[GOAL] open access and monographs - ARC and wider

[Colin Steele]

I checked with the ARC CEO yesterday and the ARC policy “ARC requires that any publications . . .”  does cover books. 

Open access should not be not simply confined to STM articles but rather to the publicly funded created knowledge of researchers. Academic books fall into that category. The focus here is meant to relate to HASS disciplines not science monographs, where they still exist. nor textbooks.  In the context of subsidies, articles are also ‘subsidised’ by academic free content and peer review to publishers. In any case, where book subsidies occur, they are low compared to the totality of journal subscriptions and ‘hidden’ library processing costs.

Most academic print books currently only sell between 250 to 350 print copies globally, mostly to libraries, which means access to their embedded knowledge is limited. Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press USA, commented at the American Historical Association’s January meeting, that historians, more than any other group of scholars, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation, he believed, was “borderline catastrophic ”. As an aside, the ANU E Press had almost 700,000 complete PDF downloads last year. 

There are examples in the past where major ARC funded HASS research could not easily find a monograph publisher because it was not deemed commercial by the then university ‘trade’ publishers and the geographic subject content had little appeal to northern hemisphere publishers. 

Emeritus Professor John Sutherland, of  University College London, once reflected on the differing standards of presses: “There are, as every wide-awake academic knows, presses with acceptance hurdles so low that a scholarly mole could get over them. They edit minimally, publish no more than the predictable minimum library sale (200 or so) and make their money from volume. They repay their authors neither in money nor prestige. They put out a few good books; and a lot of the other kind. The best imprints (Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, for example) set the bar deterring high. A scholarly kangaroo will have trouble clearing their hurdle”. 

The recent profit margins of OUP and CUP certainly place them well ahead of the general scholarly publishing pack. Cambridge University Press’s annual financial results for the year ended 30 April 2012, saw sales of £245 million, with an operating surplus of £3.4 million. Sales increased 3.8% compared to the previous year, much of which was accounted for by a large increase in digital sales ‒ 50% up on the previous year, and accounting for 30% of the academic output of the press.

OUP reported a10% growth in sales on the financial year ending 31st March 2012. Sales for the year were nearly £696 million, up from £649 million in 2011. Sales for all the OUP press’s programs thus topped US$1 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, making it the world’s first billion dollar university press. These are the exception rather than the rule for university presses.

At University College London, academic researchers were asked in 2012 about their monograph publishing preferences by the University Library. The generic response was that “They all want to be published by Oxford or Cambridge University Presses”. However, the same academics admitted that the future of the scholarly monograph was in doubt, but they were unsure what that future was!

The UK  Finch committee acknowledged that it did nit have time to cover either books or research data, both important issues in terms of scholarly output. In Australia, the Book Industry Collaborative Council (BICC), established by the Government in June 2012, has an expert reference group (ERG), examining ways to maximise exposure of Australian scholarly book publishing to the global research community. I am a member. The report of the ERG, expected mid-year, will hopefully help facilitate sustainable digital models for Australian monograph scholarship.

“The Government is to review the treatment of academic publications with a view to giving "appropriate" recognition to digital work. . . The industry, through the new Book Industry Collaborative Council, may consider working with the Australian Research Council and other potential funding partners, including universities, to identify alternative strategies to achieve greater dissemination of scholarly outputs from the humanities and social sciences." ARC comments need  also to be put in this context.

In the UK, according to RIN, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9% of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4% in 2009. It also means that many esoteric subject monographs become economically unviable, leading to the fact that publishers increasingly select titles based primarily upon the potential for sales rather than scholarly worth. 

Universities and funding agencies now need to look holistically at all scholarly communication costs. There is surely no point in institutions supporting the huge costs of academic research if there is no means of distributing and accessing monographic content effectively. Many academics spend years researching and writing a scholarly book, but then find themselves either without a publishing outlet or with relatively few sales, and commensurate low exposure for their research. Relatively few get substantial royalties. 

OAPEN (OA Publishing in European Networks) issued in November 2012 had of a survey of attitudes to OA in the humanities. The survey received 690 responses from HASS academics, mostly from the UK. The points included :

·         Familiarity with open access is at 30 per cent and awareness is at 50 per cent, although this was before the UK Finch report;

·          

·         Around 50 per cent of researchers think it is OK to make a profit from OA publishing as long as that profit goes back into supporting the discipline or making more OA content available; 20 per cent think you can make a profit and use it however you like and 20 per cent think that you can make a profit but only to cover costs. This is interesting for business modelling;

·         Academics value highly the distribution and marketing services of publishers more than any other service they provide; 80 per cent rated these services as important or very important where as other services such as peer review, copy editing and design all came in under 70 per cent;

There are at least over 25 global initiatives of some significance developing open access for monographs to improve discoverability, usage and impact, while reducing costs some through shared infrastructure and digital formats. 

 

Current business models for monographs include:

 

·         purely commercial publications: profits needed to sustain operations, 

·         subsidised monograph publishing,

·         Charging fees to make the monograph Open Access, eg Springer Open Access. 

