Lisa Bayer is AUPresses President (2021-2022) and the director of the University of Georgia Press. This article is based on her remarks to the National Information Standards Organization’s 2021 Humanities Roundtable,“The Monograph in an Evolving Humanities Ecosystem.”
During a podcast interview last year Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia and Zillow, was asked how he’d pitched the idea of Expedia to Bill Gates back in 1996. He replied, “We were encouraged to swing big.” It’s an apt metaphor for university press publishing in general too, particularly for this community’s collaborative work, with each other and with the entire scholarly ecosystem, to sustain and reimagine monographs.
University presses individually and as a team—in the form of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—are in league with humanities scholars and a variety of other individual and institutional partners around the world. Long-form scholarship, otherwise known as the monograph, is the game ball or the diamond, depending on your perspective. A 2019 survey of some 5,000 scholars by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press found that “the monograph remains a vital part of the scholarly ecosystem . . . especially in the Humanities.” But monograph publishing has not ever been about the final product alone. Respondents said that the process of writing, of conducting research, of thinking it through, of creativity and intellectual freedom, allowed them to develop “interconnected, complex arguments” that became new knowledge through delivery in long-form texts. Survey respondents did feel, however, that “experimentation and evolution,” especially regarding access and discoverability, were necessary for monographs to remain relevant and useful—which is why this conversation continues, and continues to matter.
March 20 marks the liftoff of “University Presses in Space,” a website promoting university press books about outer space and space exploration. The site, www.upinspace.org, features 30 titles selected by the 15 participating presses as among their best space books. These titles are cross-linked with the individual book pages in presses’ web catalogs so that we may share web traffic. In addition, all the presses and their authors may share links to the site through catalogs, email, social media, and at exhibits and meetings.
The MIT Press conceived of this joint promotion in conjunction with our lead Spring 2014 title, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. We worked closely with three partners—the University Press of Florida, Purdue University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press—to develop the idea and then invited all AAUP member presses to join as participants. MIT designed and launched the site; Nebraska will then take over the site after it enters its regular orbit. Nebraska has arranged to bring “University Presses in Space” to the attention of attendees at SpaceFest (“THE event for the space enthusiast”) in Pasadena this May.
We believe that space buffs, as well as general readers interested in space, don’t stop at just one book. We believe that they appreciate the quality of university press publishing. Thus we hope that the discovery experience provided by “University Presses in Space” will stimulate sales, both for the featured titles and the many more space books to be found by exploring university press lists. The site includes a link to AAUP’s Books for Understanding which has a Space Flight category.
This is a modest experiment in collaborative promotion; modest in part because the site does not offer a combined shopping experience. But we hope that the response to “University Presses in Space” will point us toward effective ways to promote books in specific fields across our community, throughout the galaxy, and beyond.
Please share the news with any space explorers in your part of the universe. Our Twitter hashtag is #upspacebooks.
Going digital means new types of products are being created, along with new ways to track them and extrapolate useful metadata. University presses have a central investment in product-centered metadata, but in today’s data-driven world, there are an increasing number of other angles to explore.
One important angle is to track the individual scholar. This is the idea behind ORCID—short for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. The ORCID system is new: the nonprofit was formed in 2010, and the identifier system officially launched a year ago in October 2012. ORCID is now in a promotional phase; in order for the system to fulfill its potential, scholars—or their institutions—need to (continue to) sign up. As an introduction, NFAIS hosted a midday webinar on October 23, “An Overview of ORCID: The Unique Identifier of Researchers Worldwide.”
In a nutshell, ORCID is a registry that matches scholars with a unique 16-digit identifier, which can be linked to anything from publications and grant awards to patents and conference registrations. The Wellcome Trust already uses the identifiers in their grant application process; Open Access publisher F1000 will soon request peer reviewers to provide their ORCID identifiers. The ORCID identifier is basically an ISBN for a scholar, providing more reliable attribution than a name, which can be abbreviated, initialized, or otherwise changed, adding to confusion at a time when ambiguities can already be amplified by the increasingly global and virtual elements of scholarly communication.
