Saskia De Vries has been a publisher for over 30 years, watching the editing process go from slow-mailed handwritten notes to be typeset on paper to today’s rapid fire access to click-and-download files. To keep up in an innovate-or-perish field, AUP has become proactive about the publishing process, leading the way in open access monographs and open source software for electronic file conversion. Here De Vries answers our publishers’ questionnaire, providing an extensive guide inside AUP’s publishing processes as well as defining her views on the future of copyright and the economics of academic publishing.
Can you describe how your titles are processed through the publishing cycle?
We have a peer review system that is very strong. It’s explained on our website. We have two big editorial boards, one for humanities, one for social sciences. When a manuscript comes in, the board tells my associate publisher to whom peer review is sent out. The peer review then comes back, which is difficult – there’s someone part-time doing that at AUP. If there’s two positive or two negative reviews, it’s simple, it’s a yes or no. It goes back to editorial board for final approval, and then we say, I will or won’t publish it. But usually a peer reviewer says ‘yes, but change a, b, c’, or ‘no unless c, d, e’. Then it goes back to the editorial board, and the board decides what is told to the author. Then the author is asked to rewrite or add content, then it goes back to one more board person for a final check. It takes three to six months.
Compared to Oxford or Routledge, it’s quick. We try to keep it that way; it’s one of our assets. I know authors who prefer to go to Oxford, then they’re told, we’ll tell you in a year’s time if we want you, but we can say, we’ll tell you in five months. Sometimes they say thank you if it’s a yes, but we want to go to Oxford now and see, and we say no, either you accept it and we start, or you go to Oxford and it’s a no deal with us. They don’t get a second option coming back to us if Oxford says no.
An author in media studies, which is a field that was first thinking about open access, she got a contract from Routledge or Sage that said they’d publish her hard cover copy within a year, then maybe in three year’s time there would be a paperback. We told her we’d do a paperback and open access right away. And she said, I’ll go with AUP. It’s quicker.
After peer review we have another six months to produce the book. We can do it in a year with peer review. Big commercial publishers take two-three years, which is far too long for authors now. I’m seeing this changing because we offer open access, which for most authors is a positive thing if you have a bit of a brain. Authors aren’t interested in making money. That’s not the object. It’s to reach out as much as possible. They want to be read, to be in a debate, to interact with colleagues and peers about the issues they are looking at.
There are tools that make it easier to publish, especially in editorial. When I started we had handwritten manuscripts that someone had to look at and give handwritten comments on, that then had to be typed and typeset, which was 30 years ago. I was a publisher in ’82 to ’83 and the whole editorial process was much longer. If you go into open access, the PDF makes it easy to print a book. And if you do a print on demand version, you don’t have a print run. Printing has become quicker as well. Printing now is two weeks. It used to be four weeks with binding.
What determines prices of these books, and how do you pay for publishing costs?
Most of the really academic books we publish need subsidies right now. We don’t want to put the price up high. We need between four and eight thousand euros per book. For 60 percent we’re finding that money. If you use that money to make an open access edition, you can then use print on demand to make a print edition.
Open access costs are split between peer review editing, a little bit of technical formatting, basic marketing, a publisher, and overhead. We need five to six thousand for an open access edition. After that it’s the publisher’s decision to do a print run, or to make a print on demand facility, which doesn’t have risk anymore, since the publisher will only print when there’s an order. This is actually a project we are looking into with five to six other university presses.
We have about 2.5 to three million euros in sales gross. The EU subsidizes pamphlets, and it differs per book. If you say we publish 200 books a year, 150 are subsidized, but they still need to make money as well, so it’s a hybrid model. We get flat subsidy from the University; all University presses do. They give to us because selling English language books outside Holland costs money. We also look for money for projects. If an author comes in with a book on arts, we go to NWO and Prins Bernhard. OA journals get three years subsidy from NWO, and after that period we’re on our own. Small foundations give, and sometimes an author has money in the budget of the project for publication. This is a big difference in the States, where it’s much more difficult to get money. Though because of the debt crisis, there’s less money in Holland for academia and culture, and more people are asking for money from the Prins foundation. We sometimes get money from big companies. There’s a bank called SNS that has funding for innovative projects, and we’re talking to them about an app we’re making.
