The Business Model is a Community Affair

1. The Business Model is a
Community Affair
Joseph J. Esposito
AAUP Annual Conference
June 2014

2. We talk so often about new business
models, but what is the current
business model, anyway? If it is
broken, as so many say, what precisely
is the nature of the breakage? This is
not an argument over the old vs. the
new but simply a matter of
clarification.

3. Topics
• Defining the ground
• UP publishing vs. other kinds of academic
publishing
• The university press in the context of the
parent institution
• What’s wrong with being a better publisher?
• The free-rider problem

4. Defining the Ground
• Not addressing journals or service businesses
• Focused on books by scholars for scholars, not
(e.g.) classroom texts or regional titles
• Include all book revenue: print, digital, sub
rights, permissions, aggregation shares, etc.

5. UP Publishing vs. Library Publishing
UPs
• Authors mostly from other
institutions
• Marketplace economics
• Primarily toll access
• Primarily book-length works
• Print and digital
• Peer review
• Challenge to get home
institution support
Libraries
• Authors mostly from home
institution
• Institutional support
• Primarily open access
• Primarily articles
• Almost entirely digital
• No peer review policy
• Strong home support (e.g.,
article deposit mandates)

6. UPs vs. For-profit Book Publishers
UPs
• Mission based
• Peer review
• Commitment to support
certain disciplines
• Largely anchored in
humanities
• With exceptions, mostly
small enterprises
For-profit Publishers
• Work for shareholders
• Variety of review policies
• No interest in categories
that are unprofitable
• Diverse; humanities and
STM publishing
• With exceptions, many
linked to large companies

7. OA Books vs. OA Journals
Journals
• Strong STM, weak HSS
• Mandates from funding
agencies, inc. government
• Green and Gold models
• Conspicuous financial
successes (PLOS, BMC)
• First-copy cost is low
(because length of articles)
Books
• No traction to date
• Scattered mandates from
funders (e.g., Wellcome)
• No emergent model
• Still in experimental stage;
no conspicuous successes
• First-copy cost is high (long-
form publishing)

8. Where Do Authors Come From?
• AAUP does not have these statistics
• Anecdotal reports: 7-10% of authors come
from parent institutions; some estimate 15-
20%
• UPs, in other words, mostly publish other
institutions’ faculty
• This can undermine support at the parent
institution

9. How Does the Faculty View its
Hometown Press?
• Obviously, hard to generalize, but most
presses have strong support from certain
departments
• But faculty may publish elsewhere
• And faculty may recommend that junior
faculty publish elsewhere
• The “taint of an inside job”
• This tends to undermine financial support

10. The Community System
• Faculty in some areas support presses
• But faculty mostly publish elsewhere
• Thus faculty depend on other institutions’
presses for publication and certification
• Other presses reciprocate—where they exist
and have sufficiently large and appropriate
programs

11. What Would an Exceptional Publisher
Do?
• Assess the marketplace; develop program
accordingly
• Focus on fields with strong markets
• But what about the weaker fields? Who
supports them?
• Thus some U. presses have to pick up slack

12. The Free-rider Problem
• Universities depend on the community of
presses for their faculty to get published
• Universities therefore may not support their
own presses sufficiently

13. The Structural Problem
• Mission-based publishing requires support of
unprofitable fields
• Certification is linked to publication
• Smart publishers (NFP and commercial alike)
avoid these fields
• Reliance on other institutions reduces support
for the home institution
• And we have a vicious circle

14. As for the Individual Press . . .
• Individual presses can strive to be better
publishers . . . at the expense of other U.
presses
• An individual press cannot solve the
community problem of certification
• But they could (easily) solve the problem of
dissemination with low-cost models similar to
library publishing

15. So which is the more important
problem, dissemination or
certification? And when you answer
that, which is the better model, U.
press publishing or library publishing?

16. Contact Information
• Joseph J. Esposito
• espositoj@gmail.com
• @josephjesposito
• +Joseph Esposito