The challenge of open access for university presses

Learned Publishing

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 165-172

  Thatcher, Sanford G ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34547224644     PISSN: 09531513     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1087/095315107X205084     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Gilman, D. C. Fifth Annual Report of The Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University, 1880.
2. For a description of how acquiring editors work to add value to monograph publishing, see Thatcher, S. G. 1999. The 'value added' in editorial acquisitions. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 30: 59-74, available at http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/302/302_thatcher.html. For copyediting,
3. see Hunter, S. 2004. Why copy editors matter. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 36: 6-14 http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/scp.2004.0030,
4. and Henige, D. 2005. Commas, Christians, and editors. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 36: 58-74 http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/scp.2005.0003. For design,
5. see Tombs, R. et al. 2001. Why design is important: five designers speak to non-designers. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 33: 37-46, available at http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/331/design4. html. For a more general statement about what university presses contribute of value to the system of scholarly communication, see http://www.aaupnet.org/news/value.html.
6. For a useful summary, see Siler, J. M. 2000. From Gutenberg to gateway: electronic publishing at university presses. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 32: 9-32, available at http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/ 321/gateway2.html. For an even more current list of digital initiatives at university presses, see http://www.aaupnet.org/resources/electronic.html. For a marvellous overview of the evolution of scholarly publishing and the role of scholarly publishers as agents of change over the past two decades,
7. see Thompson, J. B. Books in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005), especially Part Four. For a review, see http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi- bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/v037/37.2thatcher. html.
8. The quotes are from 'An open letter to the higher education community' signed by the provosts of 25 major research universities on 28 Jul 2006, advocating support of the Federal Research Public Access Act: http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/groups/CICMembers/archive/documents/FRPAAletterFinal7- 28-06.pdf.
9. One exception to the narrow focus on STM journal publishing is Rosenzweig, R. 2005. Should historical scholarship be free? Perspectives, April 2005, available at http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2005/ 0504/0504vic1.cfm. Even Rosenjweig, however, barely mentions monographs in this article and concentrates almost all his attention on history journal publishing.
10. Colin Steele, former University Librarian at the Australian National University, put the point succinctly in a posting (4 Jan 2007) to Liblicense, http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml: 'all elements need to be linked in the scholarly communication process including innovation outcomes, but have been rarely addressed as such. Engaging the academic community in ownership of the process is essential. The signs in 2007, for whatever reason, are a little more optimistic, i.e., in addressing the issues holistically rather than simply reacting to the "serials cancellation crisis".'
11. See also Thatcher, S. G. 'Thinking systematically about scholarly communication', talk delivered at the ACLS/ARL/AAUP conference on The Specialised Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book?, Washington, DC, 11-12 September 1997: http://www.arl.org/ resources/pubs/specscholmono/thatcher.shtm
12. Suber, P. 'Open access overview', http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/ overview.htm (last updated 10 Mar 2006).
13. As quoted by Suber, ibid., italics added.
14. This is, for instance, a major theme of Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (New York, American Council of Learned Societies, 2006), which claims: 'Open access is critical to constructing and deploying meaningful cyberinfrastructure, and it will be important for the humanities and social science to engage in active dialogue and then to lobby effectively concerning legislation and policy developments in this area' (p. 43). This advocacy derives from the Commission's view of scholarship as a 'public good': 'It may make more sense to conceive of scholarly communication as a public good rather than to think of it as a marketable commodity' (p. 31).
15. See also Table I in Lynch, C. A. and Lippincott, J. K. 2005. Institutional repository deployment in the United States as of early 2005. D-Lib Magazine, 11, available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch. html.
