[GOAL] Re: Monographs

Fri Nov 29 15:47:42 GMT 2013

The first-copy cost for monographs (the cost most relevant to producing open access monographs) is about $10 - $15,000. This figure comes from research by Greco & Wharton, and confirmed by a series of interviews with senior people in scholarly monograph publishing that I did in 2010/11.

Considering the difference in time investment for writing a monograph as compared to an article, funding for open access monographs should be just as feasible as funding open access scholarly journal articles. If one scholar produces 10 articles over a period of 3 years and is subsidized at $1,000 per article, it makes sense to subsidize another scholar's monograph written over the same period by about the same amount.

Frances Pinter's Knowledge Unlatched is a program designed to help libraries shift from pay-to-purchase to pay-to-subsidize that combines free with premium versions (free on the web, pay for print or e-book special editions).

My library at the University of Ottawa gives us new scholars a fund of $2,000 to develop collections in our area. I have directed the library to make use of a portion of my funds to support a Knowledge Unlatched pilot.

While there are definite disadvantages to the article processing fee method - to me, it's inefficient, encourages commercialization, and makes equity for authors difficult - there are pluses as well.

One potential advantage for us scholars is that pay-for-production of scholarly works introduces a disincentive to requiring a high volume of publications. This would give scholars more time to focus on quality rather than quantity of work!

References

Greco, A. N., & Wharton, R. M. (2008). Should university presses adopt an open access [electronic publishing] business model for all of their scholarly books? Paper presented at the Open Scholarship: Authority, Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing Held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June 2008, Milan. pp. 149-164. Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?149_elpub2008

Morrison, H. (2012) Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. Doctoral dissertation. Chapter 6: the changing economic and technical environment for scholarly monograph publishing: views from the industry. http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12537

Knowledge Unlatched (2013). An interview with Frances Pinter. http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/2013/01/an-interview-with-frances-pinter/

Morrison, H. (2013). Make my collection open access! The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/10/make-my-collection-open-access.html

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>

On 2013-11-29, at 5:24 AM, Guédon Jean-Claude <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca<mailto:jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>>
 wrote:

There a number of points to be made regarding Hurtado's message:

1. The "horrid 'Gold'" must refer to the author-pay gold. This is not the whole of gold, only a subset. Gold ciovers a wide variety of financing schemes.

2. The figures given for "horrid gold" - incidentally, I like this term applied to author-pay business models - are real, but not general. Thousands of journals offer gratis services to authors and free use by readers because, simply, they are subsidized in one fashion or another.

3. Even if the cost of £2000+ (Sterling) were accepted for articles, the cost of monographs could not be derived from a simplistic linear extrapolation based on page numbers.

4. Young scholars who may not enjoy Hurtado's stature in the world, would be delighted to have their first work published, if only electronically. Moreover, they would probably prefer open access to ensure maximum visibility and use, provided the evaluation process in force within their universities does not treat electronic publishing as inferior.

5. In many countries, e.g. in Canada, subsidies exist to support the publishing of monographs. This precedent opens the door to possible extensions to full OA-publishing support, for example for a young scholar's first book.

Jean-Claude Guédon
________________________________________
De : goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> [goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org>] de la part de l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk<mailto:l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk> [l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk<mailto:l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk>]
Envoyé : jeudi 28 novembre 2013 05:40
À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Objet : [GOAL] Re: Monographs

Further to Steven's comment, as a scholar in the Humanities, in which
the book/monograph is still THE major medium for high-impact
research-publication, mandating a major change such as OA (even
"Green", to say nothing of the horrid "Gold"), would be opposed by at
least the overwhelming majority (and perhaps even unanimously) in the
disciplines concerned.  And the reasons aren't primarily author-income
that might accrue from traditional print-book publication.  For many
European-type small-print-run monographs, sold almost entirely to
libraries, often no royalty accrues to author. Even serious books
intended primarily for other scholars in the field and published by
university presses and/or reputable trade publishers, the royalties
will still be modest in comparison with, e.g., popular fiction works.

