Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? — Should University Presses Partner with Commercial Publishers? De Gruyter has the Answer! Column Editors: Deni Auclair (Editorial Director, Humanities and Social Sciences Journals and U.S. Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Deni.Auclair@degruyter.com> and John Corkery (Client Engagement Director, LibLynx) <john@liblynx.com> www.liblynx.com German publisher De Gruyter has made a splash in the U.S. with its University Press Library (UPL) program, supported by a brand-new platform built by 67 Bricks and launched in February of 2021. Although I recently joined De Gruyter in the journals division, I didn’t know a lot about the UPL program and wanted to learn more, including how the data-focused platform will increase its value exponentially. To that end, I spoke with Steve Fallon, Vice President, Americas and Strategic Partnerships. Deni Auclair: First, tell me a bit about De Gruyter. I know it’s one of the oldest publishers, best known for its Humanities and Social Sciences content. Is there anything else we should know about it? Steve Fallon: We have a unique origin that started with the publishing of our first book in 1749 when our small bookstore in Berlin was granted the royal privilege to print books by King Frederick II of Prussia. It wasn’t until 1919 that we became Walter De Gruyter Verlag when three renowned publishing houses merged to become one company. We’ve made significant contributions to the German literary canon over the past 270 years with works by the Brothers Grimm, Schiller, Schlegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kant. In the late 2000s, the company made the strategic decision to become more international through organic publishing, partnerships and acquisitions. Today, we publish 105 OA journals, 353 subscription journals and over 1,500 books per year, predominantly in English language. Through our partnership program with university presses and small international publishers, we distribute an additional 2,500+ new titles per year. It has been quite an evolution from our roots publishing only in German. Last year, because of COVID, we did a free access campaign with over 1,800 libraries globally — the overwhelming response to that campaign was users were surprised regarding the amount of content we published and distributed. If you include the archive for De Gruyter and our partners, we will have over 100,000 titles on degruyter.com by the end of 2022. DA: This column is meant to be about technology, but I’m curious, can you tell me more about the partnership program? How was it started? How does it work? That is, what is the business model and who do you partner with? SF: In 2010 our presence in the Americas was described to me as “sleepy and dusty.” I think that assessment was apt. Recently, our vendors have been surprised to find out that we are celebrating our 50th year in the U.S. in December! It wasn’t until 2011, when we moved the U.S. office from New York to Boston, that we made a strategic decision to become more international. As partnership is in our DNA, we were looking for a new book distributor and asked Triliteral, a vendor owned by three presses, Harvard, MIT, and Yale, to do our warehousing, distribution, and
48 Against the Grain / November 2021
fulfillment. At that point, we saw an opportunity to provide digital distribution as a service to university presses like Triliteral provided print distribution for De Gruyter. Harvard University Press expressed interest, with the goal of expanding their digital presence outside the U.S. In 2012 we signed them as our first university press publishing partner. It wasn’t long before we saw larger distribution opportunities for HUP domestically through their gaps in the academic library acquisition landscape. We strategized “By 2019 we had that if HUP supported our business enough data that model, we could generate new and showed there sustainable revenue streams for the press. is very little In 2012, presses were wary of difference in print cannibalization from eBooks usage between and libraries faced challenges due to press-assigned Digital Rights Management restrictions. Harvard was less restrictive restricted-use in 2012 and by the end of 2013 we and nonhad 81 unique libraries buying their restricted-use front list content with our new offer. However, like most other university titles.” presses in 2014, HUP started restricting the use of their front list content and by the end of the year the collection became too restrictive to sell as a front list collection and we went from 81 to 0 libraries. That situation came to a head at Charleston in 2014 and became the clarion call for all stakeholders.
I have to say, Harvard University Press answered the call and Susan Donnelly, then the Sales and Marketing Director, deserves a ton of credit for what happened next. Together, with two new presses that joined our program (Columbia and Princeton), librarians from ten academic libraries and LYRASIS, we created a pilot project to address the serious challenges when it comes to university press front list eBook acquisition for presses and libraries. Five years later, the pilot grew to include five more presses (8) and ten more libraries (20). By 2019 we had enough data that showed there is very little difference in usage between press-assigned restricted-use and non-restricted-use titles. Therefore, the data showed that the three presses in our pilot were suppressing additional digital revenue streams. The pilot project became The University Press Library (UPL) and we launched it where it all began at Charleston in 2019. University presses without their own platform rely on third parties for hosting, distribution, and fulfilment of eBooks. Many aggregators provide similar business models representing their content through single title sales, aggregated collections, and demand-driven models. While the models and global reach
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