By: Paul F. Gehl

Paul F. Gehl — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:31:39 +0000

Your plea here, that we not separate the humanities from science fields in terms of whose work merits and demands open access, is absolutely crucial. I hope you can make the argument even stronger than this. Humanities and sciences already have different positions in the scholarly-publishing world –different levels of support, different modes of delivery– largely because they have differnt kinds of access to digital publishing. Separating them further would enlarge the gulf that already exists within universities between practitioners, and further ghetto-ize some fields. Interestingly, some of the oldest-line fields in the humanities (classical philology, medieval studies, linguistics, musicology) have the largest range of digital tools and largest-scale, ongoing publishing projects, most of them broadly collaborative. The long-term success of such projects has so far depended on development grants from government agencies and foundations, and on the willingness of more than one university to host and support the work.

By: Toby Green

Toby Green — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:42:22 +0000

Thompson is quite right. Treating books as a scholarly corpus is the way forward and it works. What works better, it to bundle books with other scholarly works like journals and datasets. This is what OECD has been doing since 2001 and doing so has tranformed the OECD’s Publishing Division’s finances (like University Presses, OECD’s Publishing Division has to fund itself through sales.) Doing so has meant making significant investment in IT and in new skills – OECD Publishing now employs librarians to ensure our metadata is part of our value added service.

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:47:18 +0000

Good point — I’ll definitely lay that out.

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:57:20 +0000

Please enumerate the “more traditional forms of publishing labor.” You wouldn’t believe the number of faculty I’ve met who think that decent typesetting is done without human intervention. So: acquisitions, book design, expert editing, art, proofreading, typesetting, markup, rights clearance…

By: Dorothea Salo

Dorothea Salo — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:54:07 +0000

spelling nit: “minuscule”

By: David Parry

David Parry — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:18:29 +0000

And third, fewer junior faculty would meet tenure requirements.