Abstract
Scholarly societies and university presses face serious challenges in the coming years, due to shrinking library budgets and changes to the publishing environment. All agree on the importance of scholarly publishing in the social sciences and humanities; the question is, how can university and society publishing remain robust and thrive in the future?
INTRODUCTION
Collaboration among organizations can bring big benefits particularly in the online environment. Can we create models for scholarship where publishers, librarians, and users all win? This session explored several recent examples of cross-organizational collaboration, looking closely at the importance of scalable approaches, the need to balance the benefits to all involved, and the role of scholarly values. Speakers discussed specifically their motivations and experience crafting the new effort recently announced by the not-for-profits, University of California (UC) Press and JSTOR, to make UC Press current journals available on the JSTOR platform and to invite other presses to do the same.
VIEW FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press Background
Founded in 1893, UC Press' Journals and Digital Publishing Division disseminates scholarship of enduring value. One of the largest of the university presses today, its collection of print and online journals spans topics in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to publishing its own journals, the division also provides traditional and digital publishing services to many client scholarly societies and associations.
In common with many other scholarly societies, its aim is the widest dissemination possible of scholarly research. This commitment is reflected in its pricing strategy—the lowest priced title is just $97 and the highest is $422.
UC Press fulfills its mission in other ways, with generous author rights that allow archiving of pre-print and post-print or publisher's versions of articles (making them SHERPA green). It also partners with organizations, such as the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications' Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERii), that provide free access in developing countries.
The press moved to online content via Catchword in 2001 and then Ingenta, and has hosted its own content online since 2004, via Caliber. While the platform is hosted on Atypon, UC Press retains responsibility for managing access for its customers.
Scholarly Landscape
In terms of the scholarly landscape, the press faces a dilemma that is common to many other university presses—the consolidation of the commercial presses has left less space in the marketplace for non-profit publishers to thrive. In many ways, with libraries forced to pay high subscription rates for commercial journals, those that publish secondary titles are finding themselves pushed out by budgetary constraints. Similarly, without being able to provide deep discounts and as publishers of smaller, varied, journal rosters, it has been hard to gain a foothold in consortial discussions, compounded (particularly overseas) by the global financial crisis.
Attracting new titles and retaining its more successful journals has become increasingly difficult. Despite the apparently staid exterior of scholarly publishing, the reality is very different. Sixty percent of UC Press titles are published in association with scholarly societies who are free to move to other publishers when their contract is up. However, this has additional implications for libraries. Titles that move to commercial publishers have often doubled in price in the first year—a huge percentage increase that puts a stranglehold on budget management for customers.
Relationship with JSTOR
UC Press and JSTOR have a long-standing relationship. JSTOR currently archives twenty-two of its journals, and these are offered as part of the JSTOR archive collections. UC Press would not have been able to digitize backfiles alone (the cost is prohibitive) and so JSTOR provided a crucial service, making back content accessible to users.
The benefits of the relationship are clear: hosting content has been challenging and while UC Press has had the independence to make its own hosting decisions, the financial burden has been considerable. Keeping pace with developments, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) full text, multimedia functionality, or Really Simple Syndication (RSS), has cost implications, especially for a non-profit publisher. Combining with other publishers on a single platform would make technological developments more viable and keep pace with how students access content, which is key in this age of portable technology.
UC Press recently acquired the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and, with the assistance of JSTOR, has been able to launch its first fully multimedia site, which adds sound, video, and other bells and whistles, such as Google Earth, to the full-text site.
Its titles will benefit from the support of JSTOR's considerable sales team, which has greater influence with customers and consortia both in the United States and internationally. It will also tap into a more extensive customer service resource. Although it is a smaller publisher, having content online creates an expectation in service that it is unable to meet; JSTOR's larger customer service department helps them meet the expectations of the press' subscribing libraries. The new model will also bring together current and archival materials, searchable seamlessly across a single platform.
Concerns
Preserving the press' identity is crucial and it understands the importance of continuing to distinguish its services from those of similar publishers. It is fortunate to be the publishing arm of one of the most distinguished university systems in the United States, if not the world. In 2011, it will launch Boom: A Journal of California, which will be published and edited from within the UC system. With other such projects in the pipeline, it hopes to be able to publish more from within its home university.
Given its strong relationships within the library community, some loss of direct contact with library customers is also a concern. UC Press will make sure its customers can easily share feedback on its content and suggestions for what they would like to see happen with the press.
