[GOAL] Re: Monographs

[l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk]

A few responses to Guedon's comments:
--The "gold" approach here in the UK = author-pay, whatever it may  
mean elsewhere.
--If many journals offer "free" services to authors, that's because  
they have an income-stream to pay the people who provide the services,  
whether by some form of subsidy (and I don't know of many in my field)  
or by subscription fees.  For these services to be provided will  
either require these income sources or the author-pay model.
--We can extrapolate roughly what this would cost authors:  It would  
be at least multiple(s) of the single-article charge being levied  
already by, e.g., OUP and Brill for "gold" option article publication  
(in each case £2000 or more for articles of ca. 20 pp. printed).
--I fail to see how any sort of mandate would be of any comfort and  
assistance to authors, whether first-time or established.  I repeat:  
Surely a fundamental rule should be that any convention should have  
the confidence and support of the constituency affected.  The  
alternative is tyranny.

Larry Hurtado


Quoting Guédon Jean-Claude <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> on Fri,  
29 Nov 2013 10:24:32 +0000:

> 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 [goal-bounces at eprints.org] de la part  
> de l.hurtado at ed.ac.uk [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> 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> 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
>>> 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)
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> GOAL mailing list
>>> GOAL at eprints.org
>>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> 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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>



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.