Publishing Developments

Open Access Publishing in European Networks

OAPEN is a project in Open Access publishing for humanities monographs. The Open Access movement has developed rapidly in the sciences and in journal publishing. The consortium of University-based academic publishers who make up OAPEN believe that the time is ripe to fully explore the possibilities of Open Access in the humanities and social sciences.The OAPEN partners all currently have some involvement in the Open Access movement, and you are encouraged to view their pages on this site and on their own sites….

The partners (to date) are:

• Amsterdam University Press (AUP)
• Georg-August-Universitat Göttingen/Göttingen University Press (UGOE)
• Museum Tusculanum Press (MTP)
• Manchester University Press (MUP)
• Presses Universitaires de Lyon (PUL)
• Firenze University Press (FUP)

(Via Open Access News.)

Peter Suber comments thus on ULB’s decision to issue OA editions of its OP books:

 This is an excellent idea. Instead of letting OP books disappear from view, the original publishers should issue OA editions.  One day presses will routinely publish monographs in dual OA/TA editions, and use the OA editions to increase the visibility and sales of the TA editions.

(Via Open Access News.)

An interesting report blogged by Peter Suber:

More evidence that OA books increase sales of print editions: David Glenn, Yale U. Press Places Book Online in Hopes of Increasing Print Sales, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

[Jack M. Balkin's] Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (Yale University Press, 1998)…was widely discussed in the late 1990s, but the book is now eight years old, and its sales have dwindled. So Mr. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, has concocted a new strategy for promulgating the spread of his own memes: He has persuaded the Yale press to release a free version of the book online. Anyone with Internet access can visit his Web site and download a high-resolution (but nonsearchable) PDF file of each chapter.

The idea, says the author, is that a small portion of the readers who sample Cultural Software online will decide to buy a printed copy of the book, producing a net increase in revenue for the press. (The online version has been issued under a license developed by Creative Commons….)

‘If this experiment succeeds,’ Mr. Balkin says, ‘it may change the way that university presses make money off their backlists. … What we are doing with Cultural Software may be a new and inexpensive way to create interest in the ‘long tail’ of scholarly works that sell only a few copies a year and would otherwise be a drag on profits.’

The director of the press, John E. Donatich, says Mr. Balkin’s experiment is one of several new explorations of electronic publishing there. Yale is among the six presses participating in the Caravan Project, a new program financed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that will allow publishers to release books simultaneously in print-on-demand cloth, paperback, digital, and audio formats…..

The Balkin project follows on the heels of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which Yale published in May. Mr. Benkler, who also teaches at Yale Law School, released his book in a free online format together with wiki pages that allow readers to criticize and annotate his text. Mr. Donatich says he is confident that Mr. Benkler’s online playground has not cannibalized sales of the printed book. On the contrary, the press director reports….

Those instances are hardly the first in which readers have been encouraged to browse books online in the hope that they will buy printed copies. Most university publishers participate in the licensed browsing programs operated by Amazon and Google that allow readers to look at a finite number of pages. More ambitiously, the National Academies Press and the Brookings Institution Press have released free texts of many of their books online, often in an unusual format that lets the reader view the books page by page but does not permit the wholesale downloading or printing of chapters.

‘Our experience indicates that for many titles, free online access acts as a driver for increased sales,’ writes Michael Jon Jensen, director of Web communications for the National Academies, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. ‘We still are seeing increased online sales and stable overall print sales.’…

‘The real question,’ Mr. Balkin says, ‘is what the vocation of academic publishing is. Academic publishers saw themselves as trying to spread knowledge’— high-quality knowledge’— as far and wide as they could … not just as a service that they provide to the universities that they’re associated with. Well, now they can promote that vocation even better than they could before. And they may even be able to make money off of it, which would be all to the good.’

(Via Open Access News.)

Rice University has announced an interesting scheme to publish books online open-access and print-on-demand:

As money-strapped university presses shut down nationwide, Rice University is turning to technology to bring its press back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States.
Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing….

Charles Henry, Rice University vice provost, university librarian and publisher of Rice University Press during the startup phase, said, ‘Our decision to revive Rice’s press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing. On the one hand, university presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide nearly ubiquitous delivery system, the Internet. We avoid costs associated with backlogs, large inventories and unsold physical volumes, and we greatly speed the editorial process. ‘We don’t have a precise figure for our startup costs yet, but it’s safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least 10 times less than what we’d expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model,’ Henry said….

Users will be able to view the content online for free or purchase a copy of the book for download through the Rice University Press Web site. Alternatively, thanks to Connexions’ partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, users will be able to order printed books if they want, in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper. ‘As with a traditional press, our publications will be peer-reviewed, professionally vetted and very high quality,’ Henry said. ‘But the choice to have a printed copy will be up to the customer.’…

Authors published by Rice University Press will retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions’ licensing agreement with Creative Commons.”

(Via Peter Suber, Open Access News.)

The Bookseller (19 January 2006) has an edited version of a speech given by HarperCollins chief executive Victoria Barnsley at the London Business School’s media summit. Excerpts:

“HarperCollins Worldwide has announced plans to create a global digital warehouse for our titles, which search engines will be able to visit by means of an index. This will enable us to meet the demands of the digital age while retaining control of our own digital files and thereby our intellectual property.”

“It’s by this kind of thinking that I hope publishing will take advantage of the fact that it’s rather late to the digital party. We might not’ve been catapulted into it as abruptly as the music industry, but it will fundamentally change our business, and we need to be as prepared as possible.”

“Whether the genuinely user-friendly e-book is developed this year (and Sony has come pretty close), or in 20 years — the internet is fundamentally changing the relationship between authors, readers and content.”

Cambridge University Library Readers’ Newsletter 32 (January 2006) reports thus:

“Electronic versions of over one hundred of the most frequently used titles in college libraries are now accessible to all members of the University through web links in the Newton catalogue and from a dedicated page on the supplier’s website. The agreement with NetLibrary, the e-content division of OCLC, has been negotiated by the Cambridge Colleges’ Libraries’ Forum … This initiative is being tackled by college libraries as part of the solution to the problem of providing resources despite restricted space and budgets, and is targeted at meeting undergraduate demand for key texts in all subjects taught in the Tripos. The collection has been formed following negotiation by NetLibrary with the five publishers whose titles are most frequently borrowed from college libraries.”