RE: OA monographs

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Apologies for adding to this so late, but I've been blissfully 
off-line on a disc-golfing farm (seriously!).

It depends a little on what you mean by 'monograph', but if it 
means a book-length scholarly work then I know of lots that are 
author posted on freely accessible websites. They don't come from 
the mainstream publishers, nor from the usual NFP houses 
(university presses et al), but from international organisations 
like the UN, World Bank, IMF, EU et al. You'll find their 
websites have lots of author-posted freely available book-length 
scholarly works.

The fact that these organisations can afford to put them there is 
because the taxpayer funding is available to not only do the 
research and write the book, but to pay for its publishing as 
well. This doesn't mean everything in the garden is rosy. I know 
of one international organisation's publishing arm that ran out 
of money following an instruction from on high to put their books 
out for free online. They had to go cap-in-hand back to their 
bosses (which means, in the end, the taxpayer) to get an 
increased budget to pay their bills because their income from 
publication sales collapsed as a result of this policy change.

At OECD, when the funding is provided to pay for publishing we 
make our books availably freely online. The costs involved are, 
of course, much higher than for journal articles, making it a 
considerable item on the budget line for any research project. I 
would estimate that no more than 10% of our books have this 
financing available. Internally, there is a never-ending debate 
about putting our books out for free on the website. In fact the 
debate is largely pointless - the bottom line is financial. If 
the budgets were there to pay for the costs of publishing, then 
they would be freely available. Until these budgets arrive we 
will have to charge subscription fees for online access so we can 
pay our publishing bills. And I'm sure this is the same challenge 
faced by all monograph book publishers.

In the monograph world, there is another difference from 
journals. It is possible to make sections (or more) of a book 
freely available without destroying a book's financial viability. 
Examples include Amazon's 'Read inside the book' and Google 
Books. National Academies Press (NAP) go a step further and made 
a big splash during the Dot.com era when they made their books 
'free' online, and they still offer free access to most of their 
titles (the caveat being that free access is not very 
reader-friendly, to get a reader-friendly e-book you have to 
pay). At OECD we offer a free 'Browse_it' service that allows 
visitors to our online bookshop read the full text of most of our 
books online, but they can't print or copy/paste - very similar, 
in fact, to NAP's policy. Would this count as some form of OA?

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of JOHANNES VELTEROP
Sent: 20 July, 2006 2:37 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: OA monographs

Not a direct answer, but possibly some reasons why:

Journal articles are in the main subject to 'publish or perish'.
Monographs not. The ideal copyright line for a journal author is:
"(c) Me. Please copy this article as often as possible and
distribute it as widely as possible. Just make sure you
acknowledge that it's mine."

That makes open access superbly suitable for journal articles --
primary research articles. That should make such journal articles
also quite naturally follow the model of advertising (despite the
differences): originator-side payment.

This *may* apply to monographs (there are monographs that are
published with subsidies -- if the subsidy is sufficient, those
could easily be published online with open access instead); it
*does* apply to research journals.

Another difference is that the decision to publish is the
editors' for journal articles, but the publishers' for
monographs, making a 'financial firewall' and therefore a 'vanity
publishing barrier' rather more difficult.

Jan Velterop


----- Original Message ----
From: Brian Simboli <brs4@lehigh.edu>
To: SPARC-OAForum@arl.org; liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Tuesday, 18 July, 2006 11:11:24 PM
Subject: OA monographs

(cross-posted)

A question that I posed to another listserv, but that might be germane to
soaf and liblicense.

Is there is an OA movement, akin to the "green rights movement" with respect
to journals, to beseech publishers to allow authors to post a copy of their
monographs on the web?  If not, why hasn't this been an emphasis?

The difference here would be that green rights are rights to self-archive
some version of already publisher-published ejournal articles, whereas this
would be a case of authors  gaining rights to publish electronically
monographs that are sometimes available from the publisher only in paper and
sometimes also electronically available.

Brian Simboli
Science Librarian
Library & Technology Services
E.W. Fairchild Martindale
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170
E-mail: brs4@lehigh.edu