Preliminary results on a research project on library acquisitions are now in. They suggest some interesting patterns in collection-building; the data from this project will be useful for other researchers. It is hoped that the full roll-out of this project will take place later this year.
There are many programs now to create open access monographs, but the business models surrounding these efforts do not appear to be sufficiently robust to make the OA monograph sustainable. The problem is that the monograph is something that many people want, but few are willing to pay for.
Although Amazon is a central player in many areas of publishing and media, it is hard to predict where it will head next. This makes it hard to plan to compete with it. On the other hand, Amazon has some typical ways that it behaves when it enters a market and strategic planners can learn from them.
Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.
University presses are enjoying something of a renaissance in the UK, as was evident at the recent University Press Redux conference in Liverpool. Why is this, and how are presses trying to reconcile mission, innovation and sustainability in the digital world? And what can they teach the rest of us?