The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Reimagining the Digital Monograph: Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers

A JSTOR Labs ReportJune 2017Scholarly books are increasingly available in digital form, but the online interfaces for using these books often allow only for the browsing of portable document format (PDF) files. JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development group within the not-for-profit digital library JSTOR, undertook an ideation and design process to develop new and different ways of showing scholarly books online, with the goal that this new viewing interface be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement for any scholarly book that is already available in PDF form. This paper documents that design process, including the recommendations of a working group of scholars, publishers, and librarians convened by JSTOR Labs and the Columbia University Libraries in October 2016. The prototype monograph viewer developed through this process—called “Topicgraph”—is described herein and is freely available online at https://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Why Book Processing Charges (BPCs) Vary So Much

Observers of monograph publishing often complain of a lack of transparency around publishing “costs”. There is the sense that BPCs are arbitrary and do not relate to real costs. In a landscape study covering eight European countries (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and UK) my colleagues and I came across BPCs ranging from €500 to €18,500 ($585 - $21,640). Here I aim to explain why by looking at what services are offered for a BPC and also explain why coming up with precise and comparable costs is problematic. The figures are taken mainly from UK and global English-language publishing, however, the basic considerations do not differ greatly from those found elsewhere. A glossary of accounting terms is provided at the end of this article. One purpose of this article has been to indicate that BPCs and APCs are not the same and to show how greater transparency can lead to getting to reasonable BPCs with less acrimony than has been the case with journal APCs.