Publish, Not Perish
“Publish or perish” goes the old saying in academia, but what happens when it’s the publishers who are perishing? Enter the recently resurrected Rice University Press, which is blazing an unconventional path in redefining the parameters of academic publishing.
Academic publishing is nothing new for Rice. The university published an academic journal titled the Rice Institute Pamphlet (1915–62) and later renamed Rice University Studies (1962–82), and a number of academic journals currently are housed at Rice. In 1982, Rice instituted a book publishing arm, Rice University Press (RUP), primarily as an outlet for the work of Rice faculty and limited largely to topics of regional interest or of interest to faculty members here.
In a sense, the original RUP was the canary in the coal mine of academic publishing. It succumbed in 1996 due to financial pressures caused by the rising costs of conventional publishing and distribution colliding with the typically low readership experienced by niche publishers.
“It’s the essential problem for traditional academic presses whose businesses are built on the commercial publishing model,” said Fred Moody, editor-in-chief of Rice’s 2.0 version of Rice University Press, which came online, literally, in 2008. “You print a large number of books, then you distribute them all over the country in the hope that sales will recoup the investment.”
Academic publishers generally follow this model even though the purpose and market for academic books is far different than for commercial fare. “Academic books tend to be of interest to a few experts and their students in a particular field,” said Moody. “They serve to advance understanding of specialized topics and, if they earn good reviews from expert readers, help the authors further their careers.” Nowhere in this equation is book sales, which usually number in the hundreds, considered an important or legitimate reason for doing academic research resulting in a published book.
Even so, academic publishers operating on the commercial model must live with the massive expense of production, marketing and printing a relatively large number of copies, which has led, Moody said, to a crisis in academic publishing. “Publishers are ceasing operations or cutting back drastically in the number of titles they do each year,” he said, “and growing numbers of young faculty are finding fewer outlets for their research.” As a result, deserving work is going unpublished because of the skewed economics of academic publishing rather than because the work lacks intellectual merit.
A New Model
RUP and its new model for academic publishing is, Moody believes, the solution. Started by then-vice provost and head of Fondren Library Charles Henry and Joey King, who was the executive director of the Connexions project, Rice’s digital collaborative environment for the development of educational material, RUP is administered by the Office of the Provost.
“To put it grandly,” Moody said, “we want to save academic publishing by making it financially viable without compromising editorial excellence. Like any academic press, we employ standard, time-honored editorial rigor and peer review to submitted manuscripts, and our acceptance of a book is based solely on its intellectual worth.”
The difference comes with production methods and distribution. RUP leverages digital technology for both, and the key is that its books are published in two formats: an online version and a reasonably priced print-on-demand (POD) edition for those who prefer traditional books. Using POD technology reduces costs by eliminating the need to print a large number of books beforehand, maintain an inventory and deal with returns. Ordering an RUP book online is similar to ordering a book from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble’s Web site.
The cost of production for RUP is a fraction of that borne by traditional publishers, thanks to an automatic layout program developed by Connexions. The same program is utilized for the online versions of the books, as well, but the digital versions don’t simply replicate the printed ones. Instead, they are expanding the definition of what a book can be by allowing for new forms of scholarly argument that incorporate multimedia elements and digital forms of expression.
One example is “Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s and 70s,” by Sarah C. Reynolds, which includes 18 hours of audio recording in its online edition. Another is “Images of Memorable Cases: 50 Years at the Bedside,” a book on medical diagnostics by Dr. Herbert L. Fred ’50, which is interactive, allowing the reader to study a case then click on a link to find the diagnosis.
“Being online also allows us to link to other Web sites,” Moody said. “It’s another way of both augmenting a book and redefining what a book is. Future titles will include video, three-dimensional models and, eventually, virtual environments that readers can inhabit and study. Our titles never go out of print, and they can be updated easily and inexpensively.”
