Sanford G. Thatcher

The challenge of open access for university presses

University presses were founded in the late 19th century to help alleviate a problem of market failure, namely insufficient demand in the commercial marketplace to sustain a publishing operation on the basis of sales alone. Now, in the face of claims about another type of market failure – insufficient funds to sustain library subscriptions to STM journals – calls have come forth to change the economic model of publishing from sales‐based to grants‐based, offering the fruits of knowledge free to all users with an Internet connection. This paper examines both the challenges and the opportunities that the variants of ‘open access’ present to university presses, as they seek to fulfill their traditional mission of disseminating knowledge ‘far and wide’ while remaining sustainable as businesses.

Point & Counterpoint: Is CC BY the Best Open Access License?

The only aim of scholarly communication should be the widest possible distribution of knowledge and scholarly results. In order for this to be possible, published research—which scholars give away for free to publishers—should be open access. And in this context, “gratis” open access (free to access) isn’t enough; only “libre” open access, which removes permission barriers, allows the widest distribution of knowledge.

The Future of Scholarly Book Publishing in Political Theory

I n 1995, I wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education outlining the problems of publishing scholarly books in literary criticism and explaining why the Penn State University Press could no longer afford to remain active in this field. Of the 150 books about literature the Press had put out in the previous decade, 65% had sold fewer than 500 copies, 91% fewer than 800 copies, and only 3% more than 1,000. The pattern of sales in this discipline had eroded to the point where a press without much of a subsidy from its parent university could not sustain a publishing program in it anymore. It seemed clear even then that what we scholarly publishers have come to call the problem of “endangered species” would be spreading to other disciplines over time. Five years later, in an article I wrote for the newsletter of APSA’s Organized Section on Comparative Politics ~2000!, I analyzed data that seemed to show that field to be heading in the same direction as literary studies, and I concluded with not a great deal of hope for the future. Recently, at the invitation of the Association for Political Theory, I turned my attention to the subfield of political theory and offered this paper as background for the session on book publishing at the conference in November 2006. While many of the same pressures remain in place to bedevil university presses, and it would be premature surely to claim that we are out of the woods yet, there have been some significant changes that give reason to think the future may not be quite as gloomy as it appeared back at the turn of the millennium. First, before talking about the recent changes, let’s look at some numbers that illustrate how the market has eroded over the past few decades. My previous employer, Princeton University Press, did detailed studies of sales patterns in different disciplines. For political science as a whole, the average five-year total for books published only in hardback in the period 1960–1967 was 3,387. That average had already dropped to 1,768 for books published between 1971 and 1973 and by 1979–1981 was down to 1,274. Paperbacks began emerging in the late 1960s, but initially were typically released after the hardback had already been out for at least a couple of years. In political science, the average five-year sale for later paperbacks at Princeton was 2,623 for paperbacks published in 1973–1977. Helped by an NSF-sponsored study ~Fry and White 1975! of changing library budgets ~documenting a trend of more acquisitions funds going to journals and less to monographs from 1969 to 1973!, university presses began recognizing the seriousness of the erosion in library sales as early as the first half of the 1970s and adopted a new strategy of trying to recoup some of the lost hardback sales by issuing more titles simultaneously in hardback and paperback. By 1980, every book in political science at Princeton was being issued simultaneously in hardback and paperback. The average five-year sale for hardbacks in dual editions was 1,206 in 1977–1979 but only 996 by 1981–1983, while the paperback averages for those periods were 3,754 and 5,481, respectively. On my recommendation, Princeton began tracking sales of political philosophy books separately in the later 1970s. For books published in hardback only during these two periods, the average five-year sale actually increased from 1,292 to 1,440 ~but the number of titles included were very small, fewer than five!. For books issued simultaneously in hardback and paperback, the averages were 1,120 down to 975 for hardbacks and 4,393 up to 5,267 for paperbacks. With this relatively encouraging experience as background, I carried over the same strategy to Penn State when I came here in 1989. Many other presses by that time had long since jumped on the bandwagon of dual editions that Princeton had pioneered in the early 1970s with its simultaneous Limited Paperback Editions ~LPEs!, and competition with other presses, not to mention expectations from authors, made this the dominant approach in most fields of scholarly publishing, especially in the social sciences but also in many fields of the humanities, too. But the numbers were already beginning to suggest that this strategy had its limits. Let me illustrate by using data from sales of the 73 books in political theory that Penn State published over the 15-year period from 1991 to 2006. For convenience I’ll group them into clusters, dividing them into three five-year periods during which the Press published 29, 24, and 20 titles, respectively ~reflecting the overall pattern of initial growth of the Press’s annual output to a maximum of 80 titles in the mid-1990s and then a gradual retrenchment to about 50 titles a year currently!. In the first two periods, 1991–1996 and 1996–2000, the Press published only nine titles that were not dual editions and 44 that were, and of the nine, two were paperback reprints of books by Stephen Bronner and Jean Bethke Elshtain that commercial publishers had allowed to go out of print, leaving just seven as books issued only in hardback. Excluding Chris Sciabarra’s atypical Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical ~1995!, which enjoyed significant book club sales and total sales of 2,530 hardbacks and 7,385 paperbacks, the average total sales through June 2006 for the 43 remaining titles were 466 hardbacks and 1,366 paperbacks for the 23 books published in 1991–1995 and 243 hardbacks and 931 paperbacks for the 20 books published in 1996–2000. These represent declines of 48% and 32%, respectively—sobering numbers for any publisher. We knew already from statistics issued by the Association of Research Libraries that since the mid-1980s academic library purchases of monographs had dropped nearly 25% as an ever-greater share of their funds had gone toward sustaining journal subscriptions ~even after libraries began cancelling subscriptions in the early 1990s!. Anecdotal evidence, as well as information gleaned from Yankee Book Peddler ~the largest wholesale supplier of academic books to libraries!, suggested that more libraries than ever were opting to buy paperback editions instead of hardbacks when they were issued at the same time, thus contributing further to Sanford G. Thatcher is director of Penn State University Press. He previously worked at Princeton University Press as manuscript editor, social science editor, assistant director, and editor-in-chief. He is president-elect of the Association of American University Press.