When attached to the end of the http://orcid.org URL, the identifier leads to an individualized webpage with the scholar’s name and any attached attributions. While the minimalistic profiles are intentionally not meant to form a new social network, they are semi-customizable, with the option to link to a personal website or LinkedIn profile, add a short bio, tag certain keywords. The page details, as with the ORCID identifier, are set up for free by the individual scholar, who can also choose which listings to make public and which to set limitations on or keep private.
But the intent is for the identifiers to serve beyond the ORCID website. The ORCID organization provides tools for embedding the identifier in other systems, to make the identifier a truly universal tool. For example, presses could include an ORCID identifier field in their own databases, royalty systems, and websites.
To speed up the adoption process, organizations themselves—such as a university, or a university press—can also become a “member” of ORCID and, in doing so, receive authorization to proactively enroll the scholars they work with in the ORCID system and start publicly linking their work. However, the ultimate control remains in the hands of the individual scholar: even if enrolled by an institution, they are allowed to go back and adjust the settings of their individual identifier account, such as choosing which attributions remain public. Boston University, for example, is a member and is creating ORCID records for their faculty, on an opt-out basis, and for their students as well, on an opt-in basis. While universities make up a third of ORCID members, publishers follow close behind, comprising another quarter.
To date, ORCID has assigned almost 400,000 identifiers, and records at least 1,000 unique visitors a month each from 66 different countries. (The registry supports multiple languages and character sets.) More information can be found online, on the ORCID website, blog, or Twitter feed.
Have you considered ORCID? Have authors discussed ORCID identifiers with you? Have you considered working ORCID identifiers into your press’s existing metadata? Tell us more in the comments below.
Stories along the Road to Innovation from the Johns Hopkins University Press
by Becky Brasington Clark and Claire McCabe Tamberino
Our consumer health editor, Jackie Wehmueller, had turned up a promising opportunity. She had contacted a prominent dermatologist about writing a book on chronic itch, a condition that affects millions of individuals. The market potential for the book was enormous and the dermatologist was renowned. He liked the idea and agreed to write the book with one key condition: it had to be a fully interactive e-book with patient videos and three-dimensional graphics, and it had to be published as a multi-touch iBook.
The author was coming to Baltimore in a few weeks. Did we want to meet with him and learn more?
The answer was an enthusiastic yes. As a longstanding publisher of titles in consumer health—including the bestsellingThirty-Six Hour Day—the Johns Hopkins University Press was the natural home for this path-breaking project.
There was a small twinge of anxiety over the fact that we had never before used iBooks Author—the multi-touch platform that seamlessly incorporates video, audio, 3-D graphics, and other interactive features directly into the e-book file—but that kind of anxiety is familiar in an industry where change is the only constant. “We’ll figure it out,” we said, and quickly got to work.
JHUP medical publishing: from manuscript to iBook.
Figuring it out is the charge of the Online Books Division (OBD)—a big name for a three-person operation within JHUP’s Books Marketing Department. We seek commercially promising opportunities for digital innovation and figure out how to integrate them into the Book Division’s workflow. Since 2010, we’ve developed and posted supplemental material on CD and online for dozens of titles, we’ve incorporated 3,000 new pages to our online reference, The Early Republic, and we published the 2nd edition of theJohns Hopkins Atlas of Digital EEG (a proprietary software product accompanied by a print book). We’ve also digitized our course adoption campaigns, expanded and refined our list-serv, and segmented 20,000 e-mail subscribers by subject area preference—all while adding new vendors and territories to our e-book program.
We’ve learned a few things along the way, perhaps nothing as important as this: innovation requires not only a willingness to learn, but a stomach for frustration and occasional failure. It requires us to engage fully with that which we do not know, and to begin anew the long journey of mastery. It requires us to add new challenges to already heavy workloads, disrupt routines, and make new kinds of mistakes. And sometimes it requires that we say “yes” to a project before we are 100% certain that we know exactly how to get it done.
Learning iBooks Author
A couple of weeks in advance of the author meeting, two members of the OBD staff—Claire McCabe Tamberino and Michael Carroll—enrolled in a two-day training course on iBooks Author. They came back full of enthusiasm for the platform and confident that we could master it quickly.
We all agreed that we needed a beta project that would allow us to become proficient with iBooks Author in advance of using it for our first commercial endeavor. The search for a practice project came in the midst of a press-wide strategic communications discussion, in which we had identified the need for multi-media collateral material for JHU Press. That’s when it hit us: why not use iBooks Author to develop a multi-touch iBook about the Press?
