The new presses are based in or closely collaborate with university libraries and combine an established publishing knowledge with the expertise of the library staff in areas such as digitisation, data management, archiving, preservation and faculty relationships. The close association between library and university press, or indeed the integration of the press into the library structure is not limited to Australia. Many university libraries in the US provide publishing services exploring the increasingly convergent roles that libraries and publishers play in scholarly communication practices.
The degree of institutional support that the e-presses receive varies and they rely on grants and subsidies, and experiment with different combinations of paid and free access to content in print and digital environments. They also operate on a not-for-profit basis.
In comparison with the traditional university presses, the e-presses are small, underfunded and perceived as relatively invisible, since their books are rarely stocked in chain bookshops or reviewed in mass media. I agree that they lack well-established marketing and distribution processes, but they make up for it with innovative solutions and a thorough understanding of the scholarly ecosystem.
In reality, the e-presses punch well above their weight in terms of publishing output, scholarly impact and capacity to innovate. ANU ePress, Sydney University Press and Monash University Publishing (active since 2003) between them publish close to 100 scholarly books a year and have an active backlist of over 700 titles.
As the traditional methods of mass printing and distribution are not suitable for scholarly books that tend to have specialist and limited audiences, the new presses release their titles as free-to-download digital files or as print-on-demand books. In this way, the presses ensure that the important and publicly funded research is available to the general public and never goes out of print.
Mark Carrigan 