With reference to some of the recent emails related to this
topic, I don't necessarily think we should throw the Open
Access
book out with the bathwater of either publisher or article
preferences. There is a significant opportunity here for
universities, who want to distribute their knowledge more
effectively through Open Access monographs, to utilise
present
technologies and opportunities .
The ACLS report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth"
(http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls.ci.report
.pdf) on
Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
chaired by John Unsworth, which has just been released in
draft
form,includes the following paras.
"Scholarship cannot exist without a system of
scholarly
communication: the cost of that system is a necessary cost
of
doing academic business. One could say that every part of
this
system is subsidized- from faculty to presses to libraries-
and
one could equally well say that every part operates under
significant financial constraints. In the case of university
based publishers, institutional subsidy has declined in
recent
years, forcing university presses to behave more like
commercial
entities. However, if we take a longer view of the
information
life-cycle in universities, revenue from sales may not be
the
best measure of the value of scholarship. It may make more
sense
to conceive of scholarly communication as a public good
rather
than to think of it as a marketable commodity.
Collectively, then, we should act to support the system of
scholarly communication as a public good- and this
collective
action must be as broad as possible, including not only
those
universities with presses, but also all universities with
faculty, libraries, students, and public outreach. After
all, the
social value produced by the system as a whole is enjoyed by
all
of these constituents.
In considering how best to organize the publishing side of
scholarly communication, it will also be important to be
open to
new business models. Received opinion and settled
assumptions may
be very costly, both in terms of missed opportunities and in
terms of unforeseen expenses. For example, defying
conventional
wisdom, the National Academies Press has for some time now
been
distributing the content of its monographs free on the web,
and
(thanks in part to a carefully thought-out strategy for
doing
that) it has seen its sales of print increase dramatically.
By comparison to print, born-digital scholarship will be
expensive for publishers to create, and even more expensive
for
libraries to maintain over time. But even considering these
costs, owning and maintaining digital collections locally or
consortially, rather than renting access to them from
commercial
publishers, is likely to be a cost-cutting strategy in the
long
run. If universities do not own the content they produce- if
they
do not collect it, hold it, and preserve it- then commercial
interests will certainly step in to do the job, and they
will do
it on the basis of market demands rather than as a public
good.
If universities do collect, preserve, and provide open
access to
the content they produce, and if everyone in the system of
scholarly communication understands that the goods being
produced
and shared are in fact public goods and not private
property, the
remaining challenge will be to determine how much, and what,
to
produce.
Such questions would normally be answered with reference to
demand, and one analysis of the "crisis in scholarly
publishing"
is that it is a crisis of audience. Average university press
print runs are now in the low hundreds, and though digital
printing lowers the unit-cost for printing short runs of
books,
selling fewer books raises the cost per copy to the library
or
scholar and makes it harder for the publisher to cover
prepress
costs, which are still the most significant portion of the
total
cost of producing a book or article. On the other hand,
university presses could (and should) expand the audience
for
humanities scholarship by making it more readily available
online. Unless this public good can easily be found by the
public- by readers outside the university- demand is certain
to
be underestimated and undersupplied.
We note that some university presses have already made great
strides in electronic publishing ... These and other
experiments
in electronic publishing in the humanities and social
sciences,
and experiments in building and maintaining digital
collections
in libraries and institutional repositories, need to be
supported
as they move toward sustainability, and they need to be
funded
(by universities, by private foundations, and by the public)
with
the expectation that they will move toward open access- an
area
in which many of the natural sciences and some social
sciences
are conspicuously ahead of the humanities."
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Some of the new Australian e presses( http://epress.anu.edu.au/
and http://escholarship.
usyd.edu.au/ reflect that philosophy, as
does California escholarship editions
http://content
.cdlib.org/escholarship/ . California stated in its
white paper The Case of Scholarly Book Publishing
http://www.universityofcali
fornia.edu/senate/committees/scsc/monogrpahs.scsc.0506.pdf
"Faculty, libraries, and scholarly book publishers
must
collaborate to make best use of each entity's strengths,
leverage
work that is already being done, and use the university's
financial resources most efficiently. We encourage creative
partnerships, such as the one between the California Digital
Library and UC Press, which is creating book series that are
managed by faculty editorial boards, uses the CDL's
eScholarship
repository for digital publication, and leverages the
Press's
printing and marketing services.
