Musings on Open Access books

["Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>]

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.universityofcalifornia.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/presentations/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)