Recent news postings in Library Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education tell a somewhat confusing story about Gutenberg-e, the online series publishing worthy books by younger historians. Begun under the leadership of Robert Darnton when he was President of the American Historical Association, it was grant-funded and published by Columbia University Press. As near as one can tell, the sequence of events is something as follows:These paragraphs opened a discussion on liblicense-l this week and are self-explanatory, arising from my own thoughtful reaction to some news that had crossed my desk. (The archive and subscription information for liblicense-l, which I moderate, may be found at http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/mailing-list.shtml)
1. Nearing completion of its funded run of publications, frustrated that the series was getting few subscription customers and little recognition for scholarly content, Columbia Press negotiated to have the series become part of the Humanities E-Books project led by ACLS. The Humanities E-Book site lists twenty titles in the series and at present offers access to 6 of them. This is a subscription series, typically paid for by institutional (library) subscriptions. All the articles and releases cited below seem to agree that the fundamental business model of the series was not working.
2. On 1 November 2007, volumes in the series were also made available for open access through the project's own site, www.gutenberg-e.org. Twenty-three titles are available there, with "Open Access Terms and Conditions" rather heavier on restrictions on use (e.g., one printed copy only per user, no multiple copies) than one associates with OA projects. The page bears a Columbia University Press copyright
3. On February 12, 2008, the American Historical Association issued a press release entitled "Gutenberg-e Books Now Available Open Access and through ACLS Humanities E-Book". Deep in the press release, Robert Townsend of AHA expressed concern that the series had not been financially successful.
4. At the end of February, both LJ and CHE published articles emphasizing the new open access, but containing some indication of the financial challenges the series had faced. In response, the director of Columbia University Press, Jim Jordan, wrote a cryptic blog entry http://www.cupblog.org/?p=99 in which he sought to clarify some facts of the case, somewhat distancing himself from the open access version of the project, which he reports as hosted by the Columbia libraries.
5. The Columbia University Libraries website does not make it easy to find the Gutenberg-e titles. The one time I succeeded in finding a page (yesterday: going back to write this note I was unable to locate it), the page was clearly marked as a subscription-only series accessible on the site only to Columbia users. However, a Google search does find a free site.
I'd welcome any clarification and corrections of this outline of the facts I've been able to uncover. Will all the titles of Gutenberg-e be included in the Humanities E-Book series? Will the open access version continue indefinitely? Are the two versions identical? How should we best represent these titles in our online catalogues?
Ann Okerson
Yale Library
The first response came from CU Press director Jim Jordan, courtesy of listmember Sandy Thatcher:
Dear Ann Okerson:
My post was meant to question the characterization in the original Chronicle article that the Press had "radically restructured" Gutenberg-e to take it open access. The implication, at least to me, was that we had abandoned the subscription model rather than moving the project to the more successful subscription-based Humanities eBook database. I did not want to leave the impression that we felt open access would in the long run better serve the authors' ambitions for having their work read, used, and reviewed. The best we can say is that we do not know.
Some time ago we recognized that the subscription site for Gutenberg-e was simply not drawing the traffic we expected and needed for the project to be sustained. So with the success of the ACLS project, it made much more sense to combine these projects with theirs. The Gutenberg-e authors are better served by having their work discoverable in that much larger and more widely used database, and linked to the deep resources available there. Both sites will eventually contain the complete works and we will continue to promote the availability of these projects in both places through advertising, press releases, and outreach to journal editors.
I am certain the Columbia Library is committed to maintaining the Open Access site but I defer to my colleague Kate Wittenberg on questions relating to that site and its functionality.
Jim Jordan 3/6/08
Ann: I hope you don't mind if I share some personal thoughts about the Gutenberg-e project, as I am concerned that some important issues may have gotten lost in the flurry of press surrounding the recent decisions regarding distribution of the digital books. As you know, I have been involved in this project from the start, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts looking back at the project from this point near its completion. You may share some, all, or none of this with your colleagues and readers as you think best.From the project itself, Kate Wittenberg then responded thus:
Gutenberg-e was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs by young academics would alter the way in which historical scholarship is presented, whether the scholars would received the same professional credit for these publications that they would receive from work published in print, and whether the project would permit publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The long-term business model for this enterprise was not the main focus of the project, although we did always hope that there would be a way to receive sufficient revenue to allow for the maintenance, and possibly the continued development of the series.
This project has a long and complicated history that includes many exciting breakthroughs as well as a number of significant challenges. The authors involved are courageous and innovative scholars, and in my view represent the best of the next generation of historians. A number of them have created completely new models of author/publisher collaboration in the scholarly communication process, as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. The authors who have come up for tenure have received it, with their Gutenberg-e book being their major publication. Most of the e-books have been reviewed positively in distinguished history journals.
In complex research projects that are managed by multiple organizations, agendas and missions sometimes get confused. The fact that a decision was made to have the e-books distributed through the ACLS E-Humanities publishing project, while maintaining them in their original form on the Gutenberg-e.org website hosted by the Columbia University Libraries, is not a condemnation of the project as an economic failure. Rather, it is a creative solution to stabilizing and ensuring the availability and preservation of these works over time. If, in the future, the Press, the Libraries, or some new organization that does not yet exist takes on the mission of publication of digital scholarship in history, the Gutenberg-e series will be made available, as appropriate, through this project as well. The point is that we have broken new ground, learned a tremendous amount, provided a group of scholars with beautifully designed and produced publications, and offered a new model of university press/library/information technology collaboration in scholarly communication. These are findings that few would consider a failed experiment and that instead offer valuable models and knowledge for others.
Kate Wittenberg
Manager, E-Publishing Programs
Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
Columbia University
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