US: Abandoning an digital publishing experiment

Rice University Press is being shut down next month, ending an experiment in an all-digital model of scholarly publishing, writes Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed. While university officials said they needed to make a difficult economic decision to end the operation, they acted against the recommendations of an outside review team that had urged Rice to bolster its support for the publishing operation.

Many supporters of academic publishing had high hopes for the Rice project, which was launched in 2006 with the goal of merging the quality and rigour of scholarly peer review with the convenience and low cost of digital publishing. The demise of the project led to immediate speculation about whether the Rice experience suggested difficulties for the economic model or if other factors may have been decisive.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site