[GOAL] Re: open access and monographs - ARC and wider

[Stevan Harnad]

My reply below is not about the (undoubted) benefits of Open Access to
books, both to the reader (always) and to the author (sometimes).

It is about the very practical question of what can and should be mandated
(required) by authors' institutions and funders (like ARC) vs. what should
only be encouraged or supported.

The reason this matters is that OA is still being vastly under-provided by
authors and under-mandated by their funders and institutions even today,
when it has already been possible (and beneficial) for at least two
decades.

It has to have something to do with motivation -- and primarily authors'
(i.e., researchers') motivation. What do they all want to give away free
online? and what do only some of them want to give away free online?

If a mandate is to be successful, it better focus first on mandating what
all authors want, not what some authors want and others do not. The
objective is author compliance, not author resistance.

And it seems evident that all authors, in all disciplines, want their
articles to be freely accessible online to all their potential users, not
just those who have subscription access, whereas it is not at all evident
that all authors, in all disciplines, want their books to be freely
accessible online to all their potential users, not just those who pay for
it. (They consider library access to the print edition sufficient for the
latter.)

It may well be that book authors are wrong; it may well be that many, most,
or all will eventually change their minds. But requiring them to make their
books OA now can only create a backlash even against compliance with the
requirement to make their articles OA, which all of them at least want to
do already, even if they don't -- or daren't -- do it without a mandate
from their institutions and funders.

On 2013-01-21, at 8:11 PM, Colin Steele <Colin.Steele at anu.edu.au> wrote:

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.

It's a slippery slope. Can every university author who writes a book while
employed and funded be required to make the book OA? I profoundly doubt it.

And if that was attempted now, the scholarly backlash (from scholars who,
despite its simplicity and despite how long and far and wide it's already
been discussed, still barely understand OA) against attempts to oblige them
to make their books OA will definitely infect and handicap efforts to get
support and compliance for article OA.

Once article OA is a done deal, worldwide, it's safe to try extending it to
further kinds of content. But we are still far from that; and what we have
is still shaky.

I think it is a huge mistake to conflate articles and books in mandates,
whether funder mandates or institutional mandates.

That said, of course when publication itself is subsidized, the subsidizer
is always free to attach strings to that publication subsidy, including, if
they wish, OA; and the subsidized author can then take it or leave it.

But that's a *publication* subsidy, not a *research* subsidy, and I thought
we were talking about the strings funders (like ARC) could attach to their
research subsidies.

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.

I'm not sure what's meant by "academic free content" here: Does it mean the
books that scholars write while they are professors? But the point is that
some of them might be writing books for royalties (or at least the hope of
them), not as "free content" for publishers to publish. (And peer review of
books -- such as it is -- is often "paid" for, if not very generously).

But things are getting somewhat conflated here: Funders subsidize research,
and sometimes also publication costs. Researchers (and their institutions
and salaries) sometimes "subsidize" journals with their free content,
office space, employee time and refereeing services. And institutional
libraries subscribsidize journals and buysidize library books.

But this all has to be sorted out; the whole jumble has no implications for
the question of whether scholars can or should be forced to make their
books OA if they don't want to (and ARC is not paying publishing costs for
authors that can't find a non-OA publisher -- in which case the OA would of
course be voluntary, not mandatory).

I've had an intuitive guide that has never led me astray for 20 years: *Always
distinguish author give-aways (willing give-aways) from all other forms of
content*. The world's grip on OA is still far too frail to mix up the two
forms of content just yet, and risk making enemies of those who should be
OA's allies.

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.

All true. But whereas you can get all article authors to agree to their
articles being OA, you can't get all (or even most, maybe not even many)
authors to agree to their books being made OA.

So whereas Green OA mandates for articles have already been a huge battle,
in countless ways, *authors feeling they did not want their articles to be
OA was not one of them*.

(I am of course not talking about the authors who don't want it solely
because they are afraid of their publishers, and their *publishers* don't
want it. Backing from funder and institutional mandates help those authors
do what they want to do anyway.)

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.

Again, this is orthogonal to the problem: An author who can't find a paper
publisher, and is happy to go with an OA publisher, is not the obstacle --
and doesn't need an ARC mandate (only maybe an ARC publishing subsidy!)

The UK  Finch committee acknowledged that it did not have time to cover
> either books or research data, both important issues in terms of scholarly
> output.

Thank goodness, given what a right mess they made of what they did cover!

But if this discussion is about OA publishing *subsidies* (which is what
the UK Gold OA journal publishing policy is) I rather wish Finch had just
stuck to subsidies (whether for articles or books) and stayed out of
mandates altogether…

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.

OA books definitely have a potential niche there -- but again, nothing to
do with OA mandates.

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.

If so, then academics will flock to OA book publishing opportunities in
droves, especially subsidized ones. (But that has nothing to do with
article OA mandates…)

Colin is right though, that this is all "wide of the ARC."

I'm still focussed on the basic question of *what ARC can and should
mandate, as a condition of receiving research funding…*

Stevan Harnad
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