In a recent post Martin Weller argued plausibly for a ‘rebirth’ of the university press as “a place that runs a set of open access, online journals”. His case for this is partly economic:
Running journals on an ad hoc basis across universities is inefficient. By centralising resource you could support several journals. At a rough guess, based on my experience of editing JIME, I think one central, full time administrator could support 4 journals. The same, or maybe less time required, for technical support. That admin support may or may not do the copyediting also. The other main roles are those that are currently performed by academics for free anyway – reviewing, managing and editing the journal, organising special editions, reviewing, etc.
The same universities are currently paying a considerable sum to publishers through libraries. By withdrawing some of this spend and reallocating to internal publishing, then the university could cover costs. In addition the university gains kudos and recognition for its journals and the expertise and control is maintained within the university. Now, if enough universities do this, each publishing four or more journals, then the university presses now begin to cover the range of expertise required. And in times of financial crisis people will increasingly ask ‘what is the university for?’. Being able to point to the wealth of knowledge that we generate and then share freely will be one part of an answer.
However he recognises that “in times of financial stress in the sector, it may seem perverse to be proposing that universities take on a function that is not aimed at earning revenue”. Perhaps there are ways of generating revenue through digital press though? As suggested during this roundtable discussion about the digital university, would advertising be a feasible way of generating revenue? This could take the form of affiliate programmes, given the highly specialised niche within which a readership would fall. Alternatively, although it would cease to be open-access, micro-payments (particularly of the explicitly social kind like Flattr) might be feasible, as the absence of a print run would hopefully allow payments to be priced well below those currently seen on commercial pay walls.
What about if we move beyond journals and consider other forms of publishing? For instance middle-state publishing and curatorial publishing as valued academic pursuits. Part of the problem in legitimising blogging within the academy is the ad hoc nature of the platforms, scattered here and there without unifying style or content, which leaves the ensuing content devoid of any shared framework. However the tools now exist to easily provide digital infrastructure for such outputs, for instance the Society Pages. Micro payments and/or affiliate advertising might be feasible here, perhaps? Surely capture ‘offline’ events for ‘online’ consumption represents a crucial form of digital publishing in its own right? The obvious leader in this respect is the LSE’s public events team which publishes most live events on a variety of platforms (live stream, iTunes, You Tube, Mix Cloud). The success of iTunes U, TED, RSA and others demonstrates beyond all doubt that there’s a huge hunger for this kind of content and, while many universities are beginning to provide it, it’s currently being done in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. I’m not sure how well funded the LSE public events team is but, in many case, I suspect that a centralised digital press team is going to better equipped to cover high impact events and provide logistical support, rather than attempting to capture everything. The decreasing technical obstacles to podcasting in particular means that training can be relatively brief, enhancing staff and student skills, with a central team providing ad hoc support and institutional provision of recording equipment where necessary. Furthermore if there’s a standardised infrastructure with automated guidance included, it maximises the chances that scattered individuals across various departments will be likely to to autonomously produce this content, thus getting beyond the problem of an inevitably under-equipped central team lodged within a comms bureaucracy attempting to keep up with the chaotic and fast-moving life of the contemporary university.
A large part of the appeal of a digital university press to me is the possibility that it leads to a diversification of institutionally recognised outputs, rather than everything being channeled into a small number of outlets (papers, book chapter, monographs) which have long been giving rise to a crisis of over-production. With proper institutional support, the academic sphere could ‘open out’ into a much richer and multi-dimensional dialogical sphere, which still encompasses formal outputs but extends to much more besides. At present much of this activity is going on privately, often at great distances, but it’s not ‘out in the open’, which is a shame because the digital infrastructure is there to allow it to become such, it just needs some institutional resources to be devoted to it.
Building this infrastructure isn’t difficult. In terms of open access journals, there’s open source frameworks and easily accessible technology which can host these. Furthermore although technology changes rapidly, most of these store data centrally which makes moving to a new system easier than it has ever been. Institutions have a large role to play because they are the only organisation suitably equipped to act as the enabler to facilitate the development of such projects. A small specialised digital team could function to (a) let people know the possibilities so they can formulate projects (b) help get these projects off the ground (c) provide the technical infrastructure and technical support. Additional ambassadors* could act as points of contact within individual departments, able to provide basic training and ‘hook into’ the local activity taking place in an organic way. The digital team acts to develop the infrastructure, support its use and enable activity already taken place to do so using digital tools, rather than trying to dictate a top-down digital publishing strategy. With the possible pay offs to the institution being:
- Monetization of online content covering costs and perhaps generating profits
- Hugely increasingly online visibility –> general institutional prestige, improved student/staff recruitment + retention
- An infrastructure is already in place for research projects to pursue (certain kinds of) impact and public engagement activity
- Public engagement and alumni engagement on an institutional level
- Potentially a transformation of internal comms, as departmental silos within the institution become ever more aware of who is doing what and why
*With the natural constituents being postgrads for whom this could be a valuable source of part-time work and skills-training at a time when PG funding looks set to be progressively squeezed.
Mark Carrigan 