CIC E-Publishing Venture

COC-11

Portland, Oregon

April 19, 2002

Tom Peters

CIC Member Universities

• Chicago• Illinois• Indiana• Iowa• Michigan• Michigan State

• Minnesota• Northwestern• Ohio State• Penn State• Purdue• Wisconsin-Madison

The Problem

• North American publishing: $25 billion industry with a 0.1 percent growth rate in 2001.

• 92 university presses had $408 million in sales in 2001 (1.6 % of all North American book sales).In 1999, they had nearly $412 million in sales.

• University presses publish 10-15 percent of all new book titles each year.

• Marshall Poe’s assessment of the situation.

Opportunities: Why Are We Doing This?

• We see mainstream opportunities for new types of scholarly communication and e-publishing.

• Traditional scholarly publishing is experiencing severe fiscal constraints.

• For-profit quasi-scholarly e-book aggregators are not meeting all our needs.

Why Are We Doing This? (cont.)

• One strength of the CIC: infrastructure to facilitate collaboration among various campus units.

• (To avoid replicating the situation where large for-profit publishers control large chunks of scholarly publishing.)

CIC E-Publishing Venture

• A cooperative, consortial e-publishing prototype being developed by the libraries and presses at 11 CIC member universities.

• The prototype will include approx. 55 scholarly frontlist books from the 11 presses.

• The project could expand to include other types of scholarly content.

Core Assumptions

• If we build it, scholars and students will come and use it.

• Libraries and presses bring complementary areas of expertise.

• Students and scholars want and need e-content in multiple file formats.

Core Assumptions (cont.)

• E-content is related to p-content

– E-sales may cannibalize p-sales– E-sales may complement p-sales– E-content may stimulate p-sales (NAP)– The relationship between e-sales and p-sales will

evolve over time.

• Facilitate the “will to read in print”

General Goals and Hypotheses

• Sales will be primarily to libraries and consortia, but perhaps also to individuals.

• One access route will be the existing CIC Virtual Electronic Library (VEL).

• Recover the direct costs.

Phase 1 Goals

1. A working prototype for searching, distributing, and presenting scholarly e-books.

2. A scalable, sustainable business model for the worldwide distribution of this content.

3. (Can this group of presses and libraries collaborate in this manner?)

Possible Revenue Rivulets

• Sales to libraries and consortia– Discounts for:

• CIC member libraries• Consortia• Two-year colleges• School libraries and public libraries?

• Sales to individuals

• SRDP and/or POD?

Possible Revenue Rivulets

• Separate Pricing for:– The entire aggregated content– Content clusters

• By topic• By publisher• By type of publication

• Coursepacks and other repurposing and reorganization of the content

• Links to press sales catalogs and OPACs

Questions• Federation of not-for-profit scholarly e-

publishing ventures?

• What changes in the production process?

• How should research universities undertake e-publishing?

• Impact of Open Archives Initiative, Public Library of Science, Budapest Open Access Initiative, and others?

Contact Information

• Tom Peters

Committee on Institutional Cooperation302 E. John StreetSuite 1705Champaign IL 61820tpeters@cic.uiuc.edu(217) 244-9239www.cic.uiuc.edu