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End-of-term Presidential RemarksThis talk was delivered to the Association of American University Presses by Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press and immediate past-president of AAUP, on June 17, 2005, in Philadelphia. It is traditional for the outgoing President of the AAUP to use this time to review the Association’s progress over the year just ending. I want to do that, but also look back a little further at the ways in which AAUP has changed in the six years since we determined, as part of our first strategic planning process, that we needed to be more active in publicly promoting the value and importance of university presses and also to work for representation at the conferences, summit meetings, and the working groups where the crucial issues of intellectual property and scholarly communication that impact our presses were debated. The first of these goals, to promote the value of the work we do collectively, was crystallized by AAUP President Bill Regier’s insistent call for “publicity” and in his charge to a task force on which I was fortunate enough to serve with Steve Cohn and Susan Schott, to enumerate the value of university presses—a document we’ve now heard will have its first translation, by the Association of Japanese University Presses. The second goal, to be included in the critical debates that impacted the health and missions of our presses, was given form in the determination of AAUP Presidents Bob Faherty and Marlie Wasserman, building on the work of earlier presidents and boards, that our association have “a seat at the table.” Under the leadership of our Executive Director, Peter Givler, we’ve made remarkable progress toward both these goals. This is not to glibly declare victory in either of these pursuits. But those of us who remember the quiet, somewhat meek, even—it must be confessed—rather clubby AAUP of earlier decades sometimes cannot help but step back and refocus our vision on what a vigorous and energetic public institution AAUP is becoming. And if the past several years have seen AAUP steadily progress in promoting the value of our work and gaining that crucial “seat at the table,” this year just ending could be said to mark the moment when our association’s voice became not just heard, but hearkened. The year just past has been bookended by two public debates—each of them crucial to the integrity of scholarly communication—in which the AAUP assumed a leadership position and spoke with a firm voice. The first was the suit filed by AAUP, PEN American Center, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, and Arcade Publishing against regulations of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control that sought to halt the free exchange of scholarly ideas and cultural expression between the United States and several restricted nations where, ironically, such expression is most in need of support. As we heard from Peter Givler yesterday, that suit is now nearing a settlement that addresses all our concerns. The second was the AAUP’s objection to a program by Google and four library partners to digitize hundreds of thousands of books without any consideration of the interests of the publishers and authors who created those works or to the complexities of third party permissions for use of material under copyright. To many of us, this particular program, apparently two years in development, seemed to contradict and even violate the partnerships Google had established with many AAUP members in its Google Print program, which we celebrated just a year ago in Vancouver. AAUP did not intend for its letter to Google to become public and we were frankly taken off guard with the headlines that followed its being leaked; as one board member asked only half jokingly in an email posting, “What is it, a slow news week?” Clearly though, and in this case inadvertently, AAUP’s collective voice was again being heard nationally and internationally. Though many of us are in sympathy with what we understand to be the goals of Google and its library partners, we are nevertheless concerned that in the case of this program AAUP has not had the “seat at the table” that we know is critical to the protection of our member presses and the integrity of scholarly communication. The integrity of the system of scholarly communication is what is key here. We don’t need a system for digital dissemination of book materials that brings the disorder, lack of verification and authentication, and rampant piracy and plagiarism generated by a web search to scholarly communication, that treats as equivalent discredited or superceded works of scholarship and the books that have carefully challenged and revised them. We need a system of digital dissemination of knowledge that transfers the values of peer review, careful and consistent referencing, and clarity of expression to a digital platform. University press journals programs have shown the way to that end, in many cases developing and in other cases cooperating in large collaborative projects that have made journal articles widely available digitally. What we need now is a system just as rigorous and inclusive for books, but that system will not be authoritative or reliable if publishers are not centrally involved in its development and implementation. It was with that belief in mind that I asked Marlie Wasserman to lead a task force to chart the role university presses should play in the digital future of scholarly communication. Marlie was joined on that task force by the AAUP’s incoming president, Lynne Withey, by Ellen Faran of MIT Press, and by Penny Kaiserlian of the Uiversity of Virginia Press, since named President-elect of our association. Marlie’s group proposed a set of six principles that university presses would follow in the digital environment—principles including long-term sustainability; recognition of the full costs of digital projects, including their impact on established forms of publication; the coexistence and complimentarity of traditional print publications and digital projects; clarity of intellectual property in the digital