Changing copyright legislation: Two views

Abstract Recent revisions of copyright law are the source of a debate about the issue of Fair Use in scholarly communication and the influence of commercial interest in determining how copyright is interpreted. The unusual format of this paper reflects a discussion over electronic mail between a library administrator and the director of a university press. The authors trade perspectives on the future of scholarly communication and attempt to construct a vision of a nonmarket-based system. They raise the issues of unrestricted photocopying, electronic distribution, and copyright protection in an era of ever-diminishing serials budgets. Differing views on the Fair Use provision are explored. The authors come to an agreement about the importance of preserving and distributing the results of academic research and discuss the roles of librarians, scholars, and other nonprofit entities in nurturing the process of scholarly communication in an arena separate from the mass market.

Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (review)

It is one of the never-ending tasks of a director of a university press to explain to various audiences – most especially the administrator to whom the director reports (whether provost, graduate school dean, vice president for research, head librarian, or other university officer) but also faculty editorial boards, financial oversight committees, boards of trustees, college deans, graduate students, and, not least, the press’s own authors – how this mysterious business of scholarly publishing works. The task has become ever more complex and challenging over the past few decades as technology has brought about a veritable revolution in the way the business is run. As John Thompson himself says on the first page of the introduction of this book, ‘The book publishing industry today is going through a process of change which is probably as profound as anything it has experienced since Johann Gutenberg adapted the traditional screw press for the purposes of manufacturing printed texts’ (1). Hitherto we directors have had to patch together an explanatory account from a variety of different sources. Thompson notes a few of these in his introduction, including the pioneering Books: The

A Dialogue on PDA

Editor’s Note: How does patron-driven acquisition (PDA) affect the scholarly marketplace? How will PDA affect university presses? Two of the leading voices on the topic, Sandy Thatcher and Rick Anderson, have recently been discussing these questions. In a conversation initiated by Sandy’s revision of his Charleston Conference presentation titled “Back to the Future: Old Models for New Challenges”(Against the Grain, February 2011), the two have been exploring the challenges and opportunities posed by PDA. Sandy’s position, in brief, is that PDA can potentially cause significant problems for university presses. To begin with, PDA can reduce immediate cash flow to publishers as orders for books are extended over a longer period of time compared with revenue generated from traditional approval plans. It is also possible that PDA will result in a lower number of sales overall, as evidence shows that many monographs on library shelves never circulate. For his part, Rick feels that the programmatic acquisition of library books that are never used may be too high a price to pay for the support of university presses. If these (or any other) presses are publishing books that no one wants to use, the solution is probably for those presses to publish different books rather than to insist that libraries purchase the ones no one wants. Let the debate begin! — XA

From the University Presses -- Is "Functional" Use "Transformative" and Hence "Fair"? A Copyright Conundrum