Relevant here are the discussions at the American
Association of
University Presses annual meeting on 16th June
http://aaupnet.org/resources/presentations/
digitalpublish1_potter.pdf
in which Peter Potter inter alia highlights the integration
of
the press into the wider life of the university.
And from his second talk at the same meeting
"I'm fully prepared to accept that the old university
press model
for publishing and distributing monographs has about run its
course. And I'm also willing to admit that new technologies
present a basic challenge to the way scholarship is done,
leading
to new forms of scholarly communication that we are only
just
beginning to grasp. At the same time, I believe that the
monograph has not yet outlived its usefulness and that
there's
something to be gained from focusing on the transition of
monograph-type scholarship to the digital realm."
http://aaupnet.org/resources/presentatio
ns/digitalpublishing2_potter.pdf
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Far better to have institutional peer reviewed monographs
available for free downloads on the net (with POD cheap
print
versions available) than low run, high cost monographs only
available to a few, if indeed authors can find an outlet for
their academic monograph in the first place.The ANU epress
has
seen complete downloads running into the hundreds and even
thousands for each title in a six months period,
particularly
relevant in the dissemination of knowledge of ANU 'Asian'
titles
to the region.
The market for research monographs has contracted in recent
years
for several reasons. With the rise in prices by STM
publishers
and the adoption by many major universities of 'Big Deal'
packages, the proportion of the university library budget
spent
on monographs has declined dramatically.The British Academy
noted
in 2005 "at some point in the 1990s, the UK academy
ceased to be
a self-sustaining monographic community"
As with serials and research assessment exercises, the
reward
systems influence scholarly communication patterns in the
monograph arena. Cronin and La Barre indicated, from a
survey of
the major US Ivy League universities in 2004, that a
scholarly
monograph is still an essential prerequisite for promotion
and
tenure in those universities, yet the outlets for monograph
publishing via university presses have declined. The
monograph
therefore becomes a physical symbol for tenure and
promotion,
with small printruns and even smaller sales, rather than an
effective model for the distribution of the research
contained
within the book.
The Modern Languages Association (MLA) have also highlighted
the
problems of scholarly monograph publishing, particularly for
the
younger scholar. MLA returned to this topic in December 2005
deploring the "fetishization of the monograph"
and called for new
metrics to demonstrate scholarly worth, such as a body of
articles, translations of works, electronic databases, etc.
Dr Linda Butler at ANU has demonstrated the potential of
"extending citation analysis to non-source
items" in Thomson
Scientific databases but this requires a considerable
investment
of time, effort and money. Other researchers have also noted
the
importance of extending journal based research impact
assessment
to book based disciplines.
Better to use public funding to support new models rather
than
continuing subsidies to traditional ones? The Canadian
Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences has an Aid to
Scholarly
Publication Programme (ASPP) that apparently spends about
CDN$
2,000,000/yr on about 160 monographs.This figure would go a
long
way to supporting the new models of escholarship and
improved
access to the content of monographs?
The University of Toronto Project Open Source quoted in
Peter
Suber's blog in July states "Speaking as journal
editors, we
would be cognisant of the fact that it is generally accepted
that
open access increases the impact of the research, including
the
citation rate. Open access offers a better return on
investment
on publicly-funded research. Publicly-funded research can be
accessible within public institutions, without those
institutions
having to spend public monies to private parties for access
to
that research..."
The same words surely could be applied to monographs and
chapters
in monographs made available in peer reviewed open access
mode?
Few academic authors, other than textbooks and the Simon
Schama
and the Jared Diamond generalists, make much money out of
academic monographs, so the analogies with serials are
closer in
that monographs are often giveaways to publishers in the
same way
and subsidised giveaways in many cases. So let's keep the
monograph digital baby in the Open Access bath water.
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
Email: colin.steele anu.edu.au
University Librarian, Australian National University
(1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
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