environment; and the importance of collaboration in large-scale digital projects. Just as importantly, the task force report outlines the skills and expertise that university press staff bring to digital publications—skills in evaluating and shaping scholarly works as well as expertise in editing, design, production, promotion, and management that are just as necessary to digital publishing as they are to print. The report, a final draft of which will be circulated to the membership for comment in the next few months, documents the impact that university presses have already made in moving scholarship into the digital age and also makes a forceful case for the role that the AAUP and its member presses will play as more and more scholarly materials and communication migrate to digital media. We need statements such as the one that Marlie, Lynne, Ellen, and Penny have drafted. Recently, an administrator at large research university was heard to say the following at an open forum on scholarly communication: Libraries, the administrator gushed, are wonderful because you give them money to do things and then they do them. University presses, on the other hand, are more problematic because they have a business model that doesn’t work and we don’t know what to do about that. When I hear about a comment like this, the first snappy answer that comes into my mind is that university presses could also thrive on the same business model that worked so well for libraries—that is: simply being given money to do things. But where statements such as that are truly wrongheaded is that, in fact, our current business model works fairly well—our 125 members form a large collaborative enterprise that collectively publishes approximately 12,000 books and 500 journals annually and that we recover 87% of our costs in doing so. Further, the percentage of our direct costs covered by parent institution support is nearly identical to the amount that we pay annually in author royalties, most of it, of course, to university faculty. Or, to look at it in light of another line in our annual operating statistics, our total parent institution support is roughly equivalent to the amount presses pay for copyediting, a cost that would not disappear with any alternative model of dissemination, unless the scholarly community was willing to sacrifice both clarity of expression and consistent and reliable references—sacrifice, that is, the quality, usefulness, and integrity of the scholarship itself. We are, in fact, a bargain to the university system as a whole and the only way in which scholarship could be disseminated less expensively—digitally or otherwise—would be to somehow override authors’ interests in and ownership of their intellectual property or to sacrifice the integrity of the scholarship itself. Neither of these strike me as wise steps as universities work toward a new framework for scholarly communication. And with a little more investment, presses—ideally in partnership with libraries—could do much more, could provide the necessary expertise and skills to help create a better, more rigorous and flexible system of scholarly communication in the digital age, one with consistent standards rather than one which exists as a patchwork of commercial and noncommercial ventures where a search may or may not turn up the key sources that a student or scholar needs. With such a widely-accessible digitally-based system, do any of us doubt that the knowledge locked in the pages of those long-disparaged monographs would finally regain the readers they deserve? But creating that kind of rigorous, dynamic system will take a partnership—and university presses and the scholarly authors we represent need to be among those partners. Of course, AAUP’s activities this past year encompassed many other activities beyond speaking on urgent issues of academic freedom, intellectual property, and digital communication. As I reported yesterday in the Business Meeting, a task force composed of AAUP past-Presidents Bob Faherty, Joanna Hitchcock, and Bill Sisler began the process of reexamining our membership categories in light of the increased numbers of Associate, Affiliate, and International members in our association and the significant contribution staff from presses in all those categories make to the our association’s programs, success, and community. Also this past year, a subcommittee of the board began the process of evaluating ideas for new cooperative marketing programs that would benefit the membership. And AAUP was awarded a second $50,000 Professional Development Grant from the Whiting Foundation that will help underwrite costs of our workshop and training programs. Important work was also done in each of the AAUP’s committees this past year, and I’d like to take a moment to recognize and thank the chairs of this past year’s committees: Eric Halpern, Admissions and Standards The purpose of the AAUP is to do what individual presses cannot do alone. Similarly, an AAUP President builds on the ideas and insights of the presidents who preceded him or her, and I’ve been particularly fortunate in having served on the board with a series of presidents who have taught me much about leadership and publishing: Marlie Wasserman Bill Regier, Bill Sisler, Peter Milroy, Seetha Srinivasan, and our incoming president Lynne Withey. It is in the nature of university presses and of the AAUP to achieve much on very limited resources. And in an era when many speak of the importance of volunteerism and working collaboratively to solve problems, AAUP is a truly volunteer-driven and collaborative enterprise. As we’re in Philadelphia, I’ll close with that famous —and I hope not apocryphal—statement of Benjamin Franklin from the debates over the Declaration of Independence: “We must hang together or surely we’ll all hang separately.” In this era when scholarly communication is itself being revolutionized, AAUP members must debate rigorously but then act collectively to bring our profession fully into the digital era without losing our independence or sacrificing the principles that have guided us. Thank you.
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