My best-selling book, sold ca. 5,000 hardback and has sold now over
another 3000 in paperback.  Several thousand in royalties, but,
seriously, my main aim in writing books has been to get them into the
hands of as many fellow scholars in my field as possible, and also
then into the hands of advanced students and other serious readers.
I've typically gone with a highly-respected and well-established
"trade" publisher, mainly because they combine excellent editing,
marketing, and a readiness to price the books affordably (e.g., a 700
page hardback at $55 USD, because they committed to a 5000 copy
initial print-run.)

For an equivalent service to be provided, someone has to pay.  "Gold"
access articles are costing now £2000+ (Sterling) each, with
page-lengths of ca. 20 print pages.  Imagine what an author would have
to pay for a 150-200 page monograph.  And don't tell me that
everything will be OK, because university libraries will hand over
their acquisitions budget for this.  It won't happen.  Moreover, what
about "independent" and retired scholars, who continue to produce
important works?

And the "Green" approach means no one pays, and so no service
(editing, and other production services, including promotion) will be
done free?  Think again.

But the fundamental thing is this:  Any "mandate" that does not have
the enthusiasm of the constituency is tyranny.  And neither "Green"
nor "Gold" access has any enthusiasm among Humanities scholars as may
be applied to books/monographs.

Larry Hurtado

Quoting Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>> on Mon, 25 Nov 2013
17:09:56 -0500:

Sandy, I'm all for OA to monographs, of course.

It's *mandating* OA to monographs that I am very skeptical about, because
there is unanimity among researchers about desiring -- even if not daring,
except if mandated, to provide -- OA to peer-reviewed journal articles,
whereas there is no such unanimity about monographs.

Not to mention that prestige publishers may not yet be ready to agree to it.

So mandate Green OA to articles first; that done, mandate (or try to
mandate) whatever else you like. But not before, or instead.

Meanwhile, where the author and publisher are willing, there is absolute no
obstacle to providing OA to monographs today, unmandated.

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3 at psu.edu<mailto:sgt3 at psu.edu>> 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.

Sandy Thatcher

At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:

Ann Okerson (as
interviewed<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>by Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I am not sure whether
the
commitment is ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a lifelong
("asymptotic") commitment by now.

I was surprised to see the direction Ann ultimately took because -- as I
have admitted many times -- it was Ann who first opened my eyes to (what
eventually came to be called) "Open Access."

In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the thrall of the scholarly
and scientific potential of the revolutionarily new online medium
itself ("Scholarly
Skywriting"<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>),
eager to get everything to be put online. It was Ann's work on the serials
crisis that made me realize that it was not enough just to get it all
online: it also had to be made accessible (online) to all of its potential
users, toll-free -- not just to those whose institutions could afford the
access-tolls (licenses).

And even that much I came to understand, sluggishly, only after I had
first realized that what set apart the writings in question was not that
they were (as I had first naively dubbed them)
"esoteric<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>"
(i.e., they had few users) but that they were* peer-reviewed research
journal articles*, written by researchers solely for impact, not for
income <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>.

But I don't think the differences between Ann and me can be set down to
ideology vs. pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying to free the
growth of open access from the ideologues (publishing reformers, rights
reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer review reformers, freedom of
information reformers) who are slowing the progress of access to
peer-reviewed journal articles (from "now" to "better") by insisting only
and immediately on what they believe is the "best." Like Ann, I, too, am
all pragmatics (repository software, analyses of the OA impact advantage,
mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).

So Ann just seems to have a different sense of what can (hence should) be
done, now, to maximize access, and how (as well as how fast). And after her
initial, infectious inclination toward toll-free access (which I and others
caught from her) she has apparently concluded that what is needed is to
modify the terms of the tolls (i.e., licensing).

This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on SCOAP3: "All it takes is for
libraries to agree that what they've now paid as subscription fees for
those journals will be paid instead to CERN, who will in turn pay to the
publishers as subsidy for APCs."

