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"University presses act as gatekeepers"

Mukund Padmanabhan

Henry Reece, Chief Executive of Oxford University Press, on the dynamics of scholarly publishing.

— PHOTO: Shaju John

Henry Reece: "What we really want to do is to develop the business in ways that are consistent with who we are — disseminators of scholarship and education."

As Secretary of the Delegates and Chief Executive of Oxford University Press, Dr. Henry Reece oversees the largest university press in the world. OUP. A department of the University of Oxford, OUP — which has branches all over the world — is managed by elected members of Oxford University, called Delegates of the Press. Dr. Reece, who has more than 25 years experience in the publishing industry, joined OUP in 1998. He spoke to The Hindu during a brief visit to Chennai. Excerpts from the interview:

Isn't there an inherent tension in running a university press such as OUP? On the one hand, you have this stated commitment to publish academic or scholarly work — which would mean or at least include work that sells very little. On the other, there are the commercial imperatives. Is it hard balancing the two?

You are absolutely right to highlight that. It is at the very heart of the issue of what Oxford University press is all about. But we don't actually see any contradiction there. They are different aspects of the same problem. We see everything as being on a spectrum in terms of the delivery, scholarship and education.

Take [for example] a monograph on 16th century English monasticism. It's probably going to sell 400 or 500 copies in its lifetime. So you need to be able to sell a large number of, say, dictionaries to compensate. You need to cross-subsidise. But our view is that they are both part and parcel of the same dissemination of scholarship and education.

But the issue surely is also about how far one is willing to go in cross subsidising. I ask this in the context of the Oxford Poets series, which sparked off a big controversy when it was axed.

(Laughs) You are going back a long time.

But you were with OUP then.

Yes, just. You are talking eight or nine years ago. The point about the poetry series is that it wasn't really about money. The real issue about poetry was we were not a very successful publisher of contemporary poetry. All the best poets in the U.K. published with Faber, including those Oxford dons who write poetry.

There were two feelings we had. One was we were not doing it very well. And the second point was that this was the only example of creative writing outside of children's writing that we did pretty much anywhere in the world. When you think about the skills we have in-house, they are skills of developing scholarship and education. We really don't have the people qualified to make judgments about contemporary poetry.

So the decision was editorial and not economic?

It was. Part of the problem was the message got mixed. Part of the message that went out was that this was being done for financial reasons. But the amount of money being spent on poetry was very small.

On the subject of the business aspect of publishing, there has been a drive of sorts in recent years to acquire new businesses. You bought out Blackstone, Oceana, the Grove titles. Is this a part of a commercial strategy?

I don't think you can see it as a part of commercial strategy. Years ago, we took the decision that law was a discipline where we wanted to grow. It is a core university discipline. That explains Blackstone and Oceana. We felt very strongly that Grove copyrights [such as the Dictionaries on art and music] would have a very good home with the other leading copyrights that we had. What we really want to do is to develop the business in ways that are consistent with who we are — disseminators of scholarship and education.

Most of your revenue — about 80 per cent — comes from outside Britain. Does this point towards where the real growth opportunities are?

About 83 or 84 per cent. We see most of our opportunities for growth coming from outside the U.K. If you think about it, the U.K. is a relatively small island perched on the edge of Europe. India is a classic example of a market that has grown very rapidly and steadily for us over the years. It is one of the prime growth markets for OUP. It has a lot of advantages to it. It is politically stable and is not a corrupt market to operate in. These are not preconditions we can assume in a lot of markets we operate in worldwide.

We read a lot about the challenges that digitisation poses for publishers. Is there a special threat for scholarly publishers?

Digitisation moves at different speeds in different types of publishing. Reference publishing is the most obvious case. Online reference is the area where you gain the most obvious value — you have huge databases. It's nice to have it in print. But can you move quickly in terms of looking at something related? No. Can you update quickly? No, you can't. The two areas when online publishing has made the deepest inroads are reference publishing and journal publishing. Journals because of the ease of cross-referencing and because scientific communities are far more computer literate.

The really interesting area is scholarly monograph publishing. We were first movers in an initiative two or three years ago called Oxford Scholarship Online — an experiment.

We looked to take four disciplines and migrate in toto — over a thousand monographs online — and see what the impact would be in turning it into a fully searchable database. We didn't get our first iteration of the model absolutely right. But we have adapted it and it has picked up.

But scholarly books are really important in a number of disciplines. If you want to get tenure at a university, a promotion, very often you need to be able to produce a physical entity...

Publish or perish.

Yes, but also publish in hard copy or perish. It's not enough to say `I have just done an online edition.' It doesn't work. It may do in five or ten years time but not at the moment. University presses act as gatekeepers, there is an imprimatur they put on the book. So I think you will see this continued movement of online but at very different speeds in different kinds of publishing.

How important is the charitable tax-exempt status for OUP?

It's not particularly financially important. It is more important as a statement of who we are. We enjoy the status as part of the university. We don't have it in every country...

You lost it in India.

Yes, but we have it in others. In Australia, in Canada, in the U.S. We don't have it in Spain or South Africa. We are pragmatic about it. It is more of a symbolic significance.

We understand fully if tax authorities in certain countries decide that Oxford University Press doesn't qualify as a charity. If we lost our charitable status, we would simply covenant our profits to the university.

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