On the other hand, although public goods can be extended to more users at or near zero cost, they can be quitecostly to produce in the first place. The case of digitally produced scholarship is an excellent example. Economic theory tellsus is that we ought to charge nothing for it at the margin: we ought to give it away. On the other hand, it tells us nothing abouthow to pay for its production or how much of it to produce. It does tell us that markets will underproduce this kind of good, though,and it also tells us that, as a general matter, the solution of public-goods problems requires collective action.
Collectively, then, we should act to support the system of scholarly communication as a public good—and thiscollective action must be as broad as possible, including not only those universities with presses, but also all universities withfaculty, libraries, students, and public outreach. After all, the social value produced by the system as a whole is enjoyed by all ofthese constituents.
In considering how best to organize the publishing side of scholarly communication, it will also beimportant to be open to new business models. Received opinion and settled assumptions may be very costly, both in terms of missedopportunities and in terms of unforeseen expenses. For example, defying conventional wisdom, the National Academy Press has forsome time now been distributing the content of its monographs free on the Web, and (thanks in part to a carefully thought-out strategyfor doing that) it has seen its sales of print increase dramatically.
By comparison with print, born-digital scholarship will be expensive for publishers to create and, overtime, even more expensive for libraries to maintain. Even considering these costs, however, owning and maintaining digitalcollections locally or consortially, rather than renting access to them from commercial publishers, is likely to be a cost-cuttingstrategy in the long run. If universities do not own the content they produce—if they do not collect it, hold it, and preserveit—then commercial interests will certainly step in to do the job, and they will do it on the basis of market demand rather than as apublic good. If universities do collect, preserve, and provide open access to the content they produce, and if everyone in the systemof scholarly communication understands that the goods being produced and shared are in fact public goods and not privateproperty, the remaining challenge will be to determine how much, and what, to produce.
Such questions would normally be answered with reference to demand, and, indeed, one analysis of the “crisis inscholarly publishing” is that it is a crisis of audience. Average university-press print runs are now in the low hundreds, andalthough digital printing lowers the unit cost for printing short runs of books, selling fewer books raises the cost per copy to thelibrary or scholar and makes it harder for the publisher to cover pre-press costs, which are still the most significant portion ofthe total cost of producing a book or article. On the other hand, university presses could (and should) expand the audience forhumanities scholarship by making it more readily available online. Unless this public good can easily be found by the public—byreaders outside the university—demand is certain to be underestimated and undersupplied.
We note that some university presses have already made great strides in electronic publishing—Johns Hopkins’sProject MUSE,
Illinois’s History Cooperative, and the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda series, to name a few. The Rice University Press, closed in 1996, is being brought“back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States.”As in the open-source community,