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.)

The Open Humanities Press will launch next Monday. From today’s announcement:

On May 12, 2008, the Open Humanities Press (OHP) will launch with 7 of the leading Open Access journals in critical and cultural theory. A non-profit, international grass-roots initiative, OHP marks a watershed in the growing embrace of Open Access in the humanities.

‘OHP is a bold and timely venture’ said J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, a long-time supporter of the Open Access movement and OHP board member. ‘It is designed to make peer-reviewed scholarly and critical works in a number of humanistic disciplines and cross-disciplines available free online. Initially primarily concerned with journals, OHP may ultimately also include book-length writings. This project is an admirable response to the current crisis in scholarly publishing and to the rapid shift from print media to electronic media. This shift, and OHP’s response to it, are facets of what has been called ‘critical climate change.’’

‘The future of scholarly publishing lies in Open Access’ agreed Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and fellow member of OHP’s editorial advisory board. ‘Scholars in the future should give careful consideration to the where they publish, since their goal should be to make the products of their research as widely available as possible, to people throughout the world. Open Humanities Press is a most welcome initiative that will help us move in this direction.’ …

(Via Open Access News.)

The University of Stirling has become the first academic institution in the UK to oblige staff to make all their published research available online.

Clare Allan said:

The University now requires all published journal articles to be deposited by authors, as soon as possible after they are accepted for publication, and in compliance with the publishers’ copyright agreements. 

(Via Open Access News.)

The Harvard OA mandate Plenty of comment on Harvard’s “yes” vote for OA.(Via Open Access News.)
Information World Review (Issue 204, March 200  quotes Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library, thus:

We academics provide the content for scholarly journals. We evaluate articles as referees, we serve on editorial boards, we work as editors ourselves, yet the journals force us to buy back our work, in published form, at outrageous prices.

Harvard’s new policy will be

a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available through our own university repository.

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.)

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.)

Library Journal’s Periodical Price Survey 2007 is now available. Overall price rises for 2008 renewals are expected to be in the range of 7 to 9%. There is also an interesting analysis of the impact of Open Access and Institutional Repositories.

Information World Review reports on a recent study conducted by the Publishing Research Consortium in which 400 librarians worldwide were surveyed:

Librarians are likely to cancel journal subscriptions in favour of free access to peer-reviewed research via open access repositories … The study found that librarians are sensitive to the embargo period: with a 24-month embargo, just over 50% prefer the paid-for version of a journal article.

Chris Beckett, director of Scholarly Information Strategies said: “The sooner publishers develop alternatives to enable OA, the better.”

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.)