How Much Do Monographs Cost? And Why Should We Care?

What does it cost to make a high quality, digital monograph? What may sound like an obvious question turns out to be a very knotty one, driving to the heart of the essence of scholarly publishing today. It is particularly relevant in an environment where the potential of a sustainable open access (OA) business model for monographs is being explored. Two complementary studies funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2015 have explored this question to understand the costs involved in creating and disseminating scholarly books. The team at Ithaka S+R studied the full costs of publishing monographs by gathering cost data on a sample of 382 titles across 20 presses. This process involved working with directors, CFOs, and many operational staff to understand the way staff time and effort contribute to the publishing process. In parallel, a separate project at Michigan and Indiana used a top‐down model to identify those costs related to monograph publishing at the University of Michigan Press and Indiana University Press. This cost study was part of a larger project in which focus groups and interviews were conducted with faculty and administrators to explore institutional openness to a flipped business model where the costs of producing a monograph would be borne by the author’s parent institution. The data from these two projects will help to understand how an OA monograph model could work. The studies also get at issues critical to the future of scholarly publishing: Which activities are critical to the creation of scholarly books? When does authoring end and publishing begin? How great a role do publishers play in not just producing a book, but in asserting its place in the scholarship and in current debates? A flipped model of funding monographs has major implications for publishers, libraries, and faculty, so a deep understanding of such questions is essential for the long‐term health of the scholarly communication ecosystem, especially in the humanities and social sciences

Population-Level Compensation Impedes Biological Control of an Invasive Forb and Indirect Release of a Native Grass

The intentional introduction of specialist insect herbivores for biological control of exotic weeds provides ideal but understudied systems for evaluating important ecological concepts related to top-down control, plant compensatory responses, indirect effects, and the influence of environmental context on these processes. Centaurea stoebe (spotted knapweed) is a notorious rangeland weed that exhibited regional declines in the early 2000s, attributed to drought by some and to successful biocontrol by others. We initiated an experiment to quantify the effects of the biocontrol agent, Cyphocleonus achates, on Ce. stoebe and its interaction with a dominant native grass competitor, Pseudoroegneria spicata, under contrasting precipitation conditions. Plots containing monocultures of each plant species or equal mixtures of the two received factorial combinations of Cy. achates herbivory (exclusion or addition) and precipitation (May–June drought or “normal,” defined by the 50-year average) for three years. Cy. achates herbivory reduced survival of adult Ce. stoebe plants by 9% overall, but this effect was stronger under normal precipitation compared to drought conditions, and stronger in mixed-species plots compared to monocultures. Herbivory had no effect on Ce. stoebe per capita seed production or on recruitment of seedlings or juveniles. In normal-precipitation plots of mixed composition, greater adult mortality due to Cy. achates herbivory resulted in increased recruitment of new adult Ce. stoebe. Due to this compensatory response to adult mortality, final Ce. stoebe densities did not differ between herbivory treatments regardless of context. Experimental drought reduced adult Ce. stoebe survival in mixed-species plots but did not impede recruitment of new adults or reduce final Ce. stoebe densities, perhaps due to the limited duration of the treatment. Ce. stoebe strongly depressed P. spicata reproduction and recruitment, but these impacts were not substantively alleviated by herbivory on Ce. stoebe. Population-level compensation by dominant plants may be an important factor inhibiting top-down effects in herbivore-driven and predator-driven cascades

Sustainability implementation toolkit: developing an institutional strategy for supporting digital humanities resources

This toolkit will help administrators create a coherent institutional strategy for supporting digital humanities activities and the valuable outputs that they generate. In addition this tooklit will help to: Understand all of the stages in the digital lifecycle of a project, from project planning to preservation and outreach. Assess the range of project types and complexity, so that your solution can include both scale solutions and customized support where it is needed. Clearly communicate the paths of support to campus faculty. Articulate institutional expectations for project leaders. Obtain the commitment of key stakeholders

Sustaining the Digital Humanities : Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-up Period

As more and more scholars experiment with digital methods and with building digital collections, what measures are in place to make sure that the fruits of these labors are kept vital for the long term? Library directors and chief information officers sense that there is interest on the part of faculty, but does this mean they need to invest in a digital humanities center and hire new staff or just reconfigure the people and resources they already have? First and foremost, what does university leadership seek to gain from such an investment? This study seeks to address the fate of digital research resources - whether they be digital collections of scholarly or other materials, portals, encyclopedias, mapping tools, crowdsourced transcription projects, visualization tools, or other original and innovative projects that may be created by professors, library, or IT staff. Such projects have the potential to provide valuable tools and information to an international audience of learners. Without careful planning and execution, however, they can also all too easily slip between the cracks and quickly become obsolete