A bit of history: The predecessors of RUP were the Rice Institute Pamphlet series and the quarterly Rice University Studies, followed by a short-lived occasional book publishing operation in the mid-1980s. RIP published faculty research from the university’s founding until it was supplanted by RUS in the 1960s. Both were monograph series with a faculty editor-in-chief and a single part-time staffer who did all copyediting and production editing–and even design, such as it was, and permissions. (I was that staff editor for 9 years, in the days when over-educated women couldn’t get faculty positions.) Typesetting and printing, the largest expenses but still modest, were contracted out.

The subject matter of RIP and RUS ranged from the first (and for all I know, only) scientific study of the armadillo to medieval French poetry to abstruse mathematics to ecological law. The press did no marketing beyond seeking reviews in appropriate scholarly journals. Only libraries subscribed; individual purchasers could buy single copies from the Rice library. A few issues (like the armadillo one) were classics in their field, selling a few copies annually for decades.

Distribution was principally by library exchange. In the late 1970s, scientific journal prices skyrocketed, and many university libraries balked at exchanging their high-priced, specialized journals for Rice’s modestly priced, eclectic one. The Rice library couldn’t justify “subsidizing” the press (by accounting transfer, not real cash) when they had to fork over thousands of actual dollars for subscriptions they used to get in exchange for RUS. The library also demanded its storage space back, requiring the jettisoning of thousands of back issues of RIP and RUS.

At that point, the Rice administration pulled the plug on RUS. A half-hearted attempt to create a book publishing operation that would actually make money ended as expected: scholarly presses require subsidies.

I was happy to see RUP resurrected as a digital press, but I’m not surprised to see the administration cavalierly scuttle it. Regardless of the savings effected by e-publishing and print-on-demand, publishing (good publishing) requires investments of time and money. The world has changed. You won’t find women with graduate degrees and publishing experience willing to work for minimum wage anymore. (Thank heaven.) Marketing and distribution costs have gone up, too.

@Dominic. Hear hear. The major problem facing presses these days is that they are bamboozilified by the language of print vs. digital, as if that were the main locus of cost control. In reality, publishing is expensive either way, and the costs are the same whether the output is an iBook or a Book. But people want to believe that technology lowers costs rather than shifting them around. Nonetheless, I do think that academics need to seriously pay attention to what they do for free and for whom (and with what outcome… open access or not) and what they charge a fee for. I have a whole other blog post about the money I’m collecting for reviewing books for university presses, vs. the money I am not collecting for reviewing articles for OA journals and funding agencies. Everyone should be asking themeselves not only “should I review this?” or “do I want to review this?” but also “what does the public get if I review this?”

There are many lost opportunities with the closure, and with the lack of transparency.

I was ostensibly on the board too — and was never contacted about the closure, much less asked for input as decisions were made.

Finding the right models that balance sustainability and openness of scholarly content ain’t easy, but finding it in a vacuum is even harder.

Thanks for the petition link 😉

“with a business model like this, who needs enemies?”

A major outcome of the transition to digital publishing has been the discovery that many, many people involved in the publishing process are really, really bad at their jobs. We tend to describe this badness in capitalist terms — poor business skills, and (sometimes) the need for privatization or importation of business models into the academy. But really, this badness just boils down to basic things like being well-organized and having some sense of personal integrity and responsibility. I’m sure there are plenty of professors who are short on these traits but… it’s disturbing to see administrators — whose (attempt to) justify their existence because of they are supposedly expert in sorting things out. In the case of RUP, it appears, just the opposite is true.

http://cnx.org/lenses/Ricepress/affiliation

this is how all RUP texts were made open access.
It won’t hurt Connexions much, I presume they will be retained as the back-end in any future iteration.

Forgive my ignorance as an outsider, but you mention connexions in this post; what was the relationship between Rice University Press and connexions, and where is this likely to leave connexions as a project?