HighWire Press: Keeping the Scholars in Scholarly Publishing.

HIGHWIRE Press 107791589

This article profiles HighWire Press of Michael A. Keller, a man of many titles including: Ida M. Green University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of the Stanford University Press and Publisher of HighWire Press. 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. According to its Web site, many academics think of HighWire as the Silicon Valley realization of a university press in the new millennium. Most notably, HighWire is a service to publishers of scientific and other research journals. Although its roots lie in scientific, technical and medical research, HighWire began with the online production of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The service, as of 2004, hosts 361 journal titles, including some in the social sciences. 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. Finally, HighWire hosts semi-annual meetings in which client publishers discuss the features, functions, and directions of scholarly publishing. 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. For Keller, the satisfaction comes from effecting real change.