0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 15/15)

Timing

As book publishers, we are accustomed to a schedule of about a year from the time of finished, accepted manuscript to final publication. Rotunda publications have usually taken longer. We often get involved with a project at an earlier stage of conception than we would in the print world, sometimes in helping the online project’s developer to imagine the final work, to match the technology to the scholarship, or to secure funding. Once we receive a finished proposal, we go through two peer review stages, one to endorse the concept and another to evaluate a prototype or sometimes a more finished Alpha version of the project in its Rotunda environment. It is often difficult for the author/editor of an electronic project to estimate accurately when the material will be ready to turn over to the publisher. Although some things seem to take longer than they would with a print project, other steps go surprisingly quickly. We have been impressed with the fast schedules from the conversion vendors, once we can provide them with detailed markup specifications for the individual project.

Marketing

As a book publisher, Virginia has well-established channels of distribution for new books. As soon as a book is published, we can count on immediate sales to library wholesalers and booksellers. As a new digital publisher, Rotunda has found the process of finalizing a sale to be slow-going. We have now been exhibiting Rotunda publications at academic and library conferences for the past five years as well as sending out catalogs and promotions. By this time, Rotunda is becoming recognized, but even in the fields of our two major collections (Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, and American Founding Era), there is still much to do to create awareness. We have found the library journals very responsive and prompt in reviewing our new publications, but it has been a struggle to get academic journals to review the digital editions. We also find that the digital editions are not eligible for many of the awards given by learned societies because the wording of the award usually reads “for any book” rather than “publications/works.” We pointed this out to the American Historical Association, which promised to see whether the language could be broadened on its various awards, especially those that were open to editions.

Permissions

The process for obtaining permissions for third-party materials is the same as for books, but we have found that many institutions have unrealistic expectations of what they can charge for granting permission for online use. We have spent considerable management time negotiating for permissions if the item in question was vital for the digital publication.

Multiple versions

One of the reasons publishers have resisted publishing digital editions of multi-volume works that are still being published as print publications is that they fear loss of sales of the print edition once a digital edition is available. Journal publishers have been working on that problem for many years. Aggregators like J-STOR and Project Muse have generally worked out an agreement with the publisher to establish a “moving wall” interval between print and digital publication, or creating so-called “format neutral” pricing models. We have adopted the moving-wall model in Rotunda in working out arrangements with rights-holders of various editions. We do not have enough experience yet to say whether the digital editions of the Founding Fathers’ Papers are having any effect on print sales, but we will watch this closely for our own editions and those of our publishing partners.

Most licenses for electronic publications are granted on a non-exclusive basis, raising the possibility that the same work will be offered in another electronic project. We do not have much experience yet with evaluating competition among electronic projects, except for two of the Founding Era projects. The Adams Papers project is available free through the Massachusetts Historical Society website, thanks to an NEH grant. (External Link) The same files are being used by Rotunda but run through our powerful search engine and made cross-searchable with the other editions. Because of this added convenience and value, some libraries readily purchase the Rotunda edition and the Society earns royalties on those sales. Also the documents in the Washington Papers edition are available free through the Mount Vernon site, while the full annotated edition is available in Rotunda with royalties going to the Washington Papers to assist with future volumes. So far, the existence of a free edition elsewhere does not seem to have had a significant impact on the sale of the Rotunda editions.

Perpetual stewardship

In his review of two Rotunda publications, Andrew Jewell ably summarized the new responsibilities for maintaining a digital publishing program:

The potential vulnerability of digital projects, combined with the evolving nature of technology, means that the publishers of digital scholarship (in this case, the University of Virginia Press), must consider not only production, distribution, marketing, and all of the traditional services associated with print publication, but also a particularly intensive kind of stewardship. Unlike print publications, which after production are a relatively stable material reality, digital publications will require continuous updating, maintenance, and migration to new systems. It remains to be seen how the University of Virginia Press, or any other institution supporting publication of humanities computing resources, is going to be able to manage the resource-draining stewardship of what I hope is an expanding list of digital scholarly projects. If the two projects reviewed here [ Typee and “Clotel” ] are among those establishing the standards, then there is some hope that digital scholarship will raise researchers’ expectations. Perhaps when scholars demand from all their scholarship the unprecedented wealth of materials available in the projects reviewed here, the infrastructure for supporting such scholarship—from hiring and tenure decisions to digital preservation—will become more robust. Resources for American Literary Study, Vol. 31, 2006 (External Link)

In the end it is this perpetual stewardship that is the challenge of digital publishing. We see that the digital editions cannot be static, that they will need to have new material added, that they will need to migrate to new formats, and that they need to be safely preserved. We are committed to keeping up publication of the Founding Fathers’ Papers in the digital editions and adding new volumes until they are completed. We will continue to seek ways to support this activity and to sustain Rotunda as a viable publishing outlet in several areas of the humanities.