How It Will Work
From January 2011 onward all content will be moved to the JSTOR site; Caliber will run concurrently through the end of March 2011. UC Press expects that this will give all its customers enough time to make the transition to the new JSTOR platform. It will also no longer accept institutional orders; these should be sent to JSTOR either directly or via a subscription agent. JSTOR will handle all orders, claims, and access issues.
VIEW FROM JSTOR
JSTOR Background
Since 1995, JSTOR has been building and selling digital archives of scholarly material, especially peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Today, JSTOR offers eighteen journal archive collections, along with primary source collections of plant materials, British pamphlets, and other content. These collections serve end users in over 6,400 participating institutions worldwide. Users can search across deep runs of over 1,300 peer-reviewed journals in many disciplines.
JSTOR is a service of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization that also offers a digital preservation service, Portico, which has created and maintained a digital dark archive of thousands of scholarly e-journals and e-books, ensuring that this scholarly electronic content will be preserved for researchers and students in the future.
Scholarly Landscape
Historically, JSTOR has only hosted the backfiles of scholarly journals for participating publishers. In recent years, not-for-profit scholarly publishers have approached JSTOR to explore the idea of having JSTOR take over their content hosting functions. At the same time, libraries and scholars urged JSTOR to include current content on the platform. These discussions opened the possibility for JSTOR to offer online access to these publishers' current issues, and in effect, to offer access to the full run of a journal.
In 2009, JSTOR reached agreement with its first publisher partner, UC Press. Since then, an additional eighteen publishers have joined the program, which now comprises 174 titles. Over time, JSTOR will add content from more like-minded publishers who wish to participate in the program.
Relationship with the University of California Press
JSTOR has hosted backfiles of a large portion of UC Press' titles in its Archive Collections for many years. With the advent of the Current Scholarship Program, JSTOR will, beginning in 2011, provide hosting services, fulfillment services, and subscription handling services for all UC Press titles. (Exception: JSTOR will not perform print fulfillment functions.)
This arrangement is the result of negotiations begun in 2009. There were many issues to work out, such as the issue of balancing two strong brands and identities discussed earlier. Negotiations were finally successfully completed and the agreement was signed in 2010.
There are several benefits to partnering with JSTOR for a publisher. JSTOR offers a stable, affordable hosting solution for publishers who do not wish to host their own content or are looking for an alternative hosting solution, and also helps publishers with print-only journals to bring their titles online. By aggregating the content of many publishers on a single platform, JSTOR will strengthen its ability to keep pace with technical innovations, more so than individual publishers could do by themselves. JSTOR uses its global access to academic and other cultural institutions to raise awareness of high-quality content that may have been harder to discover previously, thus potentially increasing publisher circulation and revenue. Hosting content on JSTOR increases the visibility, discoverability, and usage of publisher content. The Current Scholarship Program allows publishers to retain control over their pricing and branding.
There are also many benefits to libraries. Participating libraries already have a license with JSTOR, so libraries subscribing to Current Scholarship titles would no longer have to negotiate licenses with the titles' publishers, saving librarians much time and aggravation by reducing the number of licenses they have to process and maintain. Existing JSTOR participants can license Current Scholarship Program titles via a simple rider to their existing agreement. The JSTOR platform strengthens a library's ability to gather usage statistics for evidence-based collection management. About 15 percent of the titles in JSTOR collections have no current issue online instantiation, and therefore cannot provide usage statistics for their library subscribers. Other titles in JSTOR that have online current issues within the moving wall either do not produce statistics, or do not produce standards-compliant statistics. Additionally, JSTOR extends digital preservation of scholarly journals. The JSTOR/participating publisher agreement calls for the publisher also to become a participant in Portico, the dark archive service also offered by Ithaka. Portico will process and ingest any publisher content that was not previously preserved. This action will increase the amount of scholarly electronic content that is protected in Portico if the content is lost, orphaned, or abandoned.
End users will see benefits as well. At institutions of all sizes, faculty members in many disciplines direct their students to begin their research on the JSTOR platform. Adding current issues will make the collections more useful, and will give end users seamless access to the full runs of journals. This will strengthen the JSTOR platform as a discovery tool. JSTOR continuously improves its platform, in order to keep pace with the needs of scholars and researchers, by staying current with changes in technology and pedagogy. Another benefit is that “service failures” are reduced for end users and customer service issues are reduced for the library. A frequently occurring event in libraries is a service failure, caused by the inability of a user to access, after discovery, an article of interest, because the article is within the JSTOR moving wall, and the library does not have access to current issues of the title. Inclusion of current issues would eliminate these failures. The Current Scholarship Program will strengthen JSTOR's ability to support the broad dissemination of quality scholarship through affordable and sustainable means.
