From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2016 19:48:00 -0500

I would respectfully disagree with Adam about his assessment of
open-access monograph publishing as carried out by the Luminos project
and others, such as the program in humanities OA publishing now run by
the fully OA Amherst College Press.

The truth is that most monographs published in the past several
decades have not been commercially viable anyway and have had to be
subsidized in one way or another. At Penn State University Press,
where I was director for 20 years, our journals program produced
enough of a surplus to supply about $200,000 a year for support of
monograph publishing. We also got external subsidies for a good many
of our monographs, especially in art history, from places like the
Meiss  Publication Fund of the College Art Association. Also, until
1995 the NEH made available publication subsidies of $7,000 per book
for scholarly monographs.  Accordingly, there will not be much
difference between what is going to be published OA from what was
already being published in print. The primary criterion, relying upon
external expert reviewers, has always been and will continue to be
scholarly importance.  One advantage of OA, of course, is that books
can be longer and still be published, whereas in print some presses
would not consider books longer than 400 printed pages.  That was an
arbitrary constraint on scholarly publishing, which OA has removed,
thankfully--and which, we may hope, will not be abused by loquacious
authors!

Also, it should be noted that many top research universities have long
provided grants of $10,000 and more to younger faculty on the tenure
track to use as they wish, including subsidizing publication of books.
Some, like Michigan's Paul Courant, have argued for universities to
increase this grant in support of OA publishing, as the
administratively easiest way to move OA monograph publishing forward,
since even a $50,000 subsidy would be peanuts in the grander scale of
what a university invests in a tenured faculty member over the course
of a full career. This would of course, as Adam suggests, lead to
greater inequities between tenured and untenured faculty, not to
mention professors who merely have jobs as adjuncts and get no such
support whatsoever, and between the elite and not-so-elite
universities.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: adam hodgkin <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2016 14:51:06 +0200
>
> Surely, even for rich countries an author contribution of $7,500 for
> the publication of a monograph is going to be a problem. Certainly in
> most European universities that is a big sum for an individual to
> source without big research grants. Even in the USA, I suspect that
> there are disciplines where a young scholar will find it hard to
> scrape together funding from grants for the publication of a
> monograph, especially if the scholar is not in a rich and elite
> university. And is there not a problem that such a model for 'open
> access' publishing of monographs will tend to attract slow moving and
> unfashionable stuff? It would be tough for a Press organised along
> these lines if it were to end up being the publisher where books that
> are worthy but not commercial are most likely to be published. How are
> open access books to avoid being trapped in a pigeon-hole where they
> are deemed to be less viable, perhaps because less important than
> stuff published without subsidy?
>
> I like the open explanations on the web site, and the FAQ they
> provide. Good to see such a public and explicit statement of their
> objectives and process.
>
> Adam
>
> Adam Hodgkin
> www.exacteditions.com
> Italian: +39 3460964211
> skype name: adam.hodgkin