Turning the Camera on Ourselves
Interactive maps invite readers to explore the history of the press.
With that, Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press was born. The vision was simple enough: repurpose descriptive copy about the Press and its four divisions—Books, Journals, HFS, and Project MUSE—and enhance it with multimedia.
Inspired by the video UNC Press had recently released to highlight the appointment of director John Sherer, we decided to conduct video interviews with Press leaders. That’s where things got a little tricky. We didn’t have a resident videographer on staff, and we couldn’t afford the steep rates charged by the university. So we decided to do it ourselves.
With another small investment in software and training (iMovie), we were ready to start shooting video using the Press’s newest iPad. We wrote scripts, scheduled video shoots, and called “action.”
The shooting went smoothly enough, but we quickly discovered two unanticipated problems. First, the interviews were far too long. Second, the video quality was compromised by the lack of professional lighting. Reshooting all of the interviews simply wasn’t an option. We were already on a tight schedule and the budget was even tighter.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, it led to creative thinking and innovation. We decided to shorten the video interviews considerably, and since the audio quality was better than the video quality, we decided to use small snippets of video, then continue the audio with still shots and animated B-roll.
Nearly a dozen people[1] came together to finish the project. We published Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press in April and made it available free of charge in the iTunes store. We’ve been using it to introduce the Press to university stakeholders, prospective clients, funders, and authors, and the reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive.
Lessons Learned
Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press helped us achieve our primary goal: becoming proficient in iBooks Author in advance of our first commercial project, Living with Itch, which will be published in August (more on that project in a future column). But the beta project bestowed some additional benefits that we found instructive.
First, we gained confidence in our ability to master new ways of publishing. When faced with a challenge like publishing in iBooks Author, it can be easy to assume that we aren’t big enough to handle it, that such opportunity is better left to trade houses and large commercial publishers. That simply isn’t the case. University presses are staffed by smart, adaptable professionals who master new challenges every day. Why worry that we can’t when we demonstrate day after day that we can?
Second, the project forced us to share information across divisions, a process that has been encouraged via our Press-wide strategic messaging efforts. Not only is it interesting to learn more about the work of our colleagues, but this kind of information sharing helps us leverage our collective strength and identify new responses to industry and market challenges.
Third, we were reminded of the value of professional services. Sure, we can shoot and edit video on the iPad, but it isn’t going to be of the same quality as work from professional videographers. For future book-length projects requiring video, we’ll ask the author to deliver high-quality video or we’ll hire a pro.
See for Yourself
A stop on JHU Press’s digital journey.
Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press incorporates the multi-touch functionality of iBooks Author, with text, three-dimensional graphics, interactive maps, video, audio, and a self-grading quiz. If you’d like to see it for yourself, go to the iTunes store and download a free copy. We’d love to get your feedback. Feel free to email Claire McCabe Tamberino with your comments and questions at cmt@press.jhu.edu. And watch this space for a future column on Living with Itch: A Patient’s Guide and an update on how we’ve used Meet the Press in our strategic communications.
[1]Bill Breichner, Davida Breier, Greg Britton, Glen Burris, Michael Carroll, Jack Holmes, Kathleen Keane, Mary Lou Kenney, Dean Smith, Claire McCabe Tamberino
After 14 months, the Long Civil Rights Movement Project’s pilot online collection officially closed its test period on July 18, 2011. You can still see it at https://lcrm.lib.unc.edu/voice/works, although project staff will no longer grant premium access to the full text of the experimental site’s 87 titles (books, articles, papers, and reports) to those who register except by special request. Registration will continue to give any user the ability to see open-access content and comment on it at the paragraph level.
The commenting feature was the focus of the experiment. During the test period, the number of registered users grew beyond our expectations, finishing at 776. The number of annotations contributed by users was also impressive, finishing at 607.
In addition to these valuable statistics, Miller shares other learnings from the pilot, including valuable information on contributor behaviors, use of archives in teaching, and enhanced e-books. In her second post, Miller links to a number of other projects also experimenting in the area of archives, enhanced e-books, and “portal books.”
Posted by Laura Cerruti, University of California Press
