Feature


“Not all customers are actually that bothered about digital richness”


gof a born-digital programme such as this through an aggregator.’ But she also highlights that not all


customers are too bothered about digital richness. ‘Our own platform has seen well over 20 per cent growth in usage again this year, so there is no doubt that many customers continue to want to come to our site for the benefit of accessing our content. However, I can’t kid myself that this is true for all customers; many just want content anywhere that it’s available, so it’s about providing that choice.’


Change reactions The adoption of open access (OA) publications has also driven change among university press heavyweights. Enhancing OA monographs is


considered a ‘key mission’ by MIT Press and Libraries, with the Press undertaking a major initiative to flip its scholarly monographs to open access and make these available on MIT Direct. Meanwhile, Cambridge University Press committed 18 months ago to shift to a fully OA model, recently creating an Open Research platform to publish pre-prints on early- stage research. The University of Michigan Press is


also increasing its OA publishing content, which, as Watkinson comments, was a key reason to develop its own platform. ‘Some aggregators have not been very good at disseminating OA material... like changing forms of scholarships, OA books are the canaries in the calming,’ he says. ‘EBSCO and ProQuest have engineered a system around digital-rights management and are now finding it difficult to ‘un- engineer’ some of these systems [for OA].’ While such changes to the scholarly


Mandy Hill, Cambridge University Press


publishing landscape have triggered the move towards sales of e-books directly to libraries, the customer data sourced from these developments is also a welcome benefit for presses. As Ehling, from MIT Press, has said, direct access to usage data from its platform allows the development of insight tools and advanced analytics capabilities to support publishing programs. And as Watkinson points out, while


some aggregators provide usage statistics and information on which institutions use the Press’s products, other aggregators provide very little data. ‘We’re now also interested in more


nuanced and richer geographical information, such as international reach or reach with the US,’ he says. ‘For example, a Google Analytics-type map that shows usage outside of major university centres would be a great advocacy story... and we consider altmetrics to be really important in terms of storytelling.’ The UMP director is looking forward to gaining a greater market understanding by having direct conversations with librarians. ‘The librarians we’ve generally spoken to in the past have been our colleagues at Michigan, and we now recognise that libraries are all so very different from each other,’ he says.


Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan Press


For Mandy Hill, the direct relationship and closer understanding of customers coupled with usage statistics are an over-riding benefit of using a home-grown platform. Right now, Cambridge Core has a feedback option, developed by software provider, Usabilla, that enables users to directly provide feedback to CUP on their experience of the platform. ‘This is really powerful and important


to us, as we can find out which aspects of what we are doing, whether it’s website, marketing or editorial development, actually matter to our users so we can develop our services accordingly,’ she says.


Amid moves to drive digital enrichment,


OA and market understanding forward, the latest ‘go-it-alone’ platforms have garnered criticism in scholarly circles. Some have questioned the sense in adding another platform from which to buy e-books, while the possibility of increasing the already large administrative burden of libraries looms. And what about the diversity that aggregators bring? Scale is an important factor, and one the


larger presses such as MIT Press and UMP have. As Watkinson puts it: ‘The priority for a platform like us is to make sure we can work with OCLC, ProQuest and EBSCO, and then, actually, it won’t be too difficult.’


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Publications from the UWP’s CDSMS series 6 Research Information August/September 2019 @researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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