FW: [SCHOLCOMM] A call to support publisher diversity
Glenn Hampson
Forward this scholcomm post from Charles---relevant to the question of what publishers are preparing for in the coming months.
From: scholcom...@lists.ala.org <scholcom...@lists.ala.org> On Behalf Of Charles Watkinson (via scholcomm Mailing List)
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 3:36 PM
To: Mann, Paige <Paige...@redlands.edu>
Cc: Kathleen Shearer <m.kathlee...@gmail.com>; scho...@lists.ala.org
Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] A call to support publisher diversity
Dear Paige,
Re-reading your last post, I realize you have some specific questions about how publishers are doing right now. I can only respond from the perspective of University of Michigan Press, but I am hoping that colleagues from learned society, university press, scholar-led, and other mission-driven publishers (commercial or non-profit in the tax code) may respond as well:
1. "Do you have financial security in 2020-2021, but have financial insecurity afterward?" Our financial year is end of June. We anticipate print sales to libraries to essentially dry up between early March and end of June but ebook sales to remain stable, even possibly grow slightly as libraries focus on resourcing remote-working faculty and students. But, since we make more money from print sales than ebook sales, we will end up in deficit for the year. Where we can cover that from remains a question. Previously the University has stepped up to fill a one-time hole with an expectation that next year we'll do better. But I'm concerned they won't have the capacity to do so in FY 21. There'll be so many other demands on their resources. Sales for FY 21 will be extremely hard to project. Anecdotally we anticipate large declines in library budgets for the fall, but have little sense of how the economic downturn will affect coursebook demand or the regional trade market. In the last category, our books on topics like Mammals of Michigan may be affected by how much people can spend time outside this summer and how many independent bookstores remain in business. But, while our income is somewhat diversified, we'd have to sell a lot of Mammals to cover the likely losses from library sales.
"2. How is COVID 19 affecting your review and publishing schedules?" Most of our reviewers seem to be on time at the moment. Maybe reviewing is a good distraction from the craziness around them. Some have asked for an extension as they spend time transitioning their courses online. For now, our publishing schedules are unaffected (we can do all the production stages working remotely) but there are some books we publish that would traditionally have been printed offset rather than digital and these require warehousing. The Chicago Distribution Center which we and 100 other non-profit publishers depend on is shut by the Illinois governor's order until at least April 7, so publication dates for offset books may be delayed (nowhere for the printers to ship to) unless we change the formats to facilitate print-on-demand. That may be a positive effect of the current crisis, to be honest, as we've been needing to get more flexible and digital with our printing choices for a while now. (Current sales of monographs don't really justify offset print runs anymore.) The challenge is that short-run digital printing is more expensive per unit than offset, so we may be making less margin on print going forward. And there may be some more printers who are dependent on offset going out of business.
"3. How do you expect COVID 19 to impact the submissions you receive?" Well, we're expecting more health policy submissions in our political science list! A particular question, however, is how this will affect graduate students or post-docs finishing their dissertations and/or turning them into monographs. Their employment situations are tenuous at best and my sense is that there is too much stress in their lives right now to focus much on writing. As well as first books, we do publish a number of more senior scholars. At the moment they seem relatively unaffected, but I've seen some of our authors on Twitter complaining that it is hard to focus on the difficult work of writing right now.
I'm hoping other publishers will add their honest answers to your great questions. There's so much organizational diversity in our industry that they'll likely have very different responses.
I don't often post on this list and already feel that I'm becoming a rather monotonous voice. But your work to bridge the common library/publisher information divide feels so important, especially right now when we'll be missing the various conferences where we can meet and discuss.
If there are too many responses, I realize that too much traffic on ScholComm may not be scalable. Perhaps Ithaka S&R or the Charleston Observatory might be willing to pick up the baton to study the effects of COVID-19 on publishers, especially the smaller ones?
All best wishes,
Charles
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 2:24 PM Mann, Paige <Paige...@redlands.edu> wrote:
This is wonderful news! Thank you Kathleen Shearer, Leslie Chan, Iryna Kuchma, and Pierre Mounier (with input from Peter Suber). Thank you also to those who wrote directly to the listserv and others who wrote to me. In some ways, perhaps COVID 19 may be a gift of insight, accelerating the vulnerabilities experienced by mission-driven publishers. With this insight, I don’t think collections decisions can be made as if it’s “business as usual.” I encourage those from university presses and smaller academic publishers (nonprofit and commercial) to continue to update us with perspectives, stories, and data that librarians can use in our collections decisions and advocacy work. As Safer-at-Home orders continue, I recognize that your thoughts and sense of vulnerability will change with each week. I am particularly interested in understanding how COVID 19, decreased library budgets, possible higher ed closures, etc. might impact your operations and when. For example, do you have financial security in 2020-2021, but have financial insecurity afterward? How is COVID 19 affecting your review and publishing schedules? How do you expect COVID 19 to impact the submissions you receive?
Thank you again for sharing your thoughts and perspectives. In preparation for the ways that we will ultimately recover from this, I look forward to libraries continuing to have provocative discussions about our collections and the publishers and publishing models we support with these decisions.