Half of the work for publishing is to find money to do things. I don’t have stakeholders asking me where the profit is. That’s a good thing. The University sees us as a university press, we’re a service to academia; we make sure we select the right titles to publish, and we try to find money to do it. I have a Latin dictionary that’s a cash cow and brings a lot of money in. If we can do a commercial project like a dictionary or course books and text book, we do them. But it’s not a core process.
What formats do your OA books come in?
In digital format we have open access books in XML and PDF and Epub. We prefer XML. You can find them in our online repository where 50 percent are open access. We also have ebooks. We sell ebooks even when open access is available online. The market doesn’t know yet what to do. Libraries prefer to pay for ebooks than to develop systems for downloading books in an open library. They don’t know how to do it.
We also work with Google books, and our website is designed to sell print books.
We’re experimenting with systems that go from word to XML. We have two books which do that now. It’s with a company called Filos. It’s very complicated. Every different thing in the manuscript has a bug. We started this project five years ago thinking we’d finish in half a year, and it’s easier for literary publishers because they work with straightforward, flat text, but we have footnotes, illustrations, cross references. We still must work with people throughout the conversion, such as setters who do PDF very often.
It costs 325 euros to convert XML to PDF. It’s more expensive to have someone do a PDF, 800 euros. Machines can’t think yet. So someone must check it.
How do you select content?
Sometimes people find us because they see we publish other books in their field. We also have two editorial boards, and we have five fish ponds of special subjects. Right now it’s arts and economy. We put an editorial board together and meet with specialists in that field, preferably in Europe, and talk to them for a year four times to see if it’s possible to make a journal in open access or start a series. Once a series is started, the editorial board continues to add to the series. We are constantly renewing them. In the social sciences it’s law: what happens if you control banks, for instance? A big issue because of crisis, and a subject with a lot of research done on it. We find out who key players are and put them together and make a new series on that subject. It’s more proactive. You don’t wait for manuscripts to come in but find ways to combine similar books together.
How do you get the word out about your books?
You still want libraries to buy them, but most important is getting good reviews. We try to give review copies to the most influential journals. If it is reviewed well, that’s the best way to sell it. We also see open access as a part of marketing. If you have a manuscript in an open access environment and it’s tagged well, an author looking for information on the subject will find it. If it’s a good book and interesting enough for an academic, they don’t want to read it online even with an iPad, they want a print copy. But this will change in ten years. We’re also trying to do more marketing online, which isn’t easy. You want Google to pick up your book as the the first title in a search return, but you can’t influence it.
How do you distribute your books?
The books are for sale through Centraal Boekhuis, and even if you buy it through the website, delivery goes through Central Boekhuis and the POD as well. Chicago University Press is our representative in the States and Canada, and they work with Amazon, Book Search and different vendors there. We also work with Lightning Source, which has drop sales all over the world. It’s based in England. We also have a rep at the University of Manchester Press in Britain and two companies for Asia and Australia. We have a rep in Holland who goes to bookshops and reps all over Europe, as well through university press marketing in England. We don’t have our own reps, we’re too small. We contract with reps who combine their work for us with other small publishers.
What additional services do you provide that might also bring in revenue?
We have AOPEN, a library where open access publishers of monographs in humanities and social sciences can put OA books, The collection becomes more important the more works are in it. It’s a library and also lobby for OA publishing in Europe.
We also serve Leiden University Press, an imprint of the Library of Leiden, as a publisher and assistant doing editorial work on manuscripts. Once they have a work that’s peer reviewed and accepted, it goes to my production and marketing teams. We’re open to talking to other publishers about this service. Our back office is professional. Small publishing houses that spring from libraries think publishing is something you do without a problem. They make a mistake of thinking that if you print it, you publish it. No peer review, no marketing. Once they see the difficulties, they come up to us to see if we can do back office services. More work like this could derive from AOPEN since we have contacts with smaller publishing houses through it. We do try to service publishers. It’s new and small.
