Some ways of thinking about costs and subsidies

Editor’s note: This is the third (and, I believe, final) post in a series by Kevin Hawkins. The first contained advice for institutions thinking about starting a publishing program, and the second shared strategies for creating an accessible archive of journal back issues. This post, in addition to providing clarity in the area of fees, raises some interesting questions around what it means to be an “essential” service of the library. Many thanks to Kevin for his contributions this summer!  

When you first hear that libraries offer publishing services, you might think of this as outside the scope of what libraries traditionally do. However, libraries do all sorts of things today that are outside their traditional scope—for example, teaching people to use software to visualize and analyze data or offering makerspaces. A publishing service offered to users isn’t really all that different: the library is providing expertise and access to resources.

In an earlier post I mentioned some of the costs of publishing: staff time, technology costs, and outsourced services. As I wrote then, if the library is not willing to fully subsidize these expenses for a library publishing program, you will need to come up with a way to recover such costs. But before getting into business models, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the reasons that a library might choose (or be convinced!) to subsidize its library publishing program. It’s not simply a question of mission for the publishing service; we should also consider how other services of the library are funded.

Libraries are cost centers for the host institution, providing services without the expectation of recovering revenue. Their services are often offered for free for the benefit of affiliated users and possibly also the public. It’s in the interest of the institution for users to be able to use the resources without incurring any costs.

However, libraries do sometimes charge fees for their services.  These fall into a couple of categories:

1. Fees for unaffiliated users: A library is funded to offer services to a particular community. A public library might offer certain privileges for users who live outside the library district, or an academic library might offer certain privileges for those not affiliated with the institution, but only for a fee.
2. Convenience fees: While users can come to the library and retrieve print materials on their own, the library might charge for delivery to the user’s office on campus. Or the library might offer a for-fee research service through which a user can pay for a library employee to do in-depth research beyond what the library would typically provide to its users for free.
3. Fees for measurable, expendable resources: If a user visits the reading room, their work usually doesn’t deprive others of electricity, wifi bandwidth, or other common, basically immeasurable resources provided by the library.  However, if the user makes photocopies, this consumes paper that others can’t use. Therefore, the library might charge for the paper.  Well, it’s actually more likely to charge more than the cost of the paper—including some “overhead” to recover the cost of buying and maintaining the photocopier. But that overhead is not as likely to cover a portion of the salary of a staff member who occasionally loads the paper tray or helps people use the machine because it’s not worth measuring this small amount of time.

A library publishing service might involve any of these types of fees, but it is likely to involve some resources—especially staff member time and access to an online publishing system—that are not easily measured or not worth accounting for by project. For example, if a staff member spends a small portion of their time explaining the publishing service and helping people use it, and if the service “rides on” an institutional repository or digital library with other uses at the library, it’s probably not practical to charge users for any of this, especially if they are affiliated with the home institution and the system doesn’t allow for self service. However, if the service involves larger time commitments—such as helping journal editors set up a new journal and helping each year’s new graduate assistant understand how to use the online journal platform—there’s a good case to be made for approximating staff time spent on such projects and charging setup and/or annual maintenance fees accordingly. This is akin to a for-fee research service.

Sometimes a library incurs costs that are exactly measurable—such as ILL fees charged by another library—but chooses not to pass them on to users because the service is seen as essential or because the library doesn’t want to create a disincentive for users not to use it. If the library publishing service is seen as essential to the users, then certainly there’s a good case for the library covering the costs entirely, at least for affiliated users. But if not, and if it involves measurable, expendable resources, there will need to be a way to recover the costs of these resources, such as through user fees, such as setup or annual maintenance fees, or revenue from sales of or access to the user’s content.

How do you think about costs and subsidies?

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Options for making previously published material available

Editor’s note: This is the second guest post by Kevin Hawkins. His first talked about the process of starting a library publishing program; this one covers options for delivering back content of journals (or other materials) when you become the publisher. This second post is also part of our series on accessibility. 

If your library publishing program will absorb any established journals or series of books or technical reports, you will probably want to make previously published content available online in addition to any new content you publish. So what are your options? Below I’ll use the term “back issues” as if we’re talking about a journal, but everything I say could as easily apply to books or technical reports.

The easiest solution would be to create a searchable collection in HathiTrust of these back issues (see this example). Note that you don’t have to be affiliated with a HathiTrust member institution to create a collection; individuals can create collections using guest accounts through the University of Michigan. If the back issues aren’t yet in HathiTrust, you may be able to find a partner institution willing to digitize and submit the issues for you. Your back issues are probably still protected by copyright, so you’ll need to have the rightsholder fill out a permissions agreement authorizing HathiTrust to make the full text viewable. Then you can link to the collection of back issues from the website where you’ll publish new content.

There are, however, some disadvantages to doing this. First, you won’t be able to allow users to search across back issues and new issues in a single interface. Second, HathiTrust’s search functionality uses the OCR text created after scanning, which can contain errors in recognition of the original and which is difficult for visually impaired users to read using assistive technology. Third, a HathiTrust collection provides no index of authors or article titles; a user would need to look at each issues table of contents if a fulltext search is insufficient.

There are many vendors that will scan printed matter and deliver those scans as individual page images or multipage PDF files (as you choose).  More libraries are equipped to deliver PDF files to users, and that format has the advantage of allowing OCR text to be embedded to allow for fulltext searching. While Adobe Acrobat has built-in OCR capability, many vendors will not only create the OCR for you but even offer OCR correction as an additional service. And some can even create PDF/UA (“universal accessibility”) files, ensuring they can be read with assistive technology.

Unfortunately, none of this provides an automatic index of authors or article titles. A vendor might be able to create this for you as well, or you could create one on your own as a byproduct of XML encoding of the content. Who would do the XML encoding? Probably a vendor, though you might try creating your own using the PKP XML Parsing Service. This could be especially useful if use the XML Galley Plugin (a standard component of OJS) for new issues since you could potentially have old and new issues all in the same XML format.

In any case, when working with a vendor, it is best for your contract to specify the quality standard you expect, such as acceptable error rate on scanning pages, acceptable error rate on OCR, and file validation. But if you do this, you’ll want to actually evaluate the digitized content that you receive (likely by sampling random pages) and be prepared to reject content not meeting the standard for the vendor to fix without charge.

As you can see, there are a number of ways you might proceed. Perhaps you have other ideas? If so, please add comments!

So you want to create a library publishing program?

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of guest posts by Kevin Hawkins, the Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communication at the University of North Texas Libraries. Kevin has many years of experience in library-based publishing, both at UNT and at the University of Michigan, and he has generously agreed to share some of his expertise with us. His first post is the latest entry in our new program development series. Welcome, Kevin!

Library publishing programs come in many shapes and sizes. If you feel that your library should have one (or you were asked to create one), how do you choose what sort of program to create?

As with so many other aspects of librarianship, you need to pause to consider what sort of information need are you trying to address. For example:

• Are students, faculty, or administrators asking the library to support student publishing opportunities (a pedagogical need)?
• Are researchers at the institution looking for the library to offer or create venues in which to publish their works (a research need)?
• Does the institution want to “put a stake in the ground” in promoting a new model of scholarly publishing (a need to support the institution’s mission)?
• Does the library want to raise awareness of its unique collections (a need to support the library)?

These each call for different kinds of services, with different ways of acquiring and certifying content, different levels of support for authors and editors, different genres of publication (book, journal, brochure, etc.), and different cost models.