My reply below is not about the (undoubted) benefits of Open Access to books, both to the reader (always) and to the author (sometimes). <div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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?</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.<br>
<div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><div><br></div><div>On 2013-01-21, at 8:11 PM, Colin Steele <<a href="mailto:Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au">Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">I checked with the ARC CEO yesterday and the ARC policy “ARC requires that any publications . . .” <b>does</b> cover books.<br></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote><div>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. </div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>I think it is a huge mistake to conflate articles and books in mandates, whether funder mandates or institutional mandates.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But that's a <i>publication</i> subsidy, not a <i>research</i> subsidy, and I thought we were talking about the strings funders (like ARC) could attach to their research subsidies.</div><blockquote type="cite">
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>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).</div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">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. </div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">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).</div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">I've had an intuitive guide that has never led me astray for 20 years: <i>Always distinguish author give-aways (willing give-aways) from all other forms of content</i>. 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.</div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>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. </div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">So whereas Green OA mandates for articles have already been a huge battle, in countless ways, <i>authors feeling they did not want their articles to be OA was not one of them</i>. </div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">(I am of course not talking about the authors who don't want it solely because they are afraid of their publishers, and their <i>publishers</i> don't want it. Backing from funder and institutional mandates help those authors do what they want to do anyway.)</div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>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!)</div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>Thank goodness, given what a right mess they made of what they did cover!</div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">But if this discussion is about OA publishing <i>subsidies</i> (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…</div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:14pt">In the UK, according to RIN, library print book </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:14pt">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>OA books definitely have a potential niche there -- but again, nothing to do with OA mandates.<br><blockquote type="cite"><div lang="EN-AU" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="WordSection1" style>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><span lang="EN" style="font-size:14pt">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.</span></blockquote>
</div></div></blockquote>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…)</div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">
<br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">Colin is right though, that this is all "wide of the ARC." </div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">
I'm still focussed on the basic question of <i>what ARC can and should mandate, as a condition of receiving research funding…</i></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium">
Stevan Harnad</div></div></div>