We print as well. The University makes these big study guides that we print for them. We can make a 20 to 30 percent profit and it’s less costly than if every department goes to a printer around the corner who gives them a bad deal. We have a printing facility for institutes we know well. We do printing work for the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. It’s not a very prominent service; we want to promote ourselves as a university press publisher.
What licenses do you use for your content?
We’re using Creative Commons more and more. Most of our contracts are older. Right now we are changing contracts to Creative Commons, CC-BY. A lot of authors don’t know about copyright and are afraid not that content will be taken for free, but that it’ll be changed under their name. But what do you do? This is a problem we’re facing. It’s one of the jokes Brill will make: let AUP put everything OA CC, then we’ll print it and sell it.
It’s changing though. Creative Commons for younger authors is not as controversial any more, the younger generation is more used to open content, to sharing. A lot of our authors are elderly people who have more time to write, and they still have to make the change. In ten years time it will work in our favor. It’s not so difficult to alter or copy a printed book, either. The Chinese have been doing it for ages, they steal everything.
With our OA books, we also get authors who tell us, my book is now available on this and that website that isn’t ours, so these people are stealing our content. There’s a bureau that helps us send letters to these ventures to tell them they don’t have the right to do it. There’s a CC mentioned in the colophon, so you’re not allowed to. You can’t resell the book or change it. We do see misuse of OA titles. It’s our content. If they receive letter they right away take it off their website. They know they can be legally pursued.
OA is a way of getting things in the world. But we’ve put a lot of work in it. You can have it for free, but you’re not going to sell it. We don’t care what happens so long as the content isn’t violated. That’s what authors are concerned about, not sales. The royalties are peanuts. If they get 1000 euros a year, that’s a lot. They’re not in it for money but for exposure.
What are some difficulties you’ve encountered for making OA take hold, and what do you say to these authors/publishers?
A lot don’t believe in OA yet because they don’t see how they can make money out of it, and they’re scared of it. I see it happening in five years. The League of European Research Universities, the Ivy League of Europe, has 21 University members. They just published an OA roadmap [PDF]. It’s a bit fuzzy but it does mention green and gold OA, and the few Universities in there are talking about combining projects.
OA is an ideological thing. I see university press publishing and all academic publishing as a service to the academic word. It’s an absolute shame that content that is the result of research funded by society is sold by commercial publishers making a lot of profit that doesn’t go back into academia. I always thought this, 20 years ago. We’re non profit; it goes back to the university where it came from. The steps to OA are very easy. We don’t need to make a profit. Why wouldn’t you make scholarship as widely available as possible?
I lived in the States in ’99 for half a year on a sabbatical; my husband was professor at Harvard then. This was the start up of the internet. I did internships with Harvard, Chicago, and New York Press to open up my mind, and in Holland there was nothing, no .www addresses yet; the internet hadn’t started in Europe, but it had in the States. There was an article by Robert Darnton in ’99 on the pyramid [1]. How do you create a monograph in an electronic environment? The book is the top of a pyramid. There is a condensed version of an argument written for a wide audience, and underneath is the data, and under that are conferences, and there’s an education application. He showed in ’99 the possibilities of the internet to reveal what’s underneath an article or monograph. Publication is part of research, and so is data. It’s logical and exciting to include raw data, because making another book is boring. I’ve made five million in my life. It’s much more interesting to think of different and new ways of disseminating knowledge.
I’m not interested in making a profit. My kids say the world is about profit. If you’re in trade publishing, it’s a different area. Literary publishers have a big problem. Their authors have to live off sales. My authors have a salary from the university. They don’t need royalties. They need a publisher who does a good job disseminating results. 90 percent of authors see it that way. It’s a nice perk. We give them a royalty because if sales go up, they can profit as well. We’d like them to profit with us.
You’re promoting open access for your titles. Why are art books in particular often not yet open access?
