Hot Off the (Library) Press - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Can a small college library fix what's wrong with scholarly publishing? Bryn Geffert, librarian of Amherst College, wants to find out.

Mr. Geffert is starting a new publishing operation overseen by the library and committed to open access, called the Amherst College Press. It will produce a handful of edited, peer-reviewed, digital-first books on 'a very small number of subjects,' the librarian says. 'We want to do a few things well, not overextend.' Amherst's president and Board of Trustees approved the plan late last year.

Modest in scope, Amherst's new press won't transform the business of scholarly communication overnight. The prices of monographs and journals won't plummet; library budgets won't suddenly be flush with the kind of cash that used to line the pockets of for-profit publishers. Still, the venture is yet another sign of how active academic libraries have become in the publishing arena. And it gives a boost to the growing effort to escape the traditional, revenue-driven models of scholarly publishing…

Those services have expanded rapidly. Library-based publishing 'has taken on a life that five years ago we never would have been able to perceive,' says James L. Mullins, dean of libraries at Purdue University, one of the principal movers behind the coalition. Then, 'most library directors would have turned to their digitization efforts,' particularly the scanning of texts, as examples of their publishing efforts. 'That's not where it is today.'

It's all over the place, literally and figuratively. 'This emergent field doesn't quite know what it is yet,' says Katherine Skinner, executive director of the nonprofit Educopia Institute, which is coordinating the planning of the new coalition. Over the next two years, she says, the libraries involved will try to figure out "what is this field and how can it best be supported?"

The short answer to the what-is-it? question: Library-based publishing is many things to many people. It takes wildly different forms at different institutions…

What it can do now is 'open up the niches' and bring attention to scholarship that might otherwise be overlooked, Mr. Furlough says. 'That's still the most important reason libraries should be involved in publishing—to do what we can to help promote research on the campus.'"