What's a university to do when its academic press goes under? In the case of Rice University, they're moving to the web - and as the WSJ's Rebecca Buckman reports, it's a move that adds a new wrinkle to the debate over who will profit from Web publishing.

Although the new press will solicit and edit manuscripts the old-fashioned way, it won't produce traditional books. The publishing house will instead post works online at a new Web site, where people can read a full copy of the book free. They can also order a regular, bound copy from an on-demand printer, at a cost far less than picking up the book in a store. "Our overriding mission is to make this scholarship available for free," says Joey King, executive director of Connexions, the Rice Web-publishing platform that will serve as the new press's backbone. The nonprofit Connexions, founded in 1999 by a Rice engineering professor, offers free downloadable educational course materials on everything from electrical engineering to music theory.

In other words, Connexions uses an open-source model, one where authors are free to edit online and readers can tinker with course material. But many things - including royalty structures - are still being worked out for the new-look university press. Never mind that previous attempts haven't always worked out as well as universities hoped. Stanford University, for example, has placed some of its press titles with online-book distributors, but the move hasn't resulted in "a whole lot of new customers for the [books], at least not so far," says Michael Keller, publisher of the Stanford University Press and the university's librarian.