Determining the Financial Cost of Scholarly Book Publishing

Abstract: "During 2015, researchers from Indiana University and the University of Michigan collaborated on a project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the potential impact of moving to a model where the full costs of scholarly monograph publishing would be covered by the parent institution of the author. This paper reports on one part of this larger project that focused on establishing a framework to catalog and understand the costs associated with monograph publication using data from Indiana University Press and University of Michigan Press. Understanding how much scholarly monographs cost to produce is essential to any system-wide business modeling, but there is little published work on this topic that carefully documents methods of arriving at numbers as well as the numbers themselves. In focusing on the press operations of Michigan and Indiana as case studies, this paper hopes to provide an evidence-based approach to identifying and delineating the costs specific to scholarly book publishing, while offering a replicable methodology for discerning with reasonable accuracy the “true” cost of publishing an academic monograph."