Norris Pope, Director, Stanford University Press

In the context of dire predictions and impending crisis, a number of you will recall the introduction of the Reverend Melchisedech Howler in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son:

"Howler, . . . having been one day discharged from the West India Docks on a . . . suspicion . . . of screwing gimlets into puncheons, and applying his lips to the orifice, had announced the destruction of the world for that day two years, at ten in the morning, and opened a front parlour for the reception of ladies and gentlemen of the Ranting persuasion, upon whom, on the first occasion of their assemblage, the admonitions of the Reverend Melchisedech had produced so powerful an effect, that, in their rapturous performance of a sacred jig, which closed the service, the whole flock broke through into a kitchen below, and disabled a mangle belonging to one of the fold."

This passage, with its tribute to rum and splendid parody of the fall, of course came to mind because of Howler's exact and gloomy prophecy. Readers of the novel will know--and the rest of you will have guessed--that the world did not come to an end at ten in the morning, two years hence. Indeed, Howler does quite well among the fallen by setting up a brisk trade in dire prophecy. By the end of the novel, he preaches in a "neat whitewashed edifice," where he had "consented, on very urgent solicitation, to give the world another two years of existence, but had informed his followers that, then, it must positively go."

Insofar as one may judge by the jeremiads of successive Howlers, we've faced more than one of crisis in scholarly publishing. Yet most of us would now probably agree that seemingly irreversible changes in the external support of university research, alongside the explosive development of digital technologies and networked communication, point to a genuine crisis, from which significant changes will almost certainly emerge--changes that are not only affecting younger scholars in fields where professional recognition and advancement have hitherto turned primarily on book publication, but also affecting the evolution of the fields themselves.

At Stanford, we've of course been coping with ever-smaller institutional markets for scholarly monographs in a variety of conventional ways: requesting title subsidies, seeking more salable work to help pay for less salable work, increasing prices, providing less editorial help, editing on-line, using electronic files for in-house typesetting, and putting more and more of our specialized books into expensive, short-run paperback editions. But on the assumption that these steps may not go far enough in the long run, and that publication in some fields is in very serious jeopardy, we've also begun, as most of you know, an experimental collaboration with the Stanford Libraries to distribute a number of book-length works in Latin American studies on the web.

I want to recall at the outset, however, that this kind of collaboration has an important prehistory: most North American university presses emerged not simply from university printing departments, but from library gift-and-exchange programs. The distribution of faculty research was thus often initially a library activity. Only later did this activity migrate into the marketplace, as commercial practices replaced exchange models, and as university presses became independent departments. All academic publishers are of course deeply aware of the long-standing importance of library purchasing for scholarly publishing; but we are equally aware of the diminished role of such purchasing today, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, it seems inevitable that libraries will continue to respond to budgetary pressures by shifting farther from a "just-in-case" model of acquisitions (which has traditionally implied purchase and ownership of books in a system quite favorable to university presses), to a "just-in-time" model (which often implies leased, temporary access to works in a system relatively unfavorable to university presses). We thus hope that our electronic publishing project may help to revitalize the traditional partnership between university presses and university libraries in the ongoing production and dissemination of new scholarly knowledge.

Publishers should of course remember that partnerships are not inevitable, and that new institutional arrangements could render university presses increasingly marginal to academic enterprise. Through the creation of extensive digital archives and largely open access, for example, either libraries, individual academic departments, scholarly societies, or even commercially organized gateways to digital information could emerge over time as responsible not only for the collection of scholarly material, but also for its distribution--creating an online environment for continuous peer reviewing and discussion to replace formal refereeing and editorial-board control (linking researchers via information, rather than simply linking researchers to information) and constructing electronic course reserves to replace paperback text adoptions.