Another huge advantage to RUP’s open source model is the number of readers RUP can attract via Web-based publishing, and that is crucial because academic publishing is more about readership than dollars. “Our mission is to disseminate the fruits of academic research as widely as possible,” Moody said. “We see academic material as an open-source educational platform rather than as a source of revenue that you attempt to make more valuable by restricting access to it through price and outmoded distribution models.”
New Directions
RUP’s model seems to be working. The press’s first title, “Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age,” by Mariet Westermann and Hilary Ballon, normally would have sold 200 copies, mostly to libraries, and in the end be read by fewer than 1,000 people. RUP’s online version has attracted more than 110,000 readers. Dr. Fred’s book, written for the medical education field, was accepted for publication by a major academic publisher but then was declined for cost reasons due to its more than 150 color illustrations. Dr. Fred submitted the book to RUP, and in less than a year, it has had more than 200,000 visitors. These gratifying numbers show that RUP’s publishing model helps a book find an appropriate worldwide audience.
Cost and distribution aren’t the only reasons an author might approach RUP. One of the press’s most recent books is “Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson,” by Marcia Brennan, an associate professor of art history at Rice, and Moody says it was perfect for RUP for two reasons. “It is a brilliant work, probably one of the best titles we’ll ever publish, and it is interdisciplinary — a very hard title to pigeonhole. I think that very few academic presses would have had the imagination or courage to publish this book because it’s very unusual, even unique. Peer reviewers, by the way, were uniformly ecstatic.”
Originally, RUP started with a focus on art history, but Moody has received manuscripts in so many other fields that the press has reconsidered its direction. “Now we think of ourselves as the demonstrator of a new publishing paradigm rather than as a publisher specializing in a given subject area,” he said. An example of a surprising direction RUP is taking is its new series, Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880–1930, which consists of facsimile editions of out-of-print classic titles republished with fresh accompanying material by leading contemporary scholars. RUP will produce 17 of these books over the next three years, mostly for use in graduate-level English literature classes. The first of the series, “Le Petit Journal des Refusées,” originally an 1896 parodic pamphlet printed on wallpaper and trimmed in a trapezoidal shape, has just been released.
New Additions, New Editions
Moody is excited about RUP’s future. In the pipeline, in addition to the 17 facsimile editions, are one new title awaiting reader feedback and five others in peer review. He estimates that the press should be able to manage seven to 10 titles per year without any staff other than himself, but the demand from prospective authors may require the press to make decisions about whether to maintain that level of output or expand. Those decisions also hinge on the press’s financial situation.
“To put it grandly, we want to save academic publishing by making it financially viable without compromising editorial excellence.”
“Our initial projections were to break even in five years,” Moody said. “Now, we think we can do that by the end of 2011 with a combination of foundation funding and sales revenue.” So far, RUP has been funded by the university with help from two important establishing grants. The first was $80,000 from Isabel Brown Wilson of the Brown Foundation, Inc., which funded a Connexions content specialist for one year. This person is developing and optimizing RUP’s automatic page-layout system, updating the Web site and making many other technical enhancements to RUP’s overall system.
“Mrs. Wilson grasped the technical matters immediately and understood better than almost anyone I’ve encountered the rationale behind our publishing model,” Moody said. “She is a truly imaginative, visionary benefactor.”
The second grant — $15,000 from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation — will be used to develop five book design templates for RUP’s automatic page-layout program that will allow the press to automatically produce books that look professionally designed by hand.
In 2009, RUP received an ongoing Google Grants award, worth $120,000 per year. “This grant allows us to craft ad campaigns for our books that link our book sales Web site to commonly used search terms associated with our books,” Moody said. “Since our marketing is based entirely on people finding us via the Web, this is a massively important grant for us.”
In the long term, RUP hopes to be completely funded by a combination of sales and a modest endowment provided by foundations interested in promoting good scholarship.
With just 11 titles under it’s belt, RUP may be the fledgling among academic publishers, but that might not be the case much longer.
“No one else in the academic publishing world is trying this,” Moody said. “If we can sustain this model, we not only can be among the best academic publishers in the world at a fraction of the cost, but we also will be at the forefront of publishing academic work in the digital age.”