Scholarly Book Publishing Practice
Academic book publishers' policies and practices in online publishing

An ALPSP survey being conducted by Laura Cox (Frontline Global Marketing Services) and John Cox (John Cox Associates)

Link to survey
Glossary of Terms

Please complete the online survey above if your organisation publishes academic books of any type - monographs, conference reports, research reports, manuals, guides etc. The survey is designed to provide information on all sorts of publishing, both tradional print based forms as well as online digital versions in eBook form.

Please complete the survey if at all possible before the end of June 2009.  If you are not able to provide information yourself please bring the survey to the attention of colleagues.

ALPSP also expects to carry out and report on a a number of detailed case-studies with ALPSP book publishing members and these will be combined with the survey results when they become available as an ALPSP research report or reports in the Autumn of 2009.

ALPSP has previously conducted three surveys of scholarly journal publishing practice, in 2003, 2005 and 2008, which were published as industry reports under the title Scholarly Publishing Practice.  These surveys provided a great deal of information on the ways in which journal publishers have responded to the challenges of online publishing and to the expectations of authors, readers and libraries at a time when publishers are under scrutiny. We are now undertaking a similar survey of book and eBook publishers to ascertain the policies and practices of publishers in this emerging and complex market.

The data that is collected will be analysed and a report published by ALPSP later in 2009, with initial results available at the ALPSP Annual Conference in September.  Using hard data, it will enable ALPSP and, indeed, the whole publishing industry to represent accurately what policies publishers are adopting in the complex book and eBook arena.

We have attempted to cover the main areas of policy and practice without making the survey gratuitously long. However, as a first look at this market it is necessary to collect data on a wide range of issues, particularly as we are yet to see exactly where this new sector will start to homogenise.  To attempt to do that as much as possible we have left a lot of questions that may not be relevant to you open to view, rather than using extensive 'skip logic' so that you can add whatever may be relevant, as we suspect that publishers are likely to have lots of different models and practices working concurrently at present. 

Even if you do not publish e-books, please do complete the questionnaire as it covers traditional book publishing too, and submit it to us so that we can present a full, evidence-based, picture of our industry to government and to the academic and library communities. 

Your cooperation in completing the questionnaire in full is greatly appreciated. We estimate that it will take about 15-20 minutes to complete.  However, if you need to consult a colleague you will be able to go back into the questionnaire until the closing date and amend your answers.

We have also created a brief Glossary of Terms - this is mainly to distinguish those terms that are frequently used to cover more than one model/vendor and to explain a few terms which you may or may not have come across.

To fill out the survey please click on the link
 
If you would prefer to receive a Word version of the survey to fill out or print and post back, please contact Laura Cox

Thank you in advance for providing us with the information we need.

Nick Evans
21 May 2009