Needless to say, I have many reasons to hope that university presses remain vital institutions, and, indeed, there are many reasons to remain optimistic about this. Web publication, for example, is increasingly understood as a valuable complement to, rather than as a rival of, print publication. Moreover, university presses have created very successful and deeply institutionalized systems for selecting out and attracting the best scholarly work, for refereeing it effectively, for marketing it in professionally meaningful ways, and for conferring prestige upon authors--particularly in fields where careers turn on book publication. And people continue to express a preference for printed books whenever they want to read a work closely, or reflect on it in a sustained fashion: in ways both obvious and subtle, how a text is materially embodied affects its larger meaning. Finally, university presses are well placed to support the migration of some of their publishing--obviously of journals, but also of suitable monographs and reference works--from print to digital form (a migration that might be facilitated if it were carried out in conjunction with an inexpensive system for printing a limited number of on-demand copies).

Whatever the eventual effects of the digital revolution on university presses, digital technologies have already transformed the role of libraries in the organization and delivery of research and teaching materials to scholars and students. As all of you know, the Stanford Library has become a leader in efforts to shift scholarly communication from a paper-and-print based system to a mixed digital-and-paper environment. The Library's most remarkable achievement in this area is HighWire Press, established at Mike Keller's initiative by John Sack and others. HighWire distributes scholarly and scientific material on the web, mostly electronic versions of STM journals (sometimes in expanded form), prepared under contract for various publishers, which are often (but not always) academic societies. HighWire pages are now sometimes getting 1 million hits per day, roughly 40 percent of which are from abroad, representing probably about 100,000 users.

Let me simply name the journals that HighWire currently distributes on the web: Journal of Biological Chemistry; Journal of Neuroscience; Journal of Clinical Investigation; Journal Watch; Pediatrics; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Journal of Experimental Medicine; Journal of Applied Physiology; Cell; Neuron; Immunity; Journal of Nutrition; Journal of Cell Biology; and Science On-Line. (To make this a little more concrete, the Journal of Biological Chemistry publishes around 800 printed pages of refereed material per week.) Upcoming projects include around twenty more STM journals, including eight component parts of the American Journal of Physiology, along with more than 25 annual review volumes from Annual Reviews Press. In addition, HighWire now provides to journal subscribers toll-free cross-journal links among the HighWire journals, and many references are now linked directly with MedLine abstracts.

Our Mellon project is obviously intended to bring together the technological strengths of HighWire Press with the academic strengths of our book program. The Latin American studies focus of the project was the result of three additional factors: the very considerable distinction of our list in the field; the Mellon Foundation's interest in supporting a project that could have an impact across an entire subdiscipline; and the Library's interest in collaborative possibilities with academic institutions in Latin America (for mirror sites and for access on a reciprocal basis to works in Spanish). The project that got funded, after many revisions of the proposal, had three primary goals: to provide inexpensive digital access to important refereed scholarly books in Latin American studies; to present the material within a carefully integrated and technologically sophisticated "knowledge environment"; and to evaluate the economics and pragmatics of the networked publication of scholarly books in a field in which book publication has been of central importance.

The original proposal specified that the core of the project would consist of twelve "classic" or "landmark" works in Latin American studies from our backlist--to which two new books would be added each year as "preprints" (i.e., made available in electronic versions before they're available in print versions). Finally, access won't be free: we plan to sell site licenses to institutions, low-cost subscriptions to individual scholars, and pay-by-the-sip access for one-time use of some or all of the material to nonsubscribers.

Because our website is not yet available to the outside world (the Library is now just finishing up the scanning and tagging of the twelve "landmark" titles), we don't have any real results to report. But our thinking about various parts of the project has nonetheless evolved considerably. I'd like to use my remaining time to note three areas where this has occurred. The first concerns our commercial expectations; the second concerns technology; and the third concerns site design.

