The Idols of Scholarly Publishing 1
21.3 The Idols of the Marketplace
Price's frank discussion of sustaining digital projects like the Whitman Archive and Civil War Washington shows two paths to success. The former has had a strong series of funding and is building an endowment;
the latter, sweat equity and a good home in an established digital humanities center.Similarly,I have become increasingly convinced that sustainability is most likely at the high and low ends of digital project cost structures, a conclusion also reached by Ithaka in two recent reports on sustaining digital resources.5
On the low end, advances in creating, hosting, and maintaining a website have come down sharply over the last decade. Even if Price did not have access to servers and bandwidth at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he and his colleagues working on the site could run it for a few dollars a month and their labor. The advent of high-quality, open-source content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, and (if I may) Omeka, all of which include plugins for once-complex elements such as maps as well as themes that make them look professionally designed, make it far easier and less costly than it once was to produce a scholarly website.
Of course, as Price notes, there is no free lunch. Many low cost digital projects are hosted at digital humanities centers that spread costs (such as running a server) over many projects. The time given by faculty and technical staoften at the margins of their regular workadd up to signicant hidden costs that can become troubling if sta move on or the center loses overall funding. On the other hand, the act of
5Nancy L. Maron, K. Kirby Smith, and Matthew Loy, Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today (Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability, July 2009), available at http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability (<http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/ithaka-case-studies-in-sustainability>) ; Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griths, and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources (Strategic Content Alliance/Ithaka, May 2008), available at http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/sca_ithaka_sustainability_report-nal.pdf (<http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/sca_ithaka_sustainability_report-nal.pdf>) .
APPENDIX 179 freely giving labor is a time-honored way of supporting scholarship. We already give our free labor for the peer review of books and articles. Ithaka also points to in-kind support from host institutions, outsourcing and partnerships, and harnessing volunteer eorts (evidently under consideration by Price and the Civil War Washington Project) as ways to minimize direct costs and do it on the cheap.6
Some projects, however, cannot be supported entirely by these low-cost measures. Perhaps they have a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of documents, or technical infrastructures that move beyond the garden-variety website. What about ambitious digital projects that do not have access to the purses available to large editorial projects like the Papers of George Washington? What if Civil War Washington grows, through sheer grit and gift labor, into a critical resource for historians, literary scholars, and other researchers? What if the project needs a small, dedicated sta or a more substantial infrastructure (with its associated costs)?
The strategic planners of Ithaka point to value creation as the key: In our opinion, delivering impact is the key factor in the potential for achieving long-term sustainability; only high impact and highly useful materials will draw the nancial support from beneciaries needed for long-term success.7 I agree, but I once posited this idea to a venture capitalist. Sustainable business models don't come from the value of goods, he replied matter-of-factly. They come from the scarcity of goods that have value. Although I am a strong supporter of open access and open source, we have clearly set ourselves a nearly Sisyphean task by pushing the free and open while prospecting around for revenue. Most of the literature about sustainability fails to note that most commercial enterprises fail, even with the tremendous advantage of charging for their products. Moreover, while the idea of achieving impact and then a business model sounds good, we need to recognize that much of humanities scholarship is about the esoteric. The universe of stakeholders for some elds may be miniscule, making the ability to garner donations or have libraries subscribe to every academic resource, especially in a recession, even more implausible.
The role of funders is often compared to venture capitalists. But the comparison is imperfect at best.
Venture capitalists may indeed, like funders of open academic resources, provide seed funding, but VCs also often put in additional capital, in increasingly large amounts (i.e., Series A, B, and C funding), to support sustained operations and growth. They also provide critical connections for business deals, marketing, and IPOs, sometimes orchestrating an acquisition themselves. There are no equivalents to these injections of capital, services, or exits in the digital humanities. Ithaka does encourage mergers and acquisitions among digital academic resources, but the incentive structure of the university is perversely opposite that of commercial entrepreneurs: if your project is acquired, not only do you lose oversight of the resource, you also lose credit for it in the long term. Worse: you're not a sudden millionaire.
At an eective rate of at least $1 million per staer, endowments are unrealistic for most projects, and tilt the digital humanities playing eld unhealthily toward institutions with established fundraising prowess.
(I was delighted to see, however, that the Whitman Archive had achieved at least an initial fundraising goal to support editorial functions.) Advertising and corporate sponsorships, also proposed by Ithaka, can cloud the all-important perception of the resource I have already explored. By far the most likely path to scal success is the way that venture capitalist suggested: make your resource scarce and charge for it. That is, sacrice the ideal of open access on the altar of sustainability. We need more discussion about this tension, and creative ways out of it.
A related question is the leadership of these projects. As one Ithaka report notes, Running a start-up what these bigger digital projects eectively becomeis a full-time job and requires full-time leadership.
The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success.8 The report is indeed correct that PIs need to operate like CEOs, not professors, being unabashedly competitive with other resources and sublimating weak academic thoughtfulness in the hardheaded eort to nd revenue. The report recommends that if professors can't do this, they need to hire others. But where do these magical entrepreneurs-in-residence come from, and who maintains them between projects? I happen to know several
6Maron et al., Sustaining Digital Resources, 17-20.
7Guthrie et al., Sustainability and Revenue Models, 5.
8Guthrie et al., Sustainability and Revenue Models, 7.The author would like to thank Tom Scheinfeldt for his helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
at the Center for History and New Media, critical research faculty with the technical know-how, the intellect, and the energy to make complex digital projects succeed. Sustaining them is, unsurprisingly, my top priority.