The decision from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on April 16, 2009, in the case of A.V. v. iParadigns, LLC is the latest in a string of judicial rulings about “fair use” that employs the concept of “transformative” use to cover “functional” uses different from the original in a manner that is troubling both intellectually and practically. Intellectually, these rulings stretch the natural meaning of “transformative” well beyond the bounds of common sense — and beyond, I contend, the meaning intended by the jurist whose writing gave rise to the development of this trend in copyright interpretation in the first place. Practically, they open a Pandora’s box out of which all sorts of legal mischief may ensue — and may further contribute to the public’s already severe lack of confidence in the unpredictability of “fair use” decisions in the courts. In what is undoubtedly one of the most influential articles ever published in a law review by a sitting judge, “Toward a Fair Use Standard” (Harvard Law Review, March 1990), Pierre N. Leval begins by admitting that the reversal on appeal of two of his decisions as a district court judge (in Salinger v. Random House, Inc. [1987] and New Era Publications Int’l v. Henry Holt & Co. [1988]) had led him to ponder the need for “a cogent set of governing principles” that could get judges like him from simply deciding cases “upon ad hoc perceptions of justice without a permanent framework” to help guide their interpretations. His effort to develop “a fair use standard” takes off from his understanding of “the objectives of copyright law” in the United States as being basically “utilitarian” in nature, viz., viewing copyright ownership not as a natural right of the author but as “designed rather to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the intellectual enrichment of the public.” The temporary monopoly that copyright law invests in authors is aimed at motivating them to create new works, but if exercised in too sweeping a fashion, that monopoly can undermine the creativity of others that builds on the original authors’ works, and hence “fair use” provides a kind of safety valve preventing copyright from becoming counterproductive in carrying out the Constitutional mandate “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” As such, fair use “is a necessary part of the overall design” of copyright law, not just a “bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure” from it. In Leval’s view, the key to keeping copyright interpretation in line with the Constitutional mandate lies in placing the concept of “transformative use” front and center. As he defines it, “the use must be of a character that serves the copyright objective of stimulating productive thought and public instruction without excessively diminishing the incentives for creativity.” Leval gives pride of place to this concept as he sees it embodied in the first of the four factors set forth in Section 107’s articulation of the considerations that courts must bear in mind when reaching a decision about whether any particular use is fair. This factor, “the purpose and character of the secondary use,” he calls at one point “the soul of fair use.” According to Leval, “one must assess each of the issues that arise in considering a fair use defense in the light of the governing purpose of copyright law,” which is manifested most straightforwardly in this idea of “transformative use.” Although no one factor alone is determinative in a fair use analysis, that a use is transformative in this sense creates a strong presumption that it is fair, and the other three factors would need to weigh heavily against a use being fair to override this presumption. The use’s transformative character “lies at the heart of the fair user’s case.”

Does (or Should) the First Amendment Trump Copyright?: Review Essay

I want to begin this review essay with a biographical note, because I am known through my writings and speeches mainly as a long-time defender of copyright, and thus it might appear that I bring to my review of this book a prejudicial perspective. But since childhood I have always felt strongly about the First Amendment, too, and wrote letters to the editor defending freedom of speech and freedom of the press when I was still a teenager. The tensions between copyright law and the First Amendment were brought home to me very vividly when I served in the mid-1980s on both the Copyright and the Freedom to Read Committees of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which had long debates over the issues raised in the landmark Supreme Court case of Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985). So I did not begin reading this book with a bias in favour of intellectual property against the First Amendment. The authors’ own bias in reverse, however, did make me more defensive about copyright than I might otherwise have been, I must admit. The two senior law professors at Duke University who have written this book follow all the regular norms of scholarship but freely acknowledge that their work is ‘polemical to a considerable degree,’ proceeding as it does ‘mainly from our a priori convictions’ (xi). The basic premise of their argument is that the First Amendment trumps any law that

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (review)

Many reports in recent years have signalled the importance of creating a cyber-infrastructure to serve the new and varied needs of scholarship in the digital age. Much progress has already been made in building the technical components of this system, but less attention has been paid to what it is being built to do and whose needs it will serve. Before we get too far along with constructing the technical architecture, Christine Borgman believes, we should spend some time studying the modus operandi of scholars that this system is supposed to support. As she cautions early in her book, ‘design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning – or whether it simply reinforces today’s tasks, practices, laws, business models, and incentives’ (3). A significant part of Scholarship in the Digital Age is therefore devoted to understanding how scholars operated in the older print environment, how they now operate in the mixed print/digital environment, and what the differences between the two can teach us about the demands that any cyber-infrastructure must meet. Chapter 8, ‘Disciplines, Documents, and Data’ (the longest chapter in the book at forty-eight pages), usefully maps out the differences among the sciences, social sciences, and humanities against the more general background provided by chapter 7, ‘Building an Infrastructure for Information,’ in which aspects of the scholarly communication system common to all are examined, such as its organization into disciplines, the nature and challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, the role of collaboration and social networks, various temporal characteristics of scholars’ use of publications, and the importance of ‘tacit knowledge.’ Here again Borgman emphasizes that ‘to determine what infrastructure tools and services will be most useful, it is necessary to understand who the users are and how

An interview with Sanford G. Thatcher, director, the Penn State Press

Abstract This interview was conducted at The Pennsylvania State University Libraries on April 30, 1992. Sanford G. Thatcher candidly comments on issues relating to university presses, the current state of the publishing world, and his views regarding scholarly communication and the future of scholarly journals.