0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 11/15)

Among the American university presses, only a few besides UVa Press have created digital scholarly editions. Some presses have worked with their university libraries on collaborative projects. Others have offered their print editions to Rotunda to include in our collections or have expressed interest in collaborating with us in various ways. Rotunda staff has consulted with the staff of other projects, such as the new Stalin Archive and the Einstein Papers, about the work involved in establishing digital editions.

Here are some examples of digital scholarly editions in which other American university presses are involved:

• The Johns Hopkins University Press, which is highly experienced with digital publications though its large journals program as well as Project Muse, has now published two digital documentary editions, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower and The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress. (External Link) , (External Link)
• The University of California publishes The Mark Twain Project Online (External Link) as a three-way collaboration between the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, the California Digital Library, and the University of California Press.
• University of Nebraska Press collaborated with the Center for Great Plains Studies and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities in the UNL Libraries to put The Journals of Lewis and Clark Expedition (eleven volumes) online. (External Link)
• University of Illinois Press has published The Booker T. Washington Papers (fourteen volumes) in Open Book format through the History Cooperative.

Rotunda’s approach to sustainability

Rotunda was set up in 2001 with a grant of $640,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, matched by a grant from the University of Virginia. Since that time, UVa Press has had three further substantial Mellon grants, which have primarily covered the cost of the core staff (averaging 4.5 FTE). Since the Mellon grants do not cover the costs of digitizing legacy projects, we sought other funding for the first three editions published in the American Founding Era collection. Mount Vernon funded these costs for the Washington Papers; the Adams Papers provided us with XML files developed for their free online edition with NEH funds; the University of Virginia provided funds for the Jefferson Papers. All other editions are being funded with income derived from licenses just as the development of new books is paid for with income derived from sales of previously published books.

The first Mellon award to the UVa Press included funds to conduct market research on the best approach to sustainability for Rotunda projects. With the help of a professional consultant, we determined that the primary market for the editions would almost certainly be institutional, and we learned about the Carnegie classification system for institutions. (As a book publisher with no journals program, this was all new to us.) We developed a tiered pricing model based on Carnegie classifications, which include size and relative wealth of institution and intensity of research activity, a model well recognized by librarians specializing in electronic resources. Because most of our major projects have a significant corpus of published material but will continue to add further volumes for some time, we arrived at a hybrid pricing model for our collections. Instead of a strict subscription model with a repeating annual fee that increases slightly each year, we preferred the so-called “perpetual access” model, which includes a one-time fee covering legacy material with a modest Annual Access Fee. The annual fee covers the cost of adding new volumes to the ongoing documentary editions and makes a small contribution to the ongoing costs of technical maintenance. This model seems well suited to the documentary editions of the Founding Era, most of which are already well established with more volumes published than to come. We will consider a standard subscription model for some other collections in which the new material is delivered in more even increments.