Last week’s ITHAKA meeting on Sustainable Scholarship brought together librarians and University Press staff to talk about the challenges and opportunities facing those of us working in the scholarly communication arena. In a presentation about the University of Minnesota’s innovative Quadrant initiative, Douglas Armato, the Press Director, spoke about the inherent difficulty that University presses have in demonstrating their relevance to their parent institutions, given that their work by its nature, promotes the research of authors from other institutions.
The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, with its new “adjunct” forms of publishing, has none of these constraints, and indeed its goal is to support and promote the peer-reviewed work of Columbia researchers. It does this on a large scale with its development of Columbia’s repository, Academic Commons, which makes accessible and preserves a wide range of content from journal articles and play scripts, to working papers and conference proceedings. CDRS also provides and supports publishing platforms for Columbia-based journals. The online version of Dangerous Citizens represents a further way to support and disseminate Columbia research. In creating an e-version of Neni Pangouria’s book CDRS is piloting a new partnership between a University Press (Fordham) which applies all the rigor of peer review to selection of its list, and an institutional publishing arm (CDRS) that then promotes the book by reconceiving it as an online, non-linear publication.
Back to sustainability—how sustainable is this model? It’s a fair question and one that we’re exploring. Part of the pilot process is to calculate the costs of putting this book online and then estimating how much of this work we can undertake with current resources. And we’ll be looking at ways to fund this work—possibly from small internal and external grants. How great for example to create a fund that would support a competitive process for junior Columbia faculty to work with us and their presses, to put out an online book (not a book online) in tandem with the publication of their print monograph. Stay tuned!
—Patricia Renfro, Deputy University Librarian
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