Open access has gotten its biggest boost from scientific researchers who want to share their work widely via journal articles. It’s taken longer to work its way into the humanities and social sciences. But there’s growing interest in how open access might work for monographs in those disciplines.
Not very long ago, “you couldn’t say there was much awareness about open-access publishing” outside the sciences, said Eelco Ferwerda, director of the Oapen Foundation. (Oapen stands for Open Access Publishing in European Networks.) Now “among the humanities there is a sense that this is a step we must take in order to keep on publishing books but also to make it possible to start innovating,” he says, “because of course that happens in the digital space.” The more content that is openly available, the more authors and publishers can experiment with it.
But it costs money to publish a monograph, open access or not, and publishers may need some convincing that open access won’t hurt sales. “Generally speaking, I think academic publishers are prepared to publish open access, but obviously they will need some sort of compensation,” Mr. Ferwerda said. “Finding that model will take different forms.”
What does a viable, open-access publishing program for humanities and social-sciences monographs look like? A lot of people are trying to answer that question. Mr. Ferwerda’s group helped organize a recent conference, “Open-Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” held in early July at the British Library. The gathering brought together more than 250 publishers, librarians, financial supporters, and researchers to talk about business models, current experiments, anxieties, and possibilities surrounding open-access books. JISC Collections, a British organization that works with financing agencies and universities to provide digital content for education and research, cosponsored the event.
The conference grew partly out of recent developments at the government and institutional levels, as well as grass-roots changes in scholarly attitudes. In the last couple of years, open access has gained a much higher profile, in part thanks to new policies adopted by the British and American governments. Those policies generally deal with journal articles, not monographs, but they have helped spread word of open access beyond the hard sciences. Britain’s Wellcome Trust, a major supporter of biomedical research, recently expanded its support for open access to include monographs and book chapters, with a nod toward the crossover field of medical humanities.
And activist scholars, researchers, and advocates have lobbied hard to raise awareness and to put open-access mandates in place at the institutional level as well.
All this has made some publishers and scholars nervous. Humanists and social scientists don’t generally get the kind of publication subsidies available to scientists, and there’s a persistent worry (not backed up by any good evidence I’ve seen so far) that open access will undermine peer review.
The American Historical Association recently set off a debate when it recommended that institutions allow dissertations to be kept out of the digital public sphere for a period of time. “An increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted Ph.D.'s whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources,” the association said when it announced the policy. “Presumably, online readers will become familiar with an author’s particular argument, methodology, and archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is available.”
In its statement, the association didn’t cite evidence for that claim. But the perception of risk can be enough to deter scholars and publishers from taking a chance on open access.
The JISC/Oapen conference’s organizers were “a bit concerned that a lot of the negativity around open access would transfer to the monograph,” said Caren Milloy, head of projects at JISC Collections. So they offered sessions on “Promising Business Models,” “Peer Review and Quality,” and how to make the transition to open access. “People don’t want to leap into something,” Ms. Milloy said. “They want evidence to make informed decisions.”
An Array of Experiments
Some of that evidence will come from publishers who have been actively exploring their open-access options for monographs as well as for journals. For instance, Palgrave Macmillan and Springer, both large commercial publishers, had representatives at the conference. So did much smaller nonprofit ventures, including Open Book Publishers, a scholar-driven experiment that’s been under way more than four years.
Open Book got its start when three scholars at the University of Cambridge decided they’d had enough of the traditional model of monograph publishing. I spoke with Rupert Gatti, an economist who’s a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of Open Book’s founders and directors. The press focuses on monographs in the humanities and social sciences, published free online under Creative Commons licenses. (Authors pick which particular CC license they prefer.) With traditional publishing, some of the best work in the humanities winds up “locked into books on shelves, and nobody can read it,” Mr. Gatti said.
One of their most popular titles is Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth Finnegan, which the publisher brought back into print with the help of unglue.it, a kind of Kickstarter that supports free e-books.
It costs about £4,000 to publish a book, according to Mr. Gatti. Authors are asked to help find grants if they can. About three-quarters of the company’s direct revenue comes from sales, Mr. Gatti said.
He readily acknowledges that Open Book is a small operation. “Clearly at present we’re a niche,” he told me. “We produce 32 books a year.” That’s a sliver of what comes out of a Routledge or another “legacy” publisher, as he calls them.
Don’t underestimate the power of small, Mr. Gatti said. “Our little company, on a budget of £50,000, has produced more open-access titles” than much bigger publishers, he said. “On average, we are getting about 500 readers per title per month,” he says. “You need to compare that against the standard book run of about 200. It means we’re getting more readers per month that most books get in a lifetime.”
He mentions a flowering of other experiments in smaller-scale, open-access publishing, including Open Humanities Press, Athabasca University Press, and library-based operations like the new Amherst University Press. We also talked about Knowledge Unlatched, a nonprofit organization whose idea is to recruit libraries to help pay to publish certain titles open access. Run by Frances Pinter, a veteran scholarly publisher, Knowledge Unlatched has recruited a number of publishers willing to take part and will begin to sign libraries up this fall.
That diversity of approaches and experiments represents a collective strength, Mr. Gatti says. Open-access monographs “still don’t have the bite that’s appearing in the journals” market, he says, pointing out that there is no book equivalent of PLOS, the Public Library of Science, with its open-access megajournal PLOS One. “But in many ways you don’t want to have a PLOS for monographs,” Mr. Gatti said. “You want to maintain the diversity.”
Mr. Gatti sees open-access publishing as “only a small piece in the bigger picture of digital dissemination” of all kinds of scholarship, part of a new environment in which authors can interact with readers before and after publication, and primary sources can be directly integrated into monographs. “Open access is only a piece of that,” he said. “But if you don’t have open access you cut off the extraordinary potential to engage with the wider community.”