Keeping pace with a national trend, custom publishing on the Harvard campus has increased sharply in the last few years.

According to a new report on custom publishing on college campuses prepared by O'Donnell and Associates, a Connecticut-based market research firm, compilations of articles and textbook chapters like sourcebooks and course packs are the "only growth area" in textbook publishing.

William Witt, the copyright officer in the Harvard's office of sourcebook publications, which handles all the sourcebooks for the Core classes, said approximately three-quarters of the Core classes have sourcebooks.

"When it started out, there were about 10 [sourcebooks]," Witt said. "Five years ago, there were 30 per term. Now about 40 courses per term [use sourcebooks].

Officials at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a company that handles permissions for publishers, said that in the past year alone, it had a 40 percent increase in the amount of requests from Harvard.

Overall, the CCC has seen an increase of 50 percent last year on top of a 66 percent increase the year before that.

The quantity of sourcebooks is not the only thing that have been increasing--costs have too.

"The price of sourcebooks has been going up," Witt says. "Every term, publishers are consistently raising their prices. I've been told that because people use sourcebooks instead of textbooks, it's necessary for them to make the money back."

"My feeling is that the prices are going to rise because I haven't seen them stop," he added.

Jerry Denault, who puts together the sourcebooks for General Education classes, also said that publishing permission fees have increased.

"Clearly there has been an increase in permission cost among a substantial number of publishers," Denault said. "OIT costs have gone up a little, but not drastically."

However, Isabella L. Hinds '67, the director of professional relations for the CCC, said that publishers are not increasing their prices.

"We haven't seen any increase from individual publishers," she said. "They appreciate your budgets are limited and there is an educational issue at stake. There is sensitivity."

Denault also said the CCC, which entered the academic permissions market in the summer of 1991, has made direct bargaining between professors and publishers a thing of the past.

"The Copyright Clearance Center serves as a bureaucracy between the publisher and us. It's a much more difficult route to complain," Denault said. "There are some [fees] that have gone up a lot, and it protects them [publishers] from nasty letters and nasty complaints."