I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely pragmatic -- indeed
logical -- grounds: the transition from annual institutional subscription
fees to annual consortial OA publication fees is an incoherent, unscalable,
unsustainable Escherian scheme that contains the seeds of its own
dissolution, rather than a pragmatic means of reaching a stable
"asymptote": Worldwide, across all disciplines, there are P institutions, Q
journals, and R authors, publishing S articles per year. The only relevant
item is the article. The annual consortial licensing model -- reminiscent
of the Big Deal -- is tantamount to a global oligopoly and does not scale
(beyond CERN!).

So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's "predict[ion that] we'll see
such journals evolve into something more like 'full traditional OA' before
too much longer" then one has some practical basis for scepticism -- a
scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid Gold" OA journals -- unless
of course such a transition to Fool's Gold is both mandated and funded by
governments, as the UK and Netherlands governments have lately
proposed<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html>,
under the influence of their publishing lobbies! But the globalization of
such profligate folly seems unlikely on the most pragmatic grounds of all:
affordability. (The scope for remedying world hunger, disease or injustice
that way are marginally better -- and McDonalds would no doubt be
interested in such a yearly global consortial pre-payment
deal<https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad>for their Big Macs
too?)

I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's apparent conflation of the
access problem for journal articles with the access problem for books.
(It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric" criterion again. Many book authors
-- hardly pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches, and fear that free
online access would thwart these dreams, driving away the prestigious
publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their work from vanity press.)

Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has already proved slow enough in
coming, and has turned out to require mandates to induce and embolden
authors to make their articles OA. But for articles, at least, there is
author consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is the motivation to
comply with OA mandates from authors' institutions and funders. Books,
still a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile, no one is stopping those
book authors who want to make their books free online from picking
publishers who agree?>

And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why the librarian-obsession --
perhaps not ideological, but something along the same lines -- with the
Version-of-Record is misplaced when it comes to access to journal articles:
The author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft means the difference
between night and day for would-be users whose institutions cannot afford
toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.

And for the time being the toll-access VoR is safe [modulo the general
digital-preservation problem, which is not an OA problem], while
subscription licenses are being paid by those who can afford them. CHORUS
and SHARE have plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers (and
ideological ones for librarians), but they are vastly outweighed by their
practical disadvantages for research and researchers -- of which the
biggest is that they leave access-provision in the hands of publishers (and
their licensing conditions).

About the Marie-Antoinette option for the developing world -- R4L -- the
less said, the better. The pragmatics really boil down to time: the access
needs of both the developing and the developed world are pressing. Partial
and makeshift solutions are better than nothing, now. But it's been "now"
for an awfully long time; and time is not an ideological but a pragmatic
matter; so is lost research usage and impact.

Ann says: "Here's the fondest hope of the pragmatic OA advocate: that we
settle on a series of business practices that truly make the greatest
possible collection of high-value material accessible to the broadest
possible audience at the lowest possible cost - not just lowest cost to end
users, but lowest cost to all of us."

Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA advocate: "that we settle
on a series of research community policies that truly make the greatest
possible collection of peer-reviewed journal articles accessible online
free for all users, to the practical benefit of all of us."

The online medium has made this practically possible. The publishing
industry -- pragmatists rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this new
practical reality. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

Let me close by suggesting that perhaps something Richard Poynder wrote is
not quite correct either: He wrote "It was [the] affordability problem that
created the accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve."

No, it was the creation of the online medium that made OA not only
practically feasible (and optimal) for research and researchers, but
inevitable.

*Stevan Harnad*

--

Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: sgt3 at psu.edu<mailto:sgt3 at psu.edu>
Phone: (214) 705-1939
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher

"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)

"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who
can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)

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L. W. Hurtado, PhD, FRSE
Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology
Honorary Professorial Fellow
New College (School of Divinity)
University of Edinburgh
Mound Place
Edinburgh, UK. EH1 2LX
Office Phone:  (0)131 650 8920. FAX:  (0)131 650 7952
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/divinity/staff-profiles/hurtado
www.larryhurtado.wordpress.com

--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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