16. The CIC is the academic consortium of the Big Ten US universities, plus the University of Chicago - see http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/
17. See Creth, S. 'University publishing in the electronic age: a collaboration among university press, libraries, and computer centers', ACLS/ARL/AAUP Conference on The Specialized Monograph in Crisis, or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book?, Washington, DC, 11-12 September 1997, available at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/specscholmono/creth.shtml. This prototype also envisioned distribution of different publishing functions throughout the consortium: 'It may turn out that, rather than have presses assume these added duties and costs [like SGML coding and archiving, which a CNI report at the time assumed publishers would have to undertake in the new electronic age], it will be more practical for other entities in the CIC universities to provide them, perhaps with some universities offering centralized service for the entire consortium. On this model presses would concentrate on providing content peer reviewed, copy edited, and perhaps designed to some degree - and then other stages in the process of publication would be carried out elsewhere, the universities benefiting from the shared access to this new knowledge throughout the consortium. From a model of each press producing entirely on its own a stream of publications to be sold in the general marketplace, we might thereby move to a model of shared production and distribution within consortia. These products of the CIC universities might then be sold or licensed to the market outside the consortium, or even bartered with other consortia having similar intellectual goods to exchange. There would be a kind of free trade zone or common market ["open access"] within each consortium, and normal market arrangements beyond. Eventually, as cooperation among now independently operating units of universities became a more familiar mode of behaviour, one might even envisage a time when universities in the United States as a whole (and perhaps including Canadian universities as well and, over time, universities in other countries) could form an overarching consortium of consortia to become relatively self-sufficient in the production and distribution of scholarly knowledge. A market would still exist outside for some of its products-scientific knowledge needed by industry, certainly, and books intended for wider audiences-but much of the costs and benefits would be internalized, with the opportunity to achieve a greater degree of economic rationality in the system as a whole than exists now, when so much of value added comes from commercial publishers at exorbitant expense. Within a consortial system, copyright might cease to play its traditional role as a cost-recovery mechanism, if all publishing costs were paid up front and distribution within that system were to be done online "free" to the end user (who might, however, choose to pay a special fee to have hard copy printed out and bound). Copyright would then remain important (as it has always been in European law that recognizes "moral rights" as part of copyright) primarily as a guarantee of a work's integrity and the author's claim to be recognized as the creator of it - as a safeguard against plagiarism and misrepresentation, in other words.'
18. Thatcher, S. G. 1996. Re-engineering scholarly communication: a role for university presses? Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 27: 197-207. This vision of sharing electronic publishing functions in a more distributed manner throughout universities is now being realized as presses, libraries, and computer centers enter into more cooperative relationships, even to the extent of administrative mergers, as with Penn State University Press, which became part of the libraries after the two jointly established an Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing early in 2005 - see http://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/ scholarlycomm.
19. Pope, B. K. 1999. National Academy Press: a case study. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4, available at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/ pope.html.
20. http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen.
21. Penn State University Press started its Romance Studies series in 2005 by posting 'open access' monographs from its discontinued Romance Literatures series, and will publish its first new titles on this site in late 2007 - see http://romancestudies.psu.edu. Rice University announced in 2006 that it would resurrect its press as a digital publishing operation, with a special initial emphasis on art history. The University of California Press recently announced a new series called FlashPoints that aims to publish its first title in 2008.
22. Our Cultural Commonwealth, p. 30. See also Appendix D, 'Information economics: a primer', in National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, Washington, DC, National Academies Press, 2000, available at http://books.nap.edu/html/ digital_dilemma/appD.html. For a view that touts the advantages of this economic model for university press publishing,
23. see Sanford G. Thatcher's review of The Digital Dilemma, 2000, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 32: 50-57, available at http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/321/digital6.html. 'Indeed, a good argument could be made, on the very criteria set forth in Appendix D on the economics of information, that the most efficient model for university press publishing, all things considered (including the legal costs of protecting copyrights), would be to have the first-copy costs of publishing covered by grants from universities - not just universities that operate presses but (as the National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication recommended in its report way back in 1979) every college and university whose faculty participates in, and benefits from, the system of scholarly communication as it exists today.... The effect, for presses, of operating on a grants model would be to lessen their economic reliance on copyright law (which would remain important to authors, however, insofar as it affords protection against plagiarism). In fact, presses could then feel free to take full advantage of digital distribution and allow their publications to be accessed for no charge anywhere in the world. This would maximize the values of public access that the Committee is so keen to ensure and provide a kind of new foreign aid to underdeveloped countries that are unlikely ever to close the gap in efficient distribution of print materials but could, at least in major university centres, allow scholars all over the world to benefit from the fruits of new scholarship published by university presses through the Internet. Such a vision, one may hope, would please the authors of The Digital Dilemma, who have done so much here to stimulate new ideas about grappling with the challenges of the digital age. And, indeed, it would be fitting, since this book itself is available to anyone who can access the National Academy Press's website.'
