[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial Licensing

[Andrew A. Adams]

Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that some academic authors
> still have visions of fame and fortune they'd like to achieve through
> publishing books in the traditional manner, so he believes that the
> time for OA in book publishing has not yet arrived. But perhaps a
> simple terminological distinction may suffice to place this problem in
> proper perspective.  Academic books may be divided into two types:
> monographs and trade books. Monographs, by definition, are works of
> scholarship written primarily to address other scholars and are
> therefore unlikely to attract many, if any, readers beyond the walls
> of academe. Trade books encompass a large category that includes, as
> one subset, nonfiction works written by scholars but addressed not
> only to fellow scholars but also to members of the general public.

> There is an easy practical way to distinguish the two: commercial
> trade publishers (as distinct from commercial scholarly publishers
> that do not aim at a trade market) have certain requirements for
> potential sales that guarantee that monographs will never be accepted
> for publication.  It is true that the authors of monographs, published
> by university presses and commercial scholarly publishers, are
> sometimes paid royalties. But these amounts seldom accumulate to large
> sums (unless the monographs happen to become widely adopted in
> classrooms as course assignments--a phenomenon that happens less these
> days when coursepacks and e-reserves permit use of excerpts for
> classroom assignments).  Thus not much is sacrificed, financially
> speaking, by publishing these books OA. And, indeed, a scholar may
> have more to gain, in terms of increased reputation from wider
> circulation that may translate into tenure and promotion, which are
> vastly more financially rewarding over the long term than royalties
> are ever likely to be from monograph sales.

> Also, of course, financial opportunities do not need to be sacrificed
> completely by OA if the CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs,
> preserving some money-generating rights to authors even under OA.

> It also needs to be said that even trade authors can benefit from OA,
> as the successes of such authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig,
> Jonathan Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the free online
> versions of their books serving to stimulate print sales.

> Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite pragmatic enough in
> recognizing that the time has arrived for OA monograph publishing
> also, not just OA article publishing.

While I (and I am fairly sure that Stevan also) agree with you that the ideal 
is for all scholarly output to be Libre OA (there are soem legitimate 
arguments about exactly what level of freedom should be required but at least 
CC-BY-NC-ND) alongside giveaway reviewed journal articles. The pragmatic 
issue, though, is always how we get there. We've seen, unfortunately, that 
misapprehensions of both OA policy, legal rights, real self-interest, and 
other factors lead many academics to sloth and even incredibly objections to 
OA. I think no one can refute that this kind of resistance exists. Given that 
this resistance exists, we need a strategy to undermine the resistance. This 
means grassping the least contentious element fully before trying to move on 
to even other lowish-hanging fruit. It is quite clear that there is no 
rational argument at all (once one strips away publisher FUD and 
misunderstandings) that the materials which researchers ALL give away without 
direct recompense, for which most of the quality control is done without 
direct recompense (indeed in many cases at significant cost for themselves 
and/or their employers) by other reserchers, shouldbe made OA. The only 
simple, clear-cut case for mandated OA is the journal literature. As Bernard 
pointed out recently, once a strong mandate for this kind of material is in 
place, and properly supported/enforced (by following through on the 
commitment, for example, to only allow consideration of items deposited in a 
timely manner for promotiona and tenure decisions) then after a modest time 
(one or two years) then finally the researchers almost all see the benefits 
of OA.

Only after almost all researchers at an institution have seen the light can 
we tackle the issues where there is even a slight argument for occasional 
exemptions, to be decided on a case by case basis.

Politics is the art of the possible. We've shown it is possible to get ID/OA 
Liege model mandates adopted and they provide a scalable approach with an 
accelerating number (hopefully an S-curve with an upper limit approaching 
100% of universities). No other approach has demonstrated scalability (CS and 
HE Physics have not scaled beyond those two disciplines; Gold OA locks in 
ridiculous costs to publish and places unacceptable barriers on too many 
impoverished researchers; etc.). Any university that has adopted and properly 
implemented a Liege-style ID/OA mandate for journal articles can then go on 
to break new ground with books and book chapters, but until most universities 
have such mandates even then the time of their senior people with a passion 
for and belief in the necessity of OA would still be better putting MOST of 
their effort into spreading the word to other institutions while quietly 
working with their own staff on extending the mandate in sensible small 
incremental ways to material for which the case is not so clear and 
all-encompassing: i.e. libre OA, mandates for other types of material, open 
data deposits etc. However, even if somewhere like Liege strengthened their 
mandate to include Libre OA and other types of material, then the way to that 
goal for everyone would still be to first adopt a journal article deposit 
mandate and then strengthen it with the support of the authors, instead of 
trying to go for a big bang.

We don'thave seven league boots so we must plod towards OA one step at a time:

First step: lobby each institution to adopt a Liege-style ID/OA mandate.

Once we've got that step taken by enough institutions then we cantalk about 
the next steps. Otherwise we stumble and get nowhere or at least not very far 
(as we have mostly been doing for well two decades).



-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/