Reason for Hope Survives in Academic Publishing Despite a Month of Bad News

"It's time to declare that the initial shock of rapid change [in academic publishing] has worn off, and that publishers and their authors have knuckled down to figure out what strategies —plural— will actually work, for now anyway. That means accepting that some experiments—Rice's digital press, for instance—aren't going to survive....Several explanations have been advanced for the demise of Rice's press. Here are some of the theories I've heard, none of them a blanket verdict on digital publishing: The press was too small (it "didn't scale"). It published in a particularly difficult field, art history. The Rice administration just didn't care enough or couldn't afford to support it. It was badly managed. It couldn't sustain an open-access model with print-on-demand sales. It tried to make too radical a break with the old model. Depending on how much the principals are ultimately willing and able to share, Rice's experiment with digital publishing will probably give other publishers some ideas about what not to do. Most likely, though, the lessons won't be much of a surprise. Other publishers have already anticipated or encountered similar problems...."