 

·         institutional subsidies, eg university library-press collaborations such as Mpublishing/Michigan UP, Purdue, Göttingen University Press

 

·         research council requirements 

 

·         library licensing/consortia, e.g. OpenEdition Freemium, Knowledge Unlatched, JSTOR, Project Muse. Compact For Open-Access Publishing Equity, which involves major institutions such as Dartmouth, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley and Cornell. 

 

·         patron driven acquisitions. Publishers Partner With De Gruyter for PDA:

 

·         crowd sourcing, eg Open Book. Open Book Publishers was founded in 2008 by a small group of distinguished academics at the University of Cambridge. The academics include Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge and the British Academy. Open Book Publishers  represents an innovative model of scholarly publishing, where all titles are available as free digital versions from the OBP site, and additional formats including pdf and print can be purchased. Some of OBP's publishing costs are covered by research grants awarded to authors, and the income from the additional formats ensures this model of open access publishing is sustainable. The founders “feel that the dissemination of research should be in the hands of academic institutions and societies rather than commercial publishers. “We are looking to collaborate with these groups to create one-off publications or to develop whole series. Our model offers societies and institutions a flexible and affordable way of publishing, with the opportunity to include online multi-media content. Our Open Access ethos means that research published with us will reach the widest possible readership.”

 

·         A number of the models rely on library licensing arrangements, which though are as yet relatively untested in library operational contexts, eg Knowledge Unlatched and Open Freemium.

The Australian context is relevant here. ANU E Press, which is seen as  part of the ANU scholarly communication infrastructure, like the library, has 4.6 staff members. The aim of the E Press is to more effectively distribute ANU research monographic effort within global networks and is particularly focused on publications in HASS, especially Asian and Pacific studies. Access in 2012 came from Oceania (including Australia) 34%; North America 23%;Asia 23%;  Europe 18% and Africa 2%. The global reach here is wide.

The ANU Colleges and their 21editorial boards take responsibility for all processes from initially commissioning publication proposals through peer review to final copy editing. These academic areas also take responsibility for most if not all costs associated with these processes. Central E Press services include quality assurance in relation to style and editorial standards; digital system-based services supporting document preparation, publication, discovery, access and preservation; print on demand; and marketing and reporting. The ANU E Press publishing framework is thus a distributed editorial model, supported centrally by a set of IT services. 

ANU E Press titles are freely available in HTML, PDF, and mobile device formats and are discoverable through Google Book Search and Google Scholar. A total of  just under 5000 print-on-demand copies were sold in 2012. The Press published between 50 -70 titles per year from 2009 to 2012 –mostly monographs. Download statistics in 2012 totalled nearly 700,000 from just over 400,000 visitors 


Sydney University Press is another case study :“SUP operates as part of the Sydney University’s Library’s eScholarship division. The Library funds SUP through the two contract salaries. All other expenditure is funded through sales revenue, publication subsidies and CAL licence revenue. SUP publishes approximately 20–25 titles a year. SUP staff manages all aspects of the book publishing process from selection of titles for publication through to release and marketing. Books are typically released as print-on-demand paperbacks. A new workflow process aimed at simultaneously releasing books in electronic format is under review.


SUP operates on a hybrid model combining commercial publishing with open access. To date, SUP has published seven law titles and one health title as OA publications. Several others have been released in OA after an embargo period. All the remaining books are for sale. Apart from scholarly books, SUP publishes literature classics many of which are out-of-copyright (available in OA) as well as print, while others are still in copyright and not available for release in OA. The SUP eStore provides a partnership platform for the distribution/sale of other University publications, such as the Sydney Law School, and print-on-demand services

SUP also engages in innovative activities associated with ARC projects such as the Australian Poetry Library (ARC Linkage between Sydney and CAL) and National Indigenous Recording Project. One could add more Australian OA monograph examples from Adelaide, Monash, UTS etc” . 

In response to another assertion, more and more academic publishers are putting out short monographs, so the distinction between long articles and short books is increasingly blurred. Thus Palgrave Pivot publishes peer-reviewed research at lengths between the journal article and the monograph. This e-first initiative “liberates scholarship from the straightjacket of traditional formats, allowing works to be published in the format and length best suited to the research itself, within 12 weeks of manuscript acceptance. Palgrave Pivot was developed following a year-long research project, which asked over 1,000 scholars about the challenges faced when publishing research”. The findings showed that the scholarly community had a real need for an alternative publishing format, Palgrave Macmillan has created a form to occupy the middle ground between a journal article and a monograph that will have significant impact on future work in HASS. 

Another HASS example is St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture. The purpose of this series is to publish a range of shorter monographs and studies, between 25,000 and 50,000 words long, which illuminate the history of this community of peoples between the end of the Middle Ages and the late twentieth century. Titles in the series are rigorously peer-reviewed through the editorial board and external assessors, and are published as both e-books and paperbacks.

In the near future, we will  see new models for the academic monograph outputs including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate scholarship worldwide. The ARC policy needs to be viewed in those wider contexts.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
Copland Building 24
Room G037
The Australian National University 
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia


Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Email: colin.steele at anu.edu.au <blocked::mailto:colin.steele at anu.edu.au> 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20130122/00d208c4/attachment-0001.html