Well, for instance we publish academic art books, but these are not open access because their rights are complicated. We are trying to convince authors that even if they can’t publish the images [due to copyright restrictions], the art can be found on websites, and they could provide a link. They get upset about this because they’re used to publishing beautiful picture books – that’s what they want. But there’s no money for pictures. Monographs are in a crisis, and monographs with pictures are a terrible business. There’s a discourse among art historians in the US that if you want tenure, you have to have publish three books. Well, young academics will get raving peer reviews, but then publishers say, I’m sorry I can’t publish it, it’s not possible, it’s too expensive.
Most copyrights are for work by artists who have been dead over 70 years, but museums charge for use of these digital images. It’s ridiculous that there’s copyright on these images, but museum are trying to make money. This issue will change in the next twenty years. But for now if you want an image of a Rembrandt or van Gogh, you give your money to a museum. We are involved in that issue.
If you look at arts as statues, it’s the photographer who gets copyright, because it’s an artist’s impression of the thing. But if you have a flat, two dimensional art object, the photographer doesn’t add anything unless he does something strange with angles. If you have a special picture of an art object, it is an artist’s impression. Museums just get in a photographer and say, I want that made available as it is and don’t add anything.
Our open access books do not have pictures because it’s too complicated. We’re moving to a system where we take out pictures and replace them with a black hole on the pages, which isn’t nice. We are talking to the editorial board of arts to tell authors that you could make a copy of the text available online with links to pictures, since you can almost always find a digital copy somewhere. So you could solve the problem with copyrights that way. But authors aren’t too happy with it, and images change places online. So you need someone to control whether the link still works, which is a general problem with the internet. If a museum changes its website or its web address, your link goes to the wrong place. We are trying to work with enriched publications, and if you have data systems behind your publication, these data systems are at professional places. It’s solved, because professionals are working with data to make sure it’s at the right places. Right now it’s fuzzy.
What funding model do you see moving ahead?
Our idea is that if you are a research funder, if you give money for research, you should include a small fee to make research available. Wellcome Trust which funds medical research has figured that if they add two to three percent to their funding awards, then everything can be OA. But the problem is that in the humanities there is less research money; we don’t have big instruments or huge technical installations, so the percentage of money to add to humanities and social science is higher. On the other hand there’s less money going into research anyways.
I’m talking to research funders, and they want scholarship in open access. They realize the advantages of free availability for everyone. Funders should make money available for OA, but they should set rules. Peer review should be in order, finances should be transparent. Let a publisher show them as projects start up, why he or she needs five thousand euros. Open access for journals is happening. Springer has Open Choice, where the author can choose.
I think the way to get OA is to give money to publishers prepared to do it. Then it will change because authors will ask for it. If we ask them they say yes of course, but commercial publishers don’t ask for it.
Are you able to track viewership with your OA works?
We’re starting to track it. We’d like to tell authors they’ve been downloaded 3000 times with us, but with Brill only 250. We’ve started with three books on our website to track downloads, a book from the social sciences, from humanities, and a Dutch book. It makes a difference if it’s in English or Dutch.
Do you see the design or content of works changing because of digital technology?
We have 15 freelance designers who we contract depending on subject and author. For 80 percent of books it doesn’t matter how it is designed. For 20 percent it’s important if it has a nice cover. Art books need a good designer. We’re trying to find designers to help us with website design. It’s marginal and basic right now. We don’t want to put money into it.
Content hasn’t changed much. I’ve been in publishing for 25 years, and for 15 it hadn’t changed. But the web has changed how we publish and the connection to data behind it. We do apps now and use new social media to spread information. There are new ways of dissemination. We talk to academics all day to try to find out what they need, want, what they like. The author in our case is the same person as the reader, both are academics. This is a big difference from literature, where the author doesn’t write for peers but for different people. The academic person has three roles: the researcher/author, reader, and peer reviewer.
