Consolidating Scholarship

Cheaper monographs?

New Collaboration for Scholarly Publishing
Posted January 1st, 2008 by Blake

Electronic Publications
Publishing
New Collaboration for Scholarly Publishing Five university presses have announced a collaboration that seeks to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow more books to be released. The collaboration, created with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will set up a joint operation for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures. The presses will retain complete control over book selection and distribution.

Its not clear from this that the saving will translate in savings for libraries. For years university presses have struggled to keep open. It was never a big profit line venture certainly. A collaboration or consortium or whatever the contracts state will be a benefit in a long run anyway to most libraries. It is a fantastic solution. When an organization joins a larger funding group it enjoys the benefits.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Lots of people still talk about the death of books still. But like most it is impossible for me to conceive of my life without them.

Any thoughts?

Here is my source for this news:


http://www.lisnews.org/node/28696