With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press’s new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website. The imprint debuted with the fall 2006 publication of The Best of Technology Writing 2006, edited by journalist and Sunday New York Times business columnist Brendan Koerner, who with UM press editor Alison MacKeen selected 24 pieces from several hundred submissions. “We wanted a versatile mixture of the light-hearted and serious, profiles, features, and ‘big think’ pieces,” MacKeen said of the first volume. “We also wanted to embed some articles in there that would help to make people aware of undercovered issues such as digital copyright, municipal wireless, and so on,” A 2007 volume, to be edited by Newsweek’s Steven Levy, is currently accepting nominations.
As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press’s decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an “open and participatory publishing model” that seeks to “build a community” around its content. “Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline,” MacKeen explained. “The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity.”
While press officials use the term “open access,” the venture is actually more “free access” than open at this stage. Open access typically does not require permission for reuse, only a proper attribution. UM director Phil Pochoda told the LJ Academic Newswire that, while no final decision has been made, the press’s “inclination is to ask authors to request the most restrictive Creative Commons license” for their projects. That license, he noted, requires attribution and would not permit commercial use, such as using it in a subsequent for-sale product, without permission. The Digital Culture Books web site currently reads that “permission must be received for any subsequent distribution.”
The initiative is an innovative publishing strategy for university presses, who have the increasingly complex mission of serving scholarly communication needs while staying financially viable. “It will be interesting to see how it will go in terms of book sales,” MacKeen concedes. “I can imagine either an increase or a decrease.” Pochoda stressed that there is “more than a business model at stake,” however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press’ chance “to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation.” Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales.
Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan. 11, 2007
