Progress toward OA in the social sciences and humanities: “

Tracey Caldwell, OA in the humanities badlands, Information World Review, June 4, 2008. Excerpt:

The field of social sciences and humanities (SSH)…faces a…crisis in publishing [similar to that in the STM fields]. In STM, this crisis has been one of the drivers for open access, but this has not been the case in SSH so far.

The dearth of funding in the SSH sector has been one the main reasons it has lagged behind in getting research online and embracing open access. There is not a lot of money around to finance author-pays models of open access (OA), although there has also been an absence of drive on the part of researchers towards open access, backed by a cultural resistance in some disciplines to any sharing of research at all.

But recently, there has been a dawning of understanding among researchers that OA can bring benefits much broader than simple speed and ease of access to research.

At the same time, publishers facing demands for open access have started to make their concerns known, citing the long tail of access to research in this sector that would threaten their business model. Compared with the STM sector, there is a much higher proportion of journal articles accessed for the first time over a year after publication in SSH….

The launch of the Open Humanities Press (OHP), an international OA publishing collective in critical and cultural theory, at the end of April is one sign of the growing realisation of the need for OA in humanities….

The EU has put its weight behind moves to hasten OA in SSH through the so-called Action 32 of the STM-based COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) European programme. Action 32 aims to create a digital infrastructure for collaborative humanities research on the web….

[Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF)] believes the first step to OA in the SSH sector is to provide better access to research that is already in the public domain….

Many researchers in this sector simply do not know how to go about making their research open access. A survey by RIN showed that only 14% of arts and humanities researchers (compared with 30% in the physical sciences and 36% in the life sciences) think they are familiar with the options for making their research outputs open access.

[David Green, global journals publishing director for Taylor & Francis] believes it is too early to tell what the true impact of OA would be on the SSH sector.

‘One of the big American medical journals found a one-time drop of around 5-10% of subscriptions when it made its back archive free to access after a couple of years. We saw something similar, if less marked, with two of our journals when they introduced their 12- and 24-month embargo postprint policies. Renewals since have been good. This seems a common experience: a small loss in the first year after introducing some form of OA, followed by a large increase in usage.’

So would it hold more widely in SSH? ‘Hard to say, but we would remain concerned that SSH material has a much longer half-life and much longer usage tail than STM….

[Michael Jubb, director of the Research Information Network (RIN)] is part of a concerted effort to guide institutions towards centralised arrangements to pay publishing fees. He says: ‘I see no sign at all that research councils have much enthusiasm for meeting the costs of publishing. I am chairing a meeting on payment of publication fees and the practicalities of how institutions might take a more strategic approach to payment for publication….

The idea of providing a quality assurance layer to open access articles deposited in institutional repositories [sometimes called 'overlay journals'] may be of especial interest to the fragmented and cash-strapped social sciences and humanities communities….

(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.)

Amazon.com-CU Library partnership

A selection of rare and out-of-print historical materials at Cornell University Library is only a click away for readers using a new print-on-demand service.

The library partnered with BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, in June 2006 to make available some of its unique non-copyrighted holdings — collections ranging from historical mathematics and agriculture texts to anti-slavery pamphlets.

(Via Peter Suber.)

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.)

Newfound Press is a new digital imprint from the University of Tennessee University Libraries. The press recognises that digital publication offers universities an affordable route to publish themselves the fruits of their scholars’ research. All its publications will be Open-Access.

Today’s scholarly publishing environment presents a strategic opportunity for academic libraries to expand their role in the publications process. Universities are both creators and consumers in the information economy. A digital library press offers the potential for making scholarly and specialized resources widely available at a reasonable cost.

The University of Tennessee Libraries is developing a framework to make scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Newfound Press, the University Libraries digital imprint, advances the community of learning by experimenting with effective and open systems of scholarly communication. Drawing on the resources that the university has invested in digital library development, Newfound Press collaborates with authors and researchers to bring new forms of publication to an expanding scholarly universe. We consider manuscripts in all disciplines, encompassing scientific research, humanistic scholarship, and artistic creation.

It will publish OA journals as well as OA books and OA multimedia scholarship. It only asks for non-exclusive rights from authors and offers CC licenses as an option. It works in partnership with the University of Tennessee institutional repository.

(Via 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.”

A special panel of the MLA is looking at ways to overhaul tenure. Early reports indicate a proposed move away from insistence upon publication of a monograph, and a recognition that print publication should not necessarily be regarded as having higher status than online publication.

Report and some interesting comments at:

Inside Higher Ed :: Radical Change for Tenure