Sadness, High Hopes Mark Beginning of New Era

Citation

Wachsberger, K. (1999), "Sadness, High Hopes Mark Beginning of New Era", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916daa.001

Sadness, High Hopes Mark Beginning of New Era

Sadness, High Hopes Mark Beginning of New Era

Ken Wachsberger

The Pierian Press Years

News Flash

I've been editor of Library Hi Tech News (LHTN) for ten years. I've written a few news articles in that time and I've edited or rewritten every article that was published. This is the first time I've written an editorial. But changes are happening with LHTN and her sister publications, Reference Services Review (RSR) and Library Hi Tech (LHT). I'd like to share those changes and some thoughts, in particular on their impact on academic publishing.

The news: MCB University Press, a British-based publisher of 120 academic journals, bibliographic and full text databases, acquired LHTN, RSR, and LHT in December from Pierian Press. I was traded to MCB as part of the deal ­ I'll remain as managing editor of the three and editor of LHTN, but I also will be picking up four or five other journals to manage in the library and information technology field.

Coming over with me to MCB are RSR editor Ilene Rockman irockman@csuhayward.edu and LHT editor Michael Seadle seadle@MAIL.LIB.MSU.EDU. With the demands of the transition, the three of us corresponded with each other more in the first month of MCB's ownership than we did in all our previous years together. We expect to continue corresponding, to the benefit of all the journals. We are energized by MCB's energy and slightly overwhelmed by our newfound growth potential. But every opportunity comes with a price.

Brief Success Story

My price is no longer working at Pierian Press for the finest people I've ever known, Ed and Mary Ellen Wall (see Figure 1). Ed founded the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Pierian Press http://www.pierianpress.com in 1968 as a hobby after selling his first book to another press and being dissatisfied with what they did to it. Other books followed, then his first journal, Reference Services Review, in 1972. As his business grew, always the themes hovered close to the issues of how to make information more easily accessible to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, and the emerging technology and its effect on librarianship. Another theme was peace through understanding, a product perhaps of their nonviolent Quaker backgrounds. In 1984, Ed left his job as head librarian at the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus and became a full-time publisher at Pierian Press.

All that time, Mary Ellen ran the business side of Pierian Press, in the early years often from home so she could be with their son and three daughters, who all are now out of college and married: the phones, the billing, payroll, fulfillment, any requests for subscriptions or back issues, even design and layout of the journals and books ­ Mary Ellen handled all of these. Ed admitted without her he'd forget to do it. She never did. In addition to her work at Pierian Press, she has been officer in the local American Business Woman's Association and has been honored by them as "Woman of the Year."

Figure 1.Ed and Mary Ellen Wall, founders of Pierian Press

Together they created a successful publishing business with a worldwide reputation for producing educational tools to help information professionals cope with and benefit from the changing "paradigm," a word I understood but never actually heard in a sentence before I heard Ed say it and now hear everywhere. Through Reference Services Review and the Resources on Contemporary Issues book series, Pierian Press set the professional standard for publishing substantive annotated bibliographies. In addition, they created a favorable work atmosphere for their employees that included annual Halloween parties, mid-winter luncheon celebrations, trips to their home, regular bonuses, even small ones during tough times, occasional store-bought or homemade pastries in the kitchen, recognition for birthdays, and a working knowledge that the people who worked there were as much a part of the company's success as they were. For me personally, I appreciated that they tolerated my peculiar work habits ­ including my spending hours working at restaurants rather than in my office and my inability to not do personal work at the office (because I also did Pierian Press work at home) ­ as long as I got the job done. I always did.

Today the Pierian Press catalog has grown to include Ed's access tools: Consumers Index, Media Review Digest, A Matter Of Fact, Directory of HelpLines, and their corresponding databases, plus new ones you'll hear about when they're ready to be marketed. In addition, Ed continues to publish occasional reference works.

Transition Period

But the journals were Ed's "babies," including Serials Review, which Ed sold to JAI Press in 1996, and which Elsevier picked up recently when they bought JAI Press. He loved the journals and the continuing connection they gave him to his profession. He admired the people who made up the journals' editorial boards and came away from board meetings energized. His pre-ALA message to his board members, which I am conveying here, is that he thanks them all for the contributions they made over the years, he hopes they will continue to help his journals now that they are at MCB, and he will thank them personally but he's been spending 16 hours a day trying to keep his server running. Parting with the journals, I'm sure he'll say, was not easy.

In part, because the labor-intensive demands of his total operation were more than his small full-time staff of under two dozen could handle. But also in recent years Ed's attention has become increasingly focused on the financial and creative demands of his evolving databases. During that time, he's been taking small steps to extricate himself from any task that diverted his attention from his databases and the technology, which he must conceptualize and create because his databases are generally too advanced for vendors to handle with their own present technology. (Look, for instance, for StoryTime Database, a wonderful collaboration between Ed and me for the K-12 market that you'll hear more about when Ed invents the technology to handle what it can do.) Giving up editorship of LHT was one small step. Selling Serials Review was another. A third was getting away from book publishing.

