Internet-First publishing project at CU offers the old and the new

By Bill Steele

Just when the recording, music and publishing industries are going all-out to stop people from making their products available on the Internet, a new publishing venture at Cornell is taking the opposite approach: Put the full text of a new book on the Internet for free, and give readers the option to buy the printed book if they wish.

The new "open access" publisher, known as Internet-First University Press, launched recently with a catalog including four original manuscripts and several reprints of books that have been out of print. Soon to be added are monographs, Cornell graduate student theses and, eventually, an online scholarly journal. The project also is publishing multimedia materials, including videos and collections of photographs.

Full texts of the books will be available free on the Web at http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62. Readers will have the option of buying printed copies through a print-on-demand system. A digital copy of the manuscript can be routed to a printing facility near the buyer, who will be able to pick up the printed copy at a local bookstore or perhaps a university press or library, or have it shipped.

Cooke

"What this model does, I propose, is reduce the financial risk for the publisher by eliminating the need for a large inventory," said J. Robert Cooke, Cornell professor of biological and environmental engineering and former dean of the faculty, who is principal investigator for the project. Other leaders of the project are Kenneth M. King, former Cornell vice provost for information technology, and Ross Atkinson, associate university librarian for collections.

Cooke pointed out that all but a few university presses are in serious financial trouble. Like commercial publishers, their business model is to hope that some of their books sell enough copies to cover the costs of printing all of their selections. "You produce many, put them in storage and hope you sell them," Cooke said. "If you don't, you also pay for the storage."

With the Internet-first model, the publisher has the same up-front editing costs of a few thousand dollars per volume but no up-front printing costs. Authors receive no advance royalty but are paid a royalty for each print-on-demand copy ordered.

The advantage of making out-of-print books available this way is fairly obvious, but why would an author want a new book distributed free online?

"Faculty members value having their scholarship read, and the open-access approach provides immediate, worldwide access," Cooke explained. "Our first authors are all distinguished faculty with no need to build up their résumés. They have no pressing financial need or were smart enough to know they weren't going to get much money anyway." Mostly, he pointed out, books written by academics and published by a university press have a narrow audience.

Jay Orear, Cornell professor emeritus of physics and one of the first authors to be published in the new format, thinks he might make some money anyway. "My hope is that people will start to read on the Internet and then think, 'I want the book,'" he said. Printing it out at home, he noted, will consume a lot of paper and expensive ink cartridges. "And then you just have a pile of paper," he concluded.

Eventually, Cooke hopes, the Internet-first approach will become attractive even to young faculty, who must publish to gain tenure. Like any other publisher, he said, Internet-First University Press will be selective, with an editorial board reviewing potential selections.

The next step will be an online scholarly journal operating on the same model, Cooke said. Under the present journal system, university researchers and scholars give their papers to journal publishers, who then sell the printed journals back to university libraries at prices, he said, that are becoming a serious drain on library budgets. Meanwhile, he added, universities are laying out the capital costs of adding library shelf space to store the paper copies. Cooke proposes that each university bear the costs of publishing its own research, in order to retain control over access.

Some day, he said, when all books and all research and scholarship are published online, "Wells College and Ithaca College will have access to a library as big as Cornell's."

Initial Internet-First University Press offerings include:

Original manuscripts: