Date: 31 March 2009, 10:00-16:00
Venue: Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2

Presenters: John Fitzgerald (University College Cork), Ruth Hegarty (Royal Irish Academy), John Lavagnino (Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway), and Brad Scott (Digital Publishing Consultant, Brambletye Publishing)

Agenda
Featured Talks

The crisis in scholarly publishing has been a familiar term since the mid-1990s with the library community first sounding the alarm over the meteoric rise in subscription rates of many journals particularly in the fields of sciences, technology,  and medicine.  This pressure on library budgets has made institutions aware of the hidden costs of scholarly publishing in which public monies pays for much of the costs of the scholarly communication lifecycle.

Frequently digital publication is cited as a low-cost alternative. But anybody engaged in digital publication realises this is far from true.  The long-term costs of digital publication are not yet well understood and as yet we have no real model for preserving and sustaining digital scholarship. In short, we are nowhere near the sophisticated infrastructure that has been developed over centuries for preserving our print heritage.

Yet, digital publication offers clear advantages over print publication in many areas: it can, for example,  make works more widely available; it can offer a low-cost alternative to republishing out of print titles; and can provide scholarly societies with a venue to make available conference proceedings. In order for digital publication to flourish, new models, economic, social, and scholarly, need to be developed. This seminar was  the first in a series of dialogues between the academic, publishing, and library communities to explore synergies, economies of scale, and opportunities in the development of an Irish Digital Scholarly Imprint.

Agenda

Featured Talks

The View From the Library (or /In the Middle of Nowhere/)

John Fitzgerald (University College Cork)

A Podcast of this talk is available.

The impact of the so-called ‘journals crisis’ of the past two decades has been felt mainly by academic libraries as bearers of the steep increases in subscription costs. Despite a range of remedial measures and the emergence of possible alternative publishing models, pressure on libraries is increasing to maintain inflating subscriptions with reducing budgets. This paper identifies the challenges faced by academic libraries as both consumers and producers in the scholarly communication process and looks at how libraries might play their role in not wasting this crisis.

John Fitzgerald has been University Librarian at University College Cork since 1995 and was additionally appointed Director of Information Services in 2009. He has served as Chairman of the Consortium of National and University Libraries of Ireland, Chairman of the IUA (Irish Universities’ Association) Librarians’ Group, Chairman of the Cork Archives Institute and regularly acts as a reviewer and evaluator of EU-funded R&D projects on behalf of the European Commission in the areas of Digital Libraries and Cultural Heritage.

A Small Publisher's Forays into the Digital World

Ruth Hegarty (Royal Irish Academy)

A Podcast of this talk is available.

The Royal Irish Academy has been publishing since 1787. Staying relevant to its audience means that what it publishes and how it publishes needs to change over time. This talk will focus on what has been done to date to reach existing and new audiences both in journal publishing and book publishing. It will also look at what kind of resources are available to a small publisher to use the web and internet to its benefit without consuming what small resources it might have.
 

Collaboration, Publicity, Maintenance

John Lavagnino (National University of Ireland, Galway)

A Podcast of this talk is available.

Scholarly publishing is becoming largely digital and largely unlike the system we grew up with. This talk looks at what we as scholars need from the future publishing system, and might be able to get, in two areas of particular importance to us: publicity, or how anyone finds out about our work and why it matters, and maintenance, or how our work stays available. What forms of collaboration and what development pattern for scholarly works do we want in the future?

John Lavagnino studied physics at Harvard University and American literature at Brandeis University, where he wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. He has worked in atmospheric science at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and in digital publishing for numerous organizations; he is now Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing at King's College London. He was one of the general editors of Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007), and is now working on the digital Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.
Website: http://www.lavagnino.org.uk

Options for Online Publishing

Brad Scott (Digital Publishing Consultant)

A Podcast of this talk is available.

Experiments in online publishing have been under way for at least fifteen years, and for many larger publishers experimentation has given way to steady revenue streams. That experience has shown that, for any new entrant into the market, it is vital to make such a venture sustainable, to reduce the dependency on grant funding. This may require a large measure of consistency in how things are offered; with too many options (data types, business models) the offering quickly becomes too expensive to maintain it efficiently. Furthermore, the sales channels, and the methods to distribute and promote the use of digitally published materials have to be planned from the outset.

Brad Scott has worked in the information industry for 20 years and was digital publisher at Routledge to 2001, where he devised, managed and published a number of large-scale digital projects including the first digital Arden Shakespeare, and a number of projects with the National Archives. He has since been Account Director at Semantico, a Brighton-based software company specialising in solutions for the publishing industry. From 1998 to 2003 he served on the organising committee of the Digital Resources for the Humanities conferences and has presented papers at a number of industry events in Europe and North America.