Agents of the Publishing Chain: From Libraries as Academic Publishers to Libraries as Publishers in eScience and Digital Humanities

Abstract

Whereas Anglo-American universities have had a long tradition and reputation as publishers of scientific research monographs, in Germany, universities, with support of their local libraries, began experimenting with the new role as scientific publishers only two decades ago. The results for member institutions of the “German Academic Press” were relatively modest. The impact factor was far too low to attract authors of high ranked papers and theses to publish them with a small university press or even “university library press”. However, with the transition from print to digital format, the publication chain has changed significantly. Instead of publishing a print version of a thesis, post graduates have begun to search for cheaper alternatives to publish dissertations electronically at almost no costs and at the same time with considerable visibility for their research results worldwide. This was the birth of university repositories in Germany as in other countries as well, managed by faculty as “content provider” and university libraries as online archive.

With the journal crisis and the monopoly of big academic publishers, libraries began to publish open access journals, some in cooperation with faculty. The impact factor again was poor, the content aspect of peer-reviewed high ranked journals led in the end to the golden open access way of publishing, dominated again by big companies.

The next step during the past ten years was the collaboration of libraries with digital humanities projects (e.g....