Academia is also changing because of the possibilities of the internet. The reader reads a book from page one to 300 less and less; they will pick out parts, which is easier with digital copies. You can find things, combine them. The whole data system behind it should be open access as well. The EU is working on this. Most academics want to keep their data for themselves, because this is what they publish with. If you you have good data, you don’t want someone else finding and publishing with it while you’re on holiday. This is changing. The data was made with public money, so this should be open access and people should use it. Younger authors are realizing that if they open their data and someone else comes in to use it, it’s a more interesting data set. In Holland the Institute of the Royal Academy of Arts an Sciences have huge collections they keep for academics and institutes. The problem is you have to keep changing them, which costs more money. In the end it’s about how much money there is and how much you need. I see publishing and data sets growing into each other. The academy is trying to put publications on top of data systems.
Can you see the peer review process changing?
If you put a book in an OA environment, you can put peer review in an OA environment. There’s a first and second version, and as a reader you don’t see that. There’s a discussion around the manuscript, and this is also interesting for people study.
I know that some authors would like it to be open, but a reason not to do so is double blind peer review. The peer reviewer doesn’t know who the author is, and the author doesn’t know the peer reviewer. They might know each other and dislike each other. We want it as objective as possible. If the peer reviewer doesn’t know who the author is, he or she will be more critical. If you ask me ‘how do you like my dress?’ you will be more polite then if there’s real interaction. If I don’t know who you are, I can criticize more easily. That’s why peer reviewers aren’t eager to do everything in open access. Holland is a very small country, and all peer reviewers of my authors know each other. Even if kept anonymous, by the style of words the author will know who it is. In the States this is much less a problem. We do try to work with international peer review as well, but it’s harder. It’s easier to find a Dutch researcher to peer review Dutch research because they know more about it.
Review is not liquid or openly collaborative yet either; it’s a tightly control system. If you let 20 people comment at the same time, what do you do with the comments? One will say this is ridiculous, another will say this is good. There’s an organizational system I don’t see solved yet. Academic publications are completely dependent on quality control. Quality is the most important thing. Peer review could get lost somewhere. Everyone can put up everything on the internet, so peer review is important. It’s one of the main means of making research. We’re very open but not into that.
What do you think about liquid publications that allow book’s content itself to be dynamic?
An edition is used for reference. If you have four wildly different issues of a work, you have four versions. If we have an open access edition, and we have a second print run, we call it a second print, a second edition . People should know which edition they’re using. If the author phones us and says, I found a typo on page 17, and if you change it, it’s a different edition. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re talking about anymore. Variations are a a problem of the internet. That’s something authors are afraid as well. If you printed the book you know exactly what you’re talking about. That’s why we use PDF – you can still reference to page.
What is the ‘monograph crisis’?
The monograph crisis is connected to the fact that big commercial publishers charge significantly for journals, so library budgets go into articles. No budget is left for monographs. In the 70s a good title sold 1500. Now we’re back to 300 to 500.
If you publish with Brill you will have a print run of 300 copies of hard covers, of which 250 go into libraries. Then there are figures about how often a book is taken off shelf. Half of those books are looked at four times in ten years. And the book costs 295 euros to purchase. Look at their prices. It’s understandable because 20 to 30 years ago if you published a humanities book there were 1500 libraries who would buy it. So you could price it 20 to 30 euros at that time. Now if you only sell 250 copies to break even, you have to put up the price. They never sell books through bookshops or to individual academics. Ask them how much of their books go to libraries, students. No students buy them, you can’t afford to.
Are you interested in using open source software in your production chain?
We are looking into open software. We want to work with the digital publishing center at the UvA library, which is researching open source software for academics, which we can use.
Open source is important for collaboration. With AOPEN, there’s a big website with a technical structure behind it that a small publisher could never make, because it’s too expensive. If you share infrastructure with 50 publishers, net costs are nothing. Big publishers have their own infrastructure, which costs more money, but they make more money.
[1.] Robert Darnton, “The New Age of the Book,” New York Review of Books, (18 March 2000), pp. 5-7.
Harry van den Berg, Stef Scagliola, Fred Wester, Wat veteranen vertellen
isbn 978 90 8555 034 1
15,6 x 23,4 cm, 328 pages,
paperback, 2010
Dutch