With regard to our commercial expectations, a number of the HighWire people involved with the project now express skepticism about our ability to generate much sales income from online editions of scholarly books. Part of this skepticism derives from user surveys conducted by HighWire, in which scientists continue to express a strong preference for print materials when they need to read something carefully or in its entirety, and a concomitant reluctance to do away with print publication. Part of it reflects the experience of the societies for whom HighWire publishes, who are developing a sense of what researchers are currently willing to pay to obtain electronic subscriptions--mostly in addition to, or bundled with, print subscriptions. Part of it reflects the small but interesting body of evidence suggesting that the effect of electronic editions is often to increase the demand for print editions of the same materials (i.e., the search and browse capabilities of the electronic version enhance the use and thus value of the printed version--though of course this may not hold for scholarly books in Latin American studies!). And part of this skepticism derives from academics' and researchers' habits of viewing the web more as a library than as a market: scholars and students expect to find research materials for free on the web, with the costs borne institutionally (as a public good), rather than as commodities to be purchased by users.

One consequence of this skepticism over sales is to think more about web publishing as a vehicle for selling print editions. Another consequence has been to renew discussion of the original gift and exchange model of publishing--in which a university press might receive a direct subsidy from its library to mount each new scholarly title on a library server (in effect, a single-copy sale at a very high price), and the electronic version would then be made available for free to other libraries within a consortium, all of whose members would agree to provide analogous services in return. The price of the single electronic sale would of course need to compensate the press for the diminished library sales of printed copies. In addition to this support, however, the press would enjoy the income from all sales of print editions, probably most often of paperbacks. There are of course many advantages in allowing market discipline to play a role in electronic publishing, as in print publication, so we should be cautious about moving back toward the gift-and-exchange model. But the discussion may help us to understand better the new roles, configurations, and practices that are currently emerging as a result of networked communication.

The technological area where there's been a lot of additional thinking and discussion concerns our choice of a markup language for the electronic editions. Because HighWire Press typically receives SGML-tagged files of journal numbers from the typesetter or printer of the paper edition (and has developed filtering software for conversion to HTML on the fly)--and because SGML allows much deeper tagging of content and structural elements than HTML, thereby facilitating more powerful searching--we're decided to tag at least the dozen landmark books at the center of our project in SGML. I note this decision because thus far SGML tagging has proved vastly more labor intensive than HTML tagging. The consequence is that the ideal of producing from the start inexpensive electronic editions of books has to some extent receded--though new software, such as Microsoft's new SGML Author, may eventually help to remedy this problem. It's important to emphasize the issue of costs, however, because it may prove very difficult, in the context of a fairly small income stream from site licenses and individual subscribers, to sustain the project on a fully commercial basis once our Mellon funding is gone.

Finally, the question of design. We enlisted three computer science graduate students in a course on human/computer interfaces, who spent a term on our project. Their procedure was not in fact to construct anything, but to offer suggestions on the basis of extensive interviews with a number of people working in Latin American studies, at different stages of their research and professional careers. After the initial interviews, they then came up with preliminary design ideas, which they took back for further discussion and refinement with the original interviewees. Many of the ideas were highly utopian, and of conceptual rather than practical interest. Foremost among these was naturally the desideratum of creating a very substantial electronic archive or database for the field--massively beyond the small number of books contemplated in our proposal. Some of the other ideas were quite creative: for example, many researchers liked the idea of creating virtual bookshelves, using draggable icons of book spines to represent the physical placement and ordering of books on shelves--to capture the mental mapping, important to almost everyone interviewed, of material ordered according to individual needs within the visual field of the researcher. Similarly, people liked the idea of having sliders represent where within a book and within chapter-length files the on-screen portion of text was coming from. In essence, much of the design effort went into finding creative ways to emulate the remarkable and familiar artifactual economies of books. What almost everyone wanted most, however--and this was not something we'd thought about in our initial concern with search engines and extensive hypertext links--was some way of directly integrating online texts with personal on-screen workspace, especially with cut-and-paste features for moving text from source to workspace, and for automatically creating citations for all the material moved or copied in this way. Creating permeable boundaries of this sort between one's own work and online work would tempt lots of scholars to make extensive use of electronic books, providing a critical additional incentive, beyond the initial web attractions of immediacy, searchability, and hypertextuality.

If, like the Reverend Howler, we are prepared to grant the printed book several more years of robust existence before it must positively go, we should at least have within a year or so some actual results to report of our experiences in the mixed digital and print world that we are certainly entering.