Re: Publication, Access Provision, and Fair Use

[sgt3@psu.edu]

Stevan: Just to clarify, I am NOT "director" of the AAUP (which 
stands for Association of American University Presses, not 
American Association...); that would be Peter Givler. I am 
incoming AAUP President, that's all.

I appreciate the further clarification about the function of your 
scheme for journal Green OA, Stevan, which is indeed clever.

With regard to books, however, I find this a stunning 
overgeneralization, at least as far as academic books are 
concerned: "At the present time, most book authors are not 
motivated only or mostly by the desire to maximise impact, and 
hence they are not giveaway authors, whereas all journal article 
authors are." Where you qualify the claim by restricting it to 
trade books, I agree. (But even there exceptions exist like 
Lessig and Benkler, who clearly are happy to trade some possible 
lost print sales for much wider impact possibilities.) Trade 
books, however, constitute a very small proportion of the book 
literature that contributes seriously to academic advancement; if 
I were to hazard a guess, I would put the figure at less than 10% 
in terms of numbers of titles. By far academic authors of books 
are more motivated by concerns about impact than income, partly 
because the income directly from sales of academic books is so 
small, but also because the indirect effect on income from wider 
impact, through career advancement and promotion, vastly exceeds 
any royalty income for the vast majority of such authors. For 
more on this, see John Thompson, Books in the Digital Age (Polity 
Press, 2005).

I therefore do take very seriously the possible threat that ideas 
of fair use might post to undercutting monograph publishing. You 
seem to suggest that it will dry up in print anyway. Perhaps so, 
but then we need to find a way of publishing this literature 
electronically that makes economic sense. You suggest a Gold OA 
approach. That's easy to say, but much harder to implement for 
monograph than for journal publishing because the size of 
potential fees up front are substantially greater, on the order 
of $20,000 at a minimum. One reason I encouraged the AAUP to 
issue its statement on open access was precisely to point out the 
greater difficulties that might face Gold OA proponents of book 
than of journal publishing.

Yet, at least for humanities and social sciences, this is an 
imperative that can't be ignored or evaded. Too much of the most 
important scholarship in these fields is done in the form of 
books to be casual about accepting the demise of book publishing 
in these areas. (Only some subsectors, like Anglo-American 
analytic philosophy, might survive a retreat to journal 
publication only.) And the already yawning "digital divide" 
between the book and journal literature is a matter of increasing 
concern to all of us in scholarly publishing. It makes no sense, 
in terms of knowledge dissemination, to have what appears in 
books so much less widely available than most of the journal 
literature now is, even if it isn't in Green or Gold OA form. 
Most monographs these days exist in the form of 400 or 500 copies 
located in just the top academic libraries. By contrast, an 
article in a Project Muse journal, with some 1300 institutional 
subscriptions worldwide (multiplied by the number of users each 
of those institutions serves), has a vastly greater exposure and 
use than monographs do.

Happily, university presses are not alone in being worried about 
this "digital divide." It is a major theme of a new report from 
the Ithaka Group, titled "University Publishing in the Digital 
Age," recently released in draft form for comment by the 
university press community on the eve of our annual meeting in 
Minneapolis, where it will be a topic of discussion at a plenary 
session where the report's chief author, Laura Brown (former 
President of Oxford U.P. in America) and this list's frequent 
commentator Joe Esposito will be fielding questions from the 
audience after their initial presentations. We all look forward 
to a lively discussion and to the official release of this report 
to a wider audience soon. It is addressed as much to 
administrators and librarians, by the way, as it is to university 
press personnel, and the choice of the word "university 
publishing" in the title is deliberately broad to cover all the 
publishing that universities do, not just by their presses but 
also increasingly by librarians, departments, institutes, etc. It 
is an excellent report well worth reading by everyone concerned 
about the future of scholarly communication. (End of promo!)

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press