Duke University Press has struck an agreement with HathiTrust and Google to make a large number of its backlist titles freely available through the HathiTrust digital repository. The press, like many others, hasn’t had spare resources to digitize and archive all those books itself.
As many as a thousand titles could be eligible for the project, which the partners hope will be a model for other publishers who want to widen access to their material. With permission from rights holders, the books will be made available under a Creative Commons noncommercial license, so that anyone may read and use them for nonmonetary purposes.
The partners say the deal looks like a win all around. Many university presses don’t have the resources to create digital copies of all their books, especially older ones that aren’t likely to sell. With eight million digitized works in its repository, HathiTrust already holds many scans of Duke books—and many other scholarly titles.
“A university press stands a pretty good chance of finding a good portion of its corpus online” already, says John Wilkin, HathiTrust’s executive director. That’s thanks in large part to the digitizing partnership with Google. The Duke press will get digitized files of the books it makes available through the arrangement.
Steve Cohn, the press’s director, says making money isn’t the goal. There’s not much of a market for, say, Duke books about Carter-administration housing policy, or Irish elections in the early 1980s. But those books represent part of the press’s legacy and might hold value for some researchers.
For users who like what they see and want to buy a copy of a book, the press plans to offer a print-on-demand option, with Google’s blessing. But the HathiTrust-Google deal is “not a commercial investment in any way,” Mr. Cohn says. Instead it’s a solution to the problem of how to archive and make available decades’ worth of publishing output.
“It’s easy for me to more or less figure out how to cover costs with new books, putting them into digital form,” Mr. Cohn explains. “We’d have nothing left in the bank if we invested in the backlist going all the way back to the 1920s,” when the press was founded. The HathiTrust deal “was my strategy for getting that done without cost,” he says. The main burden on the press is likely to be chasing down rights holders, a process that can be especially tricky with older books.
Because Google provided many of the book scans in question, its support was critical. Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, manages its relationships with print-media companies, including book publishers. He says Google is happy to give the press the digitized files. “We very much support Duke getting them to extend their archive and make scholarly uses” of that material, he says.
Google stands to gain too, because the Duke press will handle all the work of securing permissions from copyright holders. That takes the copyright-search burden off Google and HathiTrust and allows them to share the full texts digitally without fear of rights infringement.
“That helps everyone,” Mr. Turvey says. “We receive some benefit because we will put those books—after the rights are cleared, of course—into our book-search projects.”
Mr. Cohn and Mr. Wilkin think that the model could prove workable for other publishers. HathiTrust has been seeking “a framework for university presses to open up materials in ways that are sympathetic to what they’re trying to do—both protect their bottom line and disseminate scholarly information,” according to Mr. Wilkin.
Mr. Cohn says he has promised to keep his fellow university-press directors apprised of how the arrangement works out. “In many ways, it could suit any press,” he says.