Information Technology Reference
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and/or thrived in this context have been those (like economics or
linguistics or classics) with international appeal.
In the increasingly complex world of digital scholarship the individual
researcher is often out of touch, for a variety of reasons, with the
problems and solutions to scholarly communication issues. Thompson
(2005) argued that while many academics 'depend on the presses to
publish their work . . . they generally know precious little about the
forces driving presses to act in ways that are sometimes at odds with the
aims and priorities of academics . . . the monograph can survive only if
the academic community actively support it'.
Whither the university press?
Historically, university presses were established to distribute the scholar-
ship of their university (Steele, 2008). They lost their way, in this context,
in the last decades of the 20th century, when commercial publishers,
mostly in Europe, grew rapidly to fill the publishing vacuum in the post-
Sputnik expansion funding of university research. The rise of the multi-
national STM 'Big Deals' and the decline in university library budgets in
real terms saw a significant reduction by libraries in the purchasing of
monographs and the output of learned societies and small publishers.
Big Deals can bring considerable benefits and underpin research by
making a far greater range of material widely available at the desktop, so
naturally they are very popular with researchers, who are, however,
largely distanced from the issues of scholarly communication and the
ever-increasing costs of subscriptions. The UK Research Information
Network (2009) has outlined the advantages of Big Deals with university
libraries, but has also cautioned that they 'bring risks: libraries are often
locked for several years into deals that may take up 75% or more of their
acquisition budgets, leaving them little scope to spend funds on other
materials, particularly monographs'. Books are especially in danger in
budget downturns because they are, in a sense, paid for out of disposable
income in a way fixed serial subscriptions are not. So, just as casual staff
are laid off before tenured staff in universities, books are simply not
ordered, so as to meet budget shortfalls.
A decline in revenues led many university press publishers away from
their academic core business to publishing products which were often
