Company Profiled: HighWire Press
http://highwire.stanford.edu
Publisher: Michael A. Keller
No. Employees: 110 Founded: 1995

Stanford University's Michael A. Keller is a man of many titles: Ida M. Green University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of the Stanford University Press, and Publisher of HighWire Press. He's also a man whose professional preoccupations include the support of research, teaching, and learning; the effective deployment of information technology; and the evolution and growth of scholarly communication.

Fortuitously, within two years of Keller's 1993 arrival on campus, Stanford founded HighWire Press to address a growing concern within academia that scientific societies and not-for-profit publishers would, individually, lack the resources and expertise to remain competitive in the Internet era. (Keller, in fact, calls digital preservation of content "the real challenge of the digital age.") The goals of the enterprise, which today serves roughly 150 client publishers, were twofold: "to improve the delivery of scientific research articles through the Web and to help reputable, small- to medium-sized scholarly publishers make the transition to the online environment both efficiently and economically." \

Nine years later, the urgency of these goals is palpable. "The basic problem set is unchanged," Keller laments. "The aggressive consolidation of journals into a very small group of for-profit publishers, the unjustifiable pricing policies of certain publishers, the inefficiency and inadequacy of small-scale Web publishing efforts for professional journals, the inefficiency of editorial processes, the delays in publishing results, and the gross inadequacy of library acquisition budgets to maintain subscription levels in a hyper-inflated and expanding market" all fuel HighWire's mission.

Recently, the market conditions for scholarly publishing "have grown ever worse, but the next 12 months may be telling," he continues. "We've seen the beginning of resistance on the part of the academy to the grotesque manipulation of the market by a few prominent, aggressive ‘wannabe' monopolists. Some of it is foolishly or quixotically high-minded and impractical, some of it is absolutely right on the mark." No matter how you slice it, "there is an urgent, dramatic, critical struggle under way," he says, "between the needs of the academy and the dynamics of leveraged greed which controls scholarly publishing."

To understand why all of this matters, one must first understand the services that HighWire Press provides and the markets that benefit from its efforts.

Don't Fence Me In
According to its Web site, many academics think of HighWire "as the Silicon Valley realization of a university press in the new millennium." Asked to describe what HighWire does, Keller offers this: "There is no generally accepted term for what we do. We don't publish, but we are much more than an aggregator or Web-hosting service."

Most notably, HighWire is a service to publishers (primarily scholarly societies) of scientific and other research journals. "In a nutshell, we take print-oriented files for journal issues from each publisher, convert them to online mark-up forms, and index, hyperlink, and mount them online," he says. That effort involves adding links among authors, articles, and citations; advanced search capabilities; high- resolution images and multimedia; and interactivity.

Although its roots lie in scientific, technical, and medical research—HighWire began with the online production of the Journal of Biological Chemistry—the service today hosts 361 journal titles, including some in the social sciences. "We serve about four million unique IP addresses a month, which generates more than 350 million hits a month," Keller says. "If we define content sources as full-text journal articles, we're up to about 1.6 million articles." (More than 717,000 of them are available worldwide without charge.) "If we include Medline citations and abstracts, which are fully searchable within the HighWire site, the number is approaching 15 million."

But there's more. HighWire also operates Bench>Press, an XML-based manuscript submission, tracking, review, and publishing system that speaks directly to HighWire's mission of "efficiency and timeliness in getting research results to press;" hosts the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; and manages and enforces each client publisher's subscription model "so that those who should see a particular article can and those who should not see a particular article can not," he says.

Finally, HighWire hosts semi-annual meetings in which client publishers "discuss the features, functions, and directions of scholarly publishing. In effect," he adds, "we provide not only a standard for online journals by example, but also a forum in which the future standards are imagined, debated, and decided."

Organizationally, HighWire is a division of Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources. The division supports itself by charging client publishers fees for the services it renders. Although the fee structure is not publicly available, Keller will say that the fees are based in part on the features and functions publishers select from a menu of journal hosting and publisher support services and in part on site traffic.

Keller describes the business goals of the market HighWire serves using three "cascading" characteristics: 1) "consumers and producers of high-impact scholarly and research-oriented information" that is 2) "mostly, but not exclusively, in journal form" and is 3) "published by not-for-profit or responsible for-profit publishers that share the goals of the academy—namely, to advance knowledge by widely disseminating peer-reviewed research results. Indirectly," he adds, "the market of the publishers receiving HighWire's services are members of the academy, faculty, students, and researchers in non-academic settings.

"We have been called a digital co-publisher, but that suggests falsely that we control content," Keller continues. "There's nothing wrong with calling us a digital facilitator," as Information Today columnist Péter Jacsó did in the June 2003 issue, "except that this description is meaningful only in context.

"The strength and weakness of our business model are the same: We are in business to improve scholarly communication, so we are the natural service provider for publishers sympathetic to the academic mission," he says. "The weakness is that we can be undercut in the short term by ordinary vendors that care less about the ultimate utility and dissemination of scholarly content online. Not all scholarly publishers can afford to work with us and we do not wish to low-ball either in price or in quality of service."

The Bloom on the Rose
Despite his frustrations with scholarly publishing, Keller is rather optimistic about academia's adoption of the technology solutions that are becoming commonplace in other business environments. "There is a fantastic amount of activity in academic information technology today, ranging from preprint services to preservation-oriented repository tools, to eportfolios, to course management," he says. "I believe great things will blossom prolifically in the Open Source environment in the years to come. The harbingers are Project Sakai, DSpace, Fedora, LOCKSS, and the Stanford Digital Repository."

For Keller, the satisfaction comes from effecting real change. "I am an advocate of change, of going for big things, of rethinking how things are done, and of pushing hard to make things happen," he says. "I think if you merely stand still, you fall behind."