Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Publishers/Triest Verlag

OS-ADM

Project

Calendar

Training

Guidelines

Case studies

Publishers

DMP

Reports

Credits

Triest Verlag für Architektur, Design und Typografie is a Swiss specialist book publisher based in Zurich and founded in 2015 by Kerstin Forster and Andrea Wiegelmann with the focus on architecture, design and typography.

• Conversation with Triest Verlag (Andrea Wiegelmann, 25.01.2024), interview by Iolanda Pensa and Chiara Barbieri, Project Open Science for arts design and music, SUPSI, 2024, CC BY 4.0.

Description

Triest Verlag publishes 6 to 8 book per year, with a print run of 1500 on average. The publisher's return is about 50% of the net price. In some cases, they are deeply involved in the making of a book and take on the role of co-editors and co-authors. This type of editorial projects, in which the publishers is directly engaged also at the state of research and production of content, can take up to six years in the making. Other projects, instead, come out of cooperations with universities. In these cases, the publishers is not involved in the research or creation of content.

Triest Verlag is known for its beautifully designed and crafted books. For each project they work with freelance graphic designers. They opt for local or short-distance (Switzerland or Germany) printers in order to enable graphic designers to work closely and in person with the printing house. The decision is also made out of ecological reasons so as to reduce C02 emission and comes with higher printing costs.

Open Access

The downsides of OA

Triest Verlag's attitude towards OA is rather reluctant. They see the digital world in conflict with their own approach towards books and publishing as they struggle to find a satisfactory and feasible solution to the digital translation of their printed books.

OA's lack of materiality

The publisher's main issue against OA is its lack of physicality and two-dimensional quality. Each publication is the result of a close collaboration with the graphic designers. Each aspect – layout, font, paper – is thus carefully chosen in order to provide the reader with the best physical experience of the printed book. All the efforts put into the printed object with regards to reader's physical experience of the book are vain once the publication is digitalised.

OA and copyright

Copyright management difficulties are another aspect that does not convince Triest Verlag of the feasibility of OA. Right owners can deny authorisation for the publication in OA of images that are instead included in the printed version of the book. Images in digital version are then pixellated. As such, not only the physical and the digital versions do not correspond, but the latter also becomes pointless since the meaning and the added value of the publication depends on the close dialogue between text and images.

Copyright management for the OA versions is also problematically expensive. Right owners would allow Triest Verlag to publish the images also in OA only if the publisher were to pay a fee per download and this is unfeasible for the publisher since they do not cover the costs through sales. Copyright clearance in OA is also more expensive that the printed version because since the size of the images is not fixed, publishers are charged the prise for full page. In the case of the printed book, instead, the publisher finds that copyright management is easier because details such as image size or print run are known in advance.

A further issue related to copyright and OA that Triest Verlag struggles with is the concern about unwanted and unauthorised re-use of third-parties content once released in OA and downloaded.

(Un)sustainability of OA

Overall, Triest Verlag sees OA as hardly feasible within its current business model as this does not support the waiver of the publisher's return on investment through sales that is implied by OA. The publisher is sceptical about the actual cost-effectiveness of OA for users since the digital format requires technology and equipment with a non-trivial cost. They also point out an ethical problem related to the ecological impact of digital. Finally, they are also conscious and express their concerns about the longevity of digital formats.

OA, AI and data mining

Triest Verlag is also concerned about data mining and the use of content by AI. In particular, the publisher objected to possible commercial use of material without compensating the authors for this.

OA as 'impoverished' version

Despite its critical stance, Triest Verlag is currently in the process of publishing its first book in OA: archithese reader: Critical Positions in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976. OA was requested by the editors in order to comply with the SNSF requests. The book is a survey on the Swiss architectural magazine Archithese that include also the facsimile reprint and English translation of about twenty-five articles.

Copyright of texts and images was a challenging aspect of this publication. Copyright issues got even more complicated with the digital OA version. In some cases, the right holder allowed only the reprint of the extrapolated text but not the reproduction of the original article in the OA version of the book. Some rights holders were willing to allow OA but only upon payment for each download of the book. The publisher considers this option to be unfeasible because it cannot return the costs since the publication is available online free of charge. Overall, this experience gave Triest Verlag further evidence that copyright management with regards to OA is very time-consuming and therefore a difficult workload to manage that they consider not sustainable within the publisher's current business model.

For Triest Verlag, at the moment, the compromise solution is turning the OA digital version of their books into an impoverished version of the actual printed publications which are instead more complex and thus enriched. In the case of Archithese, the OA version has the same layout as the printed book but, due to the above mentioned issues with the copyright clearance of images, the images are pixellated. Thus the OA version only enables readers to access the text. However, the impoverished digital version is not always a viable option because in some cases the lack of images renders the text useless due to the lack of visual information complementing the verbal content.

OA and the Academia

Triest Verlag collaborates on a regular bases with the academia. The “Visual Archives” series, for example, is co-edited together with ECAL / Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (HES-SO). Books from this series focus on unexplored legacies of designers, companies and brands. They feature documents and visual material from archives that are accompanied and contextualised by critical essays. As a result of the SNSF OA policy, from 2024 the series, as well as all publications that are resulting from publicly funded research project, must be published in a digital OA format. Triest Verlag sees its collaboration with Academia as viable as long as the SNSF will accept 'impoverishes' digital versions, that is versions where some of the material included in the printed book (e.g. images) will not the visible, as compliant with its OA strategy. However, the eventual request for the printed and digital versions to be identical without any extra funding supporting the publishers might regrettably be a dealbreaker for Triest Verlag.

Publishers and the SNSF

Since 2017 Triest Verlag has been a member of SWIPS – Swiss Independent Publishers. OA is a topic of debate within the organisation as this is a challenge that all small publishers have to face and find a solution for. SWIPS is active in defending the cause of small independent publishers to the SNSF, explaining the challenges they face in complying with the funding body's OA requirements.