Ralph Shaw and the Model for the University Press
I recently started a practicum related to scholarly communication and publishing with the University of Michigan library system. Though I'll be focusing mostly on their journals, I had the opportunity to hear from a few people about the ideology that lies behind the publishing of their monographs.
I'll paraphrase here from the UofM Press' official announcement of their new Maize Books imprint, since I don't feel that quoting an unofficial conversation from memory is a good idea:
The publications will be high-quality, low-cost, and printed on demand
The author will have the freedom to make their work as Open Access as they choose
"The key to advancing knowledge is sharing your scholarship as widely and as effectively as possible."
These ideas led me back to Ralph Shaw and his Scarecrow Press. I first learned of Shaw though an assignment called "Library Leaders" given in the introductory MLIS course at Wayne State. We were to write a short paper about an individual who had been a leader in the profession at one time or another, and I picked Shaw's name from a list completely at random. I got very lucky.
Shaw was an innovator and a firm believer in efficiency. His Scarecrow Press is one of several great examples of this mentality. Its purpose was to fill the gap left by large publishing companies when it came to academic works, a gap that many University Press' seek to fill to this day. Academic works are, by and large, not profitable enough to see publication from the larger companies. Shaw conceived the Scarecrow Press as a means of publishing esoteric academic works in a way that was both cheap and efficient, all while effectively disseminating these publications as widely as possible.
Shaw garnered a reputation among his contemporaries as being anti-technology, but this was an unfortunate characterization that could not be further from the truth. He opposed the use of technology when it would be inefficient. A favorite anecdote of his involved a library system evaluating its operations in preparation of bringing in a computerized system. Through the evaluation, the library system was able to find and eliminate so many bad procedures that, by the end of it, they realized that they didn't need the new computerized system at all. Case in point, though, Shaw completely renovated the USDA's Bibliography of Agriculture by photocopying index cards. The publication had been anywhere from 6 months to several years out-of-date before Shaw; his new methods meant that the Bibliography often shipped out to subscribers only a few days after the last entry had been received.
Monographs published by his Scarecrow Press were not the nicest-looking books on the shelves, and the same can be said of print-on-demand books (though they continue to improve). They were, though, quick, easy, and cheap, just like print-on-demand books can be. The University Press in general, and this model in particular, does not rely on a large staff. Shaw saw this as another way to keep overhead costs down and efficiency up. This streamlined vision of the publisher was, in fact, the inspiration behind the Scarecrow Press name.
Of course, it would be difficult for anyone to foresee the advent of Open Access. Giving away books would have been impractical; one must at least recoup the cost of materials and shipping, and few authors would refuse to cash a royalty check should they find it in their mailbox. It's the digital age now, though, and print-on-demand books allow publishers to charge for materials and shipping on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Through the Maize Books imprint, authors can choose how open they want their books to be.
I think that if Shaw were alive today and had today's technology at his disposal, he would either have developed such a system on his own or adopted it after rigorously evaluating its efficiency. That, I think, might be all that needs to be said about this new model for the University Press. For, as Shaw's colleague and former Dean of the Graduate School of Library Services at Rutgers Lowell Martin said of him:
I quickly learned to listen to him if I wanted to anticipate what librarians would be thinking a decade later.
“About Us”. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.scarecrowpress.com/SCP/About/. Accessed 26 September, 2011.
Hines, T. C. (1975). Shaw and the Machine. In N. D. Stevens (Ed.), Essays For Ralph Shaw (pp. 6 – 14). Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Martin, L. (1975). A Tribute to Ralph Shaw. In N. D. Stevens (Ed.), Essays For Ralph Shaw (pp. 3 – 5). Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Turner, I. B. (1983). Ralph Shaw. In W. A. Wiegand (Ed.), Leaders in Academic Librarianship: 1925 – 1975 (pp. 288 – 319). Pittsburgh, PA: Beta Phi Mu.