Still, it was important to Ed that the journals remain in good hands. He felt good about MCB University Press, and so far so do I. The journals will have an opportunity to grow again in this much larger organization, which takes pride in its author-friendly self-image.

THE MCB YEARS

Overview

MCB University Press http://www.mcb.co.uk was founded in 1967 in Bradford, England, as a management consultancy firm called Management Consultants Bradford. Today, two of the founders still remain as owners but the business itself is largely a female-run organization. Out of 166 employees and directors, 106 are women. The receptionist is a woman. So are the heads of half of the 18 departments. As a father of the 1990s myself, the parent who is counted on to take my kids to their lessons after school or pick them up early if they get sick, I couldn't accept a job that was hard-core 9-5. "If Kathryn [Toledano, Director of Business Development and Logistics] has to be with her son, she leaves," I was told.

As soon as a journal is acquired by MCB it is considered an international journal and begins the process of actually becoming so. That means expanding and diversifying its board of advisors so that it includes experts from all over the world, and publishing articles that deal with issues from around the world. With LHTN, for instance, we will increasingly cover international conferences. We always will be looking for readers to alert us to conferences to list in our calendar and to contribute conference reports for publication. We also are strengthening our regular columns, especially on enabling technology and international librarianship, and listening to ideas from readers for new columns.

Limitations and Opportunities

Publishing some 800 issues a year is a demanding job. At MCB, they've been able to do that by creating a group of templates and fitting each new journal into the existing template that most closely resembles it. The goal of the end result is a journal maybe not identical to the earlier version but close enough to not shock long-time readers. RSR and LHT both fit into the same template at Pierian Press. At MCB, they will fit into the template of Internet Research.

• •

  Positive: No more continuation articles.

• •

  Neutral: No more superscripts for footnotes; MCB uses the Harvard style for references (source in parentheses: last name, comma, year; alphabetical list of references at the end of the article).

• •

  Negative: That template doesn't allow for sidebars. What used to be a sidebar in RSR and LHT now will be an appendix. However, the MCB folks who came to Ann Arbor during final negotiations were intrigued by the idea of sidebars and liked their appearance. Will Internet Research have sidebars someday? Could be.

Meanwhile, LHTN didn't fit into any of the pre-existing molds. It wasn't even close. So MCB's production department has attempted to duplicate it by creating a template; as I write this, I myself haven't seen it.

We expect all the journals to continue to offer the same amount of content. If the page totals differ, it probably is partly because one version carried more words per page than the other. In addition, contributors to LHTN, RSR, and LHT will gain access to MCB's international network of academic writers; they will be invited to participate in Library Link, MCB's discussion list for library and information technology professionals; and they will be eligible for recognition at MCB's annual awards banquet in London.

Author-Friendliness at Pierian Press

Is this author-friendly? What does it mean to be author-friendly in academic publishing? The definition is changing radically. The biggest issues of contention are ownership of copyright and electronic rights.

Before the Electronic and Information Age, copyright was a relative non-issue in academic publishing. Publishers generally wrote ownership into their standard boilerplate contracts as, they said, a convenience to the author and authors signed away their rights without paying attention because the actual value of copyright depends on what one does with it and not much was being done with it. Certainly few academic treatises made it to Hollywood, and electronic publishing didn't exist.

Pierian Press had a fairly laid-back policy on copyright but in practice it was author-friendly. Whether or not they ever claimed ownership of individual books I don't know because in my job I didn't handle the book contracts. With journals, Pierian Press always claimed copyright ownership of each collection, which is standard publishing procedure in the USA, but copyright of individual articles can only be transferred by a signed, written agreement, which Ed never required of journal authors. Nevertheless, whenever a journal author asked to retain copyright, a notice appeared on the appropriate page of the article. Ed never, to my knowledge, denied an author's request to reprint his or her article elsewhere or duplicate it to handout at conferences, but asked that acknowledgment be given to Pierian Press for prior publication, a standard courtesy in the publishing business. Then again, Pierian Press never did a lot with the information once it was in print, so they had little reason to claim additional rights beyond first publication.

Meanwhile, academic writers did not know much about publishing other than that if they did not publish they would perish. The stereotype of authors giving away all claims to intellectual ownership ­ and even looking with disdain at the thought of financial reward ­ in exchange for a correctly spelled byline is based on fact. I remember the RSR board meeting where Ed admitted apologetically that he was thinking of raising the subscription price, something he faithfully had not done for several years, in deference to rising journal prices, increasing technology costs, and lowered library budgets that board members and other librarians already were facing nationwide. The reason: He wanted to pay the authors ­ not much, not nearly what they were worth, but at least an honorarium to show they were appreciated. There was a collective gasp: "What? Pay the writers?" He never brought up the subject again.

