Rice swaps print for digital press

Rice University said Thursday that it will introduce the country's first all-digital academic press after a 10-year hiatus from publishing a print peer-review journal.

The Texas university plans to use an open-source publishing platform, called Connexions, so that professors can author scholarly works with text and multimedia files like audio, animations and referential hyperlinks. With the system, works can be printed on-demand.

"Our decision to revive Rice's press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing," said Charles Henry, Rice University vice provost, university librarian and publisher of Rice University Press during its start-up phase.

The digital press will run similarly to the old-school press in that manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed and edited for final approval by an editorial board. Yet instead of waiting months for a bound book, Connexions will automatically format, index and insert multimedia into the file, making it ready for download and sale within days, according to Rice.

Henry estimated that the start-up costs and annual operating expenses will be one-tenth of those associated with traditional publishing, which can include unsold inventory of physical books and a lengthy editorial process.

"University presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide nearly ubiquitous delivery system, the Internet," he said.