24. The contrast between subsidized and market-based publishing, it needs to be remembered, is a contrast of ideal systems. In reality, the scholarly publishing system we have now, even where commercial publishers are involved, already depends on a significant degree of subsidy in the form of faculty time spent reviewing manuscripts, serving as editors or on editorial boards, etc., which is only partially, if at all, reimbursed. (Many commercial publishers may compensate jour al editors: it is not a common practice in university press journal publishing.) Full open access, though, will push the system as far as it can go to one extreme, whereas open access that is still compatible with market-generated revenue streams will be just one more step toward that end of the spectrum spanning completely market-based to completely free-to-end-user.
25. For an analysis of the costs of publishing monographs, see Wasserman, M. 1998. How much does it cost to publish a monograph and why? Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4, available at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/ wasserman.html. The figures used here include some upward adjustment for inflation since 1998.
26. On the high cost of using faculty as publishers, see Day, C. 1998. Digital alternatives: solving the problem or shifting the costs? Journal of Electronic Publishing, 4, available at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/ day.html: '[I]t is unlikely actually that the work will be done either as well or as cheaply as it would be by professional publishing people - the economic benefits of specialization are well-attested in every other industry after all. But what is worse is that people who would otherwise be doing research and teaching, or as support staff enabling those crucial activities, are now engaged in the work of publishing to the detriment of the time available for teaching and research.'
27. JSTOR provides back issues of journals with a 'moving wall' of five years; before this period, they are available only from the publisher. If all journals in JSTOR go fully open access, then eventually there would be no material that was not freely accessible and JSTOR would remain valuable only for its back issues up to the point that open access took over.
28. Operating Statistics 2005, Association of American University Presses.
29. This is one aspect of the more general concern that has arisen in the debate over open access, viz. that 'research-intensive academic institutions will end up subsidizing access for other organizations with lower research outputs, including commercial companies'. Worlock, K. 2004. The pros and cons of open access, Nature Web Forum on Access to the Literature, 13 Sep 2004, available at http://www.nature.com/nature/ focus/accessdebate/34.html. See also the contribution to this debate titled 'On being scientific about science publishing' by Yale's Associate Librarian, Ann Okerson, who observes of the current market-based economic model that 'it does secure resources from a wide variety of sources, including the for-profit sector, universities, colleges, research labs and of course many nations': http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/ accessdebate/9.html.
30. Operating Statistics 2005, Association of American University Presses.
31. Although it is quite possible that universities would be willing to provide subsidies to faculty at a level sufficient to support the business of commercial journal ublishers such as BioMed Central, it seems far less likely that they would do so for monographs published by commercial academic presses, especially since those presses do not have the transparent peer-review process that is mandatory at any university press that is a member of the AAUP. (Commercial publishers may conduct peer review, but nothing obliges them to do so, as AAUP-member presses must; and probably no commercial publisher makes its decisions by resting the authority to approve or disapprove in an editorial board consisting of faculty members. These facts are well known and provide the rationale for books published by university presses being generally given more weight in promotion and tenure decisions than those from commercial publishers.) They would also be less likely to provide sizable subsidies to societies for publishing monographs, unless there were guarantees that a significant amount of the money would not be siphoned off to support the societies' other activities.
32. See, for example, Baldwin. C. What do societies do with their publishing surpluses? Worthing, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, 2004. Available at http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id = 200&did=47&aid = 277&st = &oaid=-l
33. The 'tipping point' was first identified as a way of explaining patterns of urban segregation, especially 'white flight,' but has since been applied to many other processes of rapid change; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tipping_point. Malcolm Gladwell has recently popularized the idea in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston, MA, Little Brown, 2000.
34. See Thatcher, S. G. 2000. Fair use: a double-edged sword. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 32: 3-8, available at http://www.utpjournals.com/ product/jsp/321/fair1.html.