Current Scholarship Program
Current Scholarship is available in two different ways, “Current Scholarship Single Titles Subscriptions” and “Current Scholarship Collections Subscriptions.”
The Current Scholarship Single Title Subscription option enables libraries to license subscriptions to the current issues of individual titles on the JSTOR platform. Libraries can “self-aggregate”; for a given year, they can choose whichever titles they want to access for that year. The Current Scholarship Single Titles option is available in two forms: the library can license a current issue subscription or a full run subscription.
A current issue subscription provides access for the current year back to the digital availability date, that is, the first year during which the publisher made online subscriptions to the current content of the title available for purchase (see ). JSTOR charges the list price of the journal (that is, the price set by the publisher). For example, if a library licenses Title A for 2010, and Title A's digital availability date is 2000, JSTOR would provide access to Title A for 2000 and forward, as long as the subscription is renewed every year.
FIGURE 1 Comparison of the current issue subscription and the full run subscription.
A full run subscription enables the library to add the remaining back issues of the single title back to volume 1, issue 1 (see ). The price for this subscription is 70 percent of the then-current list price of the electronic-only version of the title. This fee is set by JSTOR. The archival content of a single title cannot be purchased separately from the current issue subscription, but it is important to note that if the library already participates in the JSTOR archival collection that contains a given title, their purchase of the current issue subscription will ensure their institution has access to the full run, with no additional cost. JSTOR will continue to provide access as long as the subscription is renewed.
Full run subscriptions most benefit those libraries that have not licensed JSTOR backfile collections, but want complete access once they start collecting the title. Libraries can also license full runs of single titles outside of their Archive Collection holdings. For example, Title B has a list price of $100. Volume 1, issue 1 was issued in January 1950. For a library licensing this title, JSTOR would provide access back to volume 1, issue 1. The library would pay $100 for access to 2011 issues, and $70 for access to all the back issues. Both fees are annual.
To a user, the moving wall seems to disappear upon the advent of a Current Scholarship Subscription. However, JSTOR's responsibility for archiving content that goes beyond the moving wall does not disappear; JSTOR becomes responsible for archiving the entire run of the title, not just the part of the run the ends at the moving wall.
Also, it should be kept in mind that the moving wall is still in place for libraries that do not buy Current Scholarship Subscriptions; these libraries can still access the legacy content (that is, the JSTOR archival collections) as always, up to the moving wall.
Current Scholarship Collections are aggregations of current titles. The titles are aligned to the JSTOR backfile collections in which the title's backfile resides. For example, JSTOR has 174 titles from nineteen different publishers signed up for Current Scholarship. There are 120 titles in the Arts & Sciences I Collection. Of these, fifteen are in the Current Scholarship Arts & Sciences I Current Collection.
The price of each collection is the sum of the list prices of the journals (set by the publisher) within it for the then-current subscription year. Libraries would pay no more for the title than they would through their subscription agent (not counting the agent's service charge, if any) or directly from the publisher. Librarians would not, with this format, be able to choose which titles they want; they would buy the titles as a collection, in the same way JSTOR backfile collections are licensed now.
Worldwide, JSTOR frequently works through groups, governments, university systems, consortia, subscription agents, and sales agents to add new participants and add new collections for existing participants. Libraries can order Current Scholarship titles either directly through JSTOR or through their preferred subscription agent.
All Current Scholarship publishers are participants in Portico, and all of their titles will be preserved in the Portico archive. Also, all of the publishers have granted JSTOR post-cancellation rights on behalf of JSTOR's participants. When a library cancels a subscription to a Single Title Subscription, JSTOR can provide post-cancellation access in one of three ways:
| 1. | If the library is a Portico participant, JSTOR will make post-cancellation access available on the JSTOR platform by virtue of the library's status as a Portico participant. | ||||
| 2. | If the library is not a Portico participant and does not participate in the JSTOR Archive Collection that contains the title that has been cancelled, JSTOR charges a small annual fee in order to guarantee post-cancellation rights for the library. | ||||
| 3. | If the library is not a Portico participant but participates in the JSTOR Archive Collection that contains the title that has been cancelled, JSTOR waives this fee. | ||||
JSTOR will provide post-cancellation access back to the digital availability date, that is, to the first year that the publisher made the title available online.
SUMMARY
JSTOR and the University of California Press are strengthening and sustaining not-for-profit scholarly publishing by partnering in their hosting, delivery, fulfillment, and outreach functions for journals. This partnership has been extended to eighteen additional publishers for 2011, and will continue to grow in coming years.