Scaling Up: Recovering Costs to Enable Mission-Driven Library Publishing

Abstract

Of the 124 LPC members listed in the 2015 Library Publishing Directory, only eight organizations indicate that they receive any revenue from chargebacks to the authors, editors, faculty, departments, or organizations they serve. Michigan Publishing is not one of these, but by the time the 2016 Library Publishing Directory is published, it will be.

Taking the emerging Michigan Publishing Services and the long-running Michigan Journals programs as case studies, this presentation makes the case that attempting to recover costs by charging for services provided allows library publishing initiatives to:

* scale up sustainably, responding to faculty demand for new services and projects and providing better tools and infrastructure to their partners. * advertise services and recruit new offerings clearly and proactively, rather than scrambling to estimate costs for each new project or turning away projects due to insufficient capacity. * steward university resources--such as departmental funds, research funds, grants, etc.--well by leveraging existing skills and vendor relationships to meet faculty needs in an efficient and mutually beneficial way. We will share the cost model(s) that are emerging here at Michigan Publishing, along with a look under the hood at the challenges we have faced in developing this framework, including coordinating with the university’s central finance office, complying with federal regulations, and communicating these changes to our publishing partners. Finally, we will demonstrate that this is very much a work in progress by projecting where we hope this trajectory will take us in a few years’ time.