crossposted from MediaCommons:

The Chronicle of Higher Education announced today that the University of Michigan Press is being restructured as an academic unit housed under the University of Michigan Library. A number of other institutions, including New York University and Penn State University, have similar reporting relationships between the press and the library, but something has been made explicit in the Michigan shift that stands to be pretty dramatic:

Michigan’s new press-library hierarchy is not a revolution in itself. Many university presses now report to their campus libraries. But Philip Pochoda, the press’s director, said in an interview that he believes this arrangement is notable because it relieves the press of pressure to be financially self-sustaining.

“It removes the bottom line on a book-by-book basis,” he said. “Basically we will be judged for staying within a budget,” just as academic departments are. “In a sense, it will allow us to do more things that are consistent with university objectives, as opposed to commercial objectives.”

This transformation of the press from a revenue center to something more like a service organization within the institution is, I believe, a necessary first step toward solving the financial crisis faced by most university presses.

The University of Michigan’s publishing program notably includes a number of experimental partnerships between the press and the library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, including digitalculturebooks, a joint imprint whose titles are available for free online, or for sale in hard copy. The reporting relationship between the press and the library now promises to free the press to undertake more such explorations of the possibilities for new publishing models, including open access publishing.

The new operating model will emphasize digital monographs, with a small print-on-demand component.

“It opens up opportunities that we had to foreclose because we were so tied to the kind of budgeting and business model that we had before,” Mr. Pochoda said. “This seems to be the first university that’s freeing its press from that model.”

The press director sounded relieved and optimistic about the change. “In many ways, we feel like we’ve come in out of the cold, and boy, it’s been pretty cold,” he said. “There’s never been a colder period in publishing.”

This is an extremely exciting development, one that I hope points the way for other universities to reconsider their commitment to scholarly publishing as a core part of the academic mission.

[UPDATE, 9.29 am: Here's the University of Michigan's press release, with more details. This story is getting reported around the web, most notably at Inside Higher Ed, as an end-of-print story, which I think is missing the point: the news here is not that the press is going all-digital (they're really not), but that, freed from the bottom line, they're now free to experiment with new digital modes. That's huge.]

crossposted from MediaCommons:

Today’s Inside Higher Ed features an opinion piece by Sara Kubik, urging academics to “get serious” about online forms of research publication.

While it once made sense to equate print with quality, it’s time to embrace newer forms of communication as valid. If they need academically sound forms of verification and procedures for citation, let’s get to work.

I could not agree more — and yet it’s important to note, in the comments that follow, one of the reasons why such getting-serious is easier said than done: in response to Kubik’s insistence that online publishing would help to alleviate the horrific time-lags between the completion of research and its dissemination, Sandy Thatcher, Director of Penn State University Press, responds by saying that it’s peer review that takes so long, and thus the digital won’t speed things up all that much.

This kind of response is precisely the reason a project like MediaCommons is so necessary, I believe: if we are really going to get serious about online scholarly publishing, we have got to get outside the paper-based model of what publishing is. What Thatcher’s response misses (and what I’ve attempted to follow up with in a comment myself) is that it makes no sense to port paper-based procedures into a digital publishing process. In conventional publishing, peer review has to come before publication, due to the material scarcities involved, whether the limited number of pages that can be published in a journal or the limited number of volumes that can be published by a press. These scarcities do not obtain in networked environments; there are no limitations on the number of texts, or the length of texts, that can be published. What is scarce, instead, is time and attention. What we need is a peer review process that works toward maximizing those scarcities, rather than using paper-based models of gatekeeping.

What I’ve been arguing for some time now is that we need to let everything be published, and transform peer review into a post-publication filtering process. Right now, a monograph that will only reach a dozen interested readers simply can’t be taken on by a traditional press — but why shouldn’t that monograph be able to find its dozen readers online? Isn’t it imaginable that those dozen readers might gradually, through their resulting publications, persuade many more that they’d overlooked something important in that original monograph?

So open the floodgates. Let’s develop a system that helps that dozen readers find the texts they’re looking for, and vice versa. And in the process, let’s crowd-source peer review. Right now, the process is slow in no small part because of how the “peers” involved are determined — they’re a very small number of hand-selected, overworked, and undercompensated readers. Why shouldn’t we allow any reader who genuinely engages with a text to become a “peer”? In so doing, we not only spread the labor of peer review out in a more just fashion, but we also recognize that readers and readings change, and thus that review should be an ongoing, rather than a one-time-only, process.

I’m hopeful that MediaCommons, by creating a new publishing process from the ground up, might be able to help transform our ideas about online publishing, to help us work with rather than against the net-native modes of producing “authority.” But in order to do so, we need your help. Publish things here, whether as blog posts or uploaded documents. Help us imagine the projects we should be taking on. Give us your feedback about the site, its structure, the features you’d like to see, and how we might develop and implement a genuinely peer-to-peer review process.

We’re getting serious. We hope you will, too.