Sincerely,
Paige
Paige Mann
STEM Librarian | Scholarly Communications
University of Redlands
From: Kathleen Shearer <m.kathlee...@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, March 30, 2020 at 11:15 AM
To: Charles Watkinson <wat...@umich.edu>
Cc: Paige Mann <Paige...@redlands.edu>, "scho...@lists.ala.org" <scho...@lists.ala.org>
Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] A call to support publisher diversity
Hi Paige, (Charles, and others),
Thanks for bringing up this important point.
A group of us (Leslie Chan, Iryna Kuchma, Pierre Mounier, and myself, with input from Peter Suber) are just finalizing a short paper about this very subject. The aim is to get the community and different stakeholders thinking about how they can support bibliodiversity through their policies, funding and other activities.
To quote from the current draft,
While the recent news that cOAlition S will fund a study “to identify ways to support publishing initiatives wishing to implement Diamond business models” is a positive development, the predominant strategy to date for transitioning to OA is to invest in established, proprietary infrastructures, rather than to support smaller services, or open systems and platforms that are governed by the communities they serve. As a result, many local, regional and national infrastructures are overlooked by potential funders and struggle to ensure their sustainability.
And now, with the potentially devastating financial impact of covid-19, there is even greater urgency around the issue of bibliodiversity.
I’ll share the paper with the mailing list when it is available. We hope it will trigger some more discussion and strategic decision making in this area.
All the best, Kathleen
Kathleen Shearer
Executive Director
Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
On Mar 28, 2020, at 10:56 AM, Charles Watkinson (via scholcomm Mailing List) <scho...@lists.ala.org> wrote:
Dear Paige,
Thank you for this considerate and thoughtful post. To your question about how mission-driven publishers are doing; talking with my colleagues from the Association of University Presses, it's clear that we're looking to the future with increasing dread. In the short term the focus was on how to support authors, their students and colleagues in moving to remote learning, teaching, and research (e.g., the more than 50 publishers now offering free-to-read content in Project Muse or the direct free-to-read offers from publishers like Michigan that have their own platforms). But now we're starting to perceive the financial damage the current crisis will do to universities and their libraries' budgets and feeling increasingly vulnerable.
Most of us are presses who were already feeling the pinch of the declining market for monographs and the substitution of new purchases of course texts with secondhand and digital copies. This crisis and its aftermath will clearly push many of us even further over the edge at a time when our parent institutions will likely have bigger funding priorities to deal with. While it undoubtedly offers short-term benefit to readers who register their contact details with the Internet Archive, the National Emergency Library gives nothing back to us or our authors and it honestly feels to me like an opportunistic attack when we are most vulnerable.
There are many independent barely-for-profit publishers who are very similar to university presses and they will be feeling similar pain, without the protective umbrella of a higher education institution. The large commercial publishers, however, are generally more digital, more diversified, and more resilient and will be quicker out of the gate to vacuum up the reduced budgets that libraries will have. As you note, there will also undoubtedly be questions from administrations about whether libraries can afford to support born-OA publishers that deliver public good but may be harder to justify supporting in terms of primarily local campus benefit (such as Lever Press or the ScholarLed consortium).
In short, I agree with you: Collection development librarians who deeply believe in values such as bibliodiversity will need to be strong in standing up for the smaller publishers this autumn in the face of what will be a barrage of commercial entities. Their sales reps will have compelling big deals and detailed cost-per-use spreadsheets in hand because they will need to rectify the damage done to their shareholders. That, of course, is their fiduciary responsibility and they will also be wanting to protect their own talented staff members from inevitable "downsizing." That is their job. The independent mission-driven publishers will have less capacity, will be less ready, and may well be lost.
I, and I suspect my non-profit publishing colleagues worldwide, are very grateful to you for raising such concerns. Thank you again.
Charles
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 1:30 PM "Mann, Paige" <scho...@lists.ala.org> wrote:
Anyone out there know how independent and learned society presses and publishers are doing amidst COVID 19 uncertainty? Along with university presses, I suspect they are threatened with financial viability. With this in mind, it may behoove us to begin considering how we will allocate next year’s budgets. Before COVID 19, those outside the publishing oligopoly were already facing pressures to contract with publishing oligopolists. Since COVID 19, the pressures have certainly grown.
Since COVID 19 ensures that we are not doing “business as usual,” libraries and consortia will need to decide how we will spend our reduced budgets. Do we flip our budgets so that we prioritize independents and learned societies, and leave what remains in our budgets to oligopolists? Do we proactively reach out to diamond/platinum OA publishers to ask if they need library support lest they turn to oligopolists?
I think we need to start thinking about this now given the ramifications and uncertainty facing all publishers. Working at a liberal-arts institution, I hope that my colleagues will relate to the value of diverse positions and empathize with the perils facing niche communities which are often supported philosophically and less so financially.
Paige
Paige Mann
STEM Librarian | Scholarly Communications Librarian
University of Redlands