Meredith M. Babb
Director
University Press of Florida
Alex Holzman
Director
Temple University Press
Charles Watkinson
Director
Purdue University Press
Marlie Wasserman
Director
Rutgers University Press
Global revenues paid by the academy to commercial science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) publishers for access to journals total millions of dollars per year. Libraries face extraordinary financial difficulties in no small part because of this expense, while researchers without access to key journals work at a handicap. While open access (OA) in various flavors has helped mitigate this problem slightly, the costs to authors under schemes like Gold OA can be prohibitive if they do not have grants to pay for them. At the same time, most American university presses have chosen not to publish STEM journals since at least the post-World War II era.
This session presents a modest proposal that would enable a consortium of university press publishers, working closely with select librarians, faculty, and administrators, to begin publishing in these areas under an open Web scheme, thereby aligning STEM intellectual property more closely with the academy. Individual presses would pursue their own journal opportunities, but the consortium would share all “back-room” operations, mitigating the considerable costs. Managed well over time, this initiative would assist virtually all constituencies within the university and could provide desperately needed revenue streams for under-funded presses. This session will gauge librarians’ and information technologists’ initial reactions to the idea, and help identify individuals and institutions that may wish to be involved in subsequent development of the plan.
