The Chronicle reported a couple of weeks ago (4/12/08) that there were rumors that the Columbia University might eliminate its electronic publishing program, and that the admirable Kate Wittenberg, who has been the editor most prominently associated with Columbia’s electronic-publication program, would leave the University in June. Jim Neal, Columbia’s able librarian and chief information officer (Columbia was one of the first universities to combine the two positions) refused the Chronicle’s request for comment on the matter. I gather from friends in publishing that no one knows exactly what is happening, but if Columbia is abandoning the field of electronic publishing, those of us who have promoted digital publications should be concerned.
One of Columbia’s first forays into the field was via a Mellon-funded partnership with the American Historical Association, to publish Gutenberg-e. This was an initiative spearheaded by then AHA president Bob Darnton (my former Princeton history colleague and currently the Harvard Librarian) to award prize fellowships for the best history dissertations in fields that seemed to have limited publishing opportunities. I was the vice president for research at the AHA at the time, and worked with Bob to launch the project.
Simultaneously, the Mellon Foundation was funding an ACLS digital history project, intended to provide retrospective digital conversions of important history monographs, as well as to publish born-digital monographs in the field. The initial idea was to distribute e-publication across several academic publishers, but Columbia pretty quickly emerged as the leading publisher, in part because of the skill and commitment of Kate Wittenberg, and in part because of Columbia’s commitment to e-publishing.
These events took place about a decade ago, and today almost all academic presses are doing some electronic publishing, though it is my impression that little of their digital activity is of born-digital scholarship. Google has of course made large-scale digital retrospective conversion of older academic monographs and source materials a startling reality, and most academic journals currently publish either simultaneously in analog and digital forms or exclusively electronically. But the economics of born-digital publishing (whether commercial or non-profit) are still very difficult, and therefore the news from Columbia may be discouraging. We do not yet (or I do not yet) know enough about the actual situation to be sure, but this is one more sign that our entry into digital publishing is still a work in progress.
Can academic presses continue their important work without philanthropic support? If not, what is the near-term future of the digital academic book?