Copyright Takes on Meaning, Writers Awaken

But the potential benefits ­ in terms of royalties, exposure, access, and control ­ and the ruthlessness with which some publishers have retaliated against writers for asking to share in those benefits, have made authors in the USA sensitive to the issue of giving away copyright, which after all was always legally theirs to give away in the first place. It has become a matter of principle and of dignity. It is now becoming standard practice for freelance writers to consider both print rights and Web rights to be primary publishing rights and to expect to share fairly in the benefits of both. When The New York Times and several other newspapers imposed a new contract on freelance writers that took away the copyright and all rights forever in exchange for one print payment, massive resistance from freelancers caused them to relent.

Clearly this is not the stated direction of MCB's Authors' Charter[1], which outlines the contractual rights of authors and responsibilities of MCB: "MCB's mission is to be the international publisher of choice for both researchers and practitioners, adding value throughout the publication process and investing in new technologies to increase access to, and dissemination of, the body of knowledge by working in partnership with, and promoting the best interests of, our contributing authors." According to the Charter and conversations I have had with folks at MCB, although they take copyright ­ not an author-friendly act in itself ­ even in the name of author convenience, a red-flag term for authors ­ their policy allows authors to reuse their own material freely and even profit from those reuses without having to split additional profits. Further, if MCB is asked for permission to reprint an author's article, they will contact the author first for permission and will refuse permission if that is the author's decision. If the author grants permission, MCB will pay the author 20 per cent of those royalties. This practice shows an author-friendly intention.

MCB's four-page Journal Article Record (JAR) form, which MCB authors are required to submit with their articles, is the legal vehicle through which the author transfers copyright. It makes no mention of royalties or amounts, unless that is inferred in the clause ensuring "fair and faithful representation of my/our work in all media." However, representations by myself and Michael Seadle have led to MCB reviewing the current JAR forms in terms of content and length.

The Cutting Edge of Author-Friendliness

I believe that MCB wants to remain author-friendly and even be on the cutting edge of author-friendliness in the new paradigm. But I know they also need convenience in exploiting all technology present and future, as per their Authors' Charter, and in paying any royalties that may accrue. Can the contract be modified so that writers still maintain copyright but they grant the uses that MCB needs to productively (for publishers and writers) exploit the new technologies?

I believe so. The result would be good for academic publishing. One benefit: it would spare authors the humiliating indignity of having to ask permission to reuse their own intellectual creations (although MCB currently does not). Certainly that would be author-friendly. MCB, for instance, might lease certain author rights "in perpetuity," without denying the author also the opportunity to use those rights. At Michigan State University, in East Lansing, for instance, one Copyright Permission Form states: "I authorize Michigan State University (MSU) to audiotape, videotape and/or photograph my image and/or voice at my presentation on [date] for use in research, educational, and public service programs, including, but not limited to, Web access as part of the collections of the MSU Libraries. I grant MSU non-exclusive permission to edit, duplicate, distribute, reproduce, reformat and translate into other languages these audio, video, film and/or print images, in any manner, without payment of fees, in perpetuity. None of these permissions shall be construed as a transfer of copyright ownership."

The "without payment of fees" clause likely is attributed in part to MSU's desire for convenience. Could royalties be paid in a convenient manner? The National Writers Union (NWU) has addressed this issue. [Disclosure: I'm a member.]

In the May 1995 issue of LHTN, I interviewed Becky Lenzini, president of CARL Corporation (Wachsberger, 1995). CARL Corporation earlier that year had entered into unprecedented discussion with NWU to change its copyright payment policies. Out of those negotiations evolved Publication Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), the NWU's collective licensing service for collecting royalties paid for reuse. PRC addresses the convenience issue that publishers complain about while addressing freelancers' concern about publishers reusing freelance material without paying for it, all the while assuming that the writer retains copyright. MCB's policy is relatively liberal in this regard already. Through e-mail and personal correspondence, MCB folks have signaled a clear interest in discussing options ­ possibly through a tailor-made arrangement with PRC? That attitude would be author-friendly.

As a long-time academic journal editor and a freelance writer myself, I know that writers value their relationships with publishers like Pierian Press that are author-friendly. MCB takes pride in their degree of author-friendliness. But the definition of author-friendliness has changed as radically as has the publishing world itself. We're entering a new paradigm. Addressing the above concerns favorably would put MCB by far in the forefront of author-friendliness worldwide in these important and timely arenas. While other companies are being denounced regularly by authors for their practices, MCB would be lauded.

It is hoped, therefore, that MCB will continue its work with organized writers to create a new template of publisher-writer teamwork. I am confident that they will.

I'd like to hear from readers on the issue of being an academic writer in the Electronic and Information Age. What experiences have you had with publishers and contracts? I'd like to hear from publishers also. What would make an author-friendly contract that also recognized the need of publishers for convenience in exploiting technology present and future?

Note

1. MCB, "Authors' charter: your rights as a contributor to an MCB journal," http://www.mcb.co.uk/literati/nethome.htm

Reference

Wachsberger, K. (1995), "Appendix 1: 'We've been paying copyright fees since day one': an interview with CARL president Rebecca Lenzini," Library Hi Tech News, No. 122, May, pp. 3-4.

Wachsberger is editor of Library Hi Tech News, Ann Arbor, Michigan. eng_wachsber@online.emich.edu.