From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 14:33:20 -0500


>From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 09:34:30 -0400
>
>Just a reference to an interesting piece -- for when there's time on a
>train or plane or wherever, to peruse it.
>
>http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/2013/08/open-access-and-scholarly-monographs-in-canada/
>
>Particularly interested in Canadian comments about it.  Ann Okerson

Thanks to Ann for bringing this report to our attention.  It is, in
many ways, a very nicely done and comprehensive review of the state of
open access as it relates to monograph publishing in not only Canada
but also Europe and the U.S. (Regrettably, however, it says nothing
about OA monograph publishing in Australia, where it has been
flourishing more than perhaps anywhere else. This is regrettable
particularly because Australia faces many of the same kinds of special
challenges that Canada does.)  Among its many virtues is the attention
it pays to the burdens that the need to maintain a legacy print
publishing operation imposes on university presses, as well as the
often conflicting demands on presses that place them "between a rock
and a hard place." The attention it pays to the Ithaka Report (2007)
as a seminal document in the debate over OA monograph publishing is
also well justified. And the case study of the University of Athabasca
Press is especially valuable as one model for how OA monograph
publishing might be successfully done.

The report does suffer some, though, from being a bit our of date.
There is no entry in the bibliography later than 2010, which explains
why such significant developments as the following are not covered:

1) the actions taken in Canada, both by the Supreme Court and the
legislature there, to change the country's copyright law in major ways
very favorable especially to fair use ("fair dealing") in educational
settings, which would make it impossible for the kind of suit brought
by publishers in the U.S. against Georgia State to be successful now
in Canada--and which thus has major ramifications for the income
presses in Canada can generate from subsidiary rights sales;

2) the further evolution of the Google case, which has gone past the
discussion of a settlement, rejected by the trial judge, and is now
back under review for hearing of the fair-use arguments;

3) the initiation by Frances Pinter of Knowledge Unlatched after her
departure from Bloomsbury Academic and the very recent announcement of
a new cooperative venture between OAPEN and KU
(http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=314fa411ba5eaaee7244c95e1&id=db63895247&e=a16e022087);

4) the dissolution of the collaboration between the University of
California Press and the California Digital Library (which Catherine
Mitchell, in a talk at an OA conference in North Texas earlier this
year, likened to a "divorce");

5) the omission, from the section on possible OA business models, of
an approach relying on endowment income (which is what is the new
Amherst College Press is using to fund its OA monograph publishing);

6) the creation of the Library Publishing Coalition;

7) the use of the Open Monograph Press publishing software by such
institutions as the library at SUNY-Geneseo, which is using it to do
open textbook publishing; and

8) perhaps most important of all, the launching of the new e-book
aggregations from Project Muse, JSTOR, Oxford, and others that extend
the subscription model from e-journals to e-books in the hope that it
will be as successful financially as the e-journal aggregations proved
to be. (My own view is that, unless and until this approach to
financial viability fails, university presses in the U.S. will not
seriously pursue the OA model as an option on any systematic scale,
but just continue to experiment at the margins.)

I would also quibble some on various of the author's assessments.
E.g., many of us in university press publishing believe that the
experiment in OA publishing at Rice University Press failed because of
the initial decision to focus on an area of scholarship, art history,
where permission problems posed special obstacles to doing online
publishing successfully.  The report does not mention this criticism.
About OA in Europe the report states: "Europe, then, is not much
further advanced than the US in terms of OA. The experiments being
conducted at present are very much in the early days, and there is
little to no data available by which to assess how OA is affecting
monograph publishing." I beg to differ. There is nothing like OAPEN
operating anywhere in the U.S., nor anything like the commitment it
has to gather data systematically.  Not only is Europe ahead of the
U.S. but, as mentioned previously, so is Australia.

If I may add a couple of personal notes here, I'm pleased to see that
the report pays as much attention as it does to the AAUP Statement on
Open Access, for which I was the principal drafter and which was
issued in July 2007 during my term as AAUP President. There are two
places in the report where this document is discussed.  In the first,
under 1.2 titled "The Cautious Opposition," I think the author
stresses the negative too much and makes it appear that this was part
of a concerted effort by publishers to fight the advance of OA. That
was not its intention at all. Rather, as comes out more in the
author's second discussion in section 2.1, the main point of the
statement was to help stimulate more discussion of OA as it relates to
monograph publishing, viewed under the rubric of "opportunities,"
while also emphasizing some of the special challenges that book
publishers, compared with journal publishers, would be facing. The
author cites my article in Learned Publishing titled "The Challenge of
Open Access Publishing for University Presses" (July 2007) without
apparently realizing that it is an expanded version of the AAUP
Statement. It, along with the other articles of mine listed in the
report's bibliography, are all accessible here:
http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html

In that article I referred to a discussion of an OA model for
monograph publishing that had occurred in the CIC in the early 1990s
in a series of meetings between CIC press directors and librarians:
Some university presses have long been experimenting with types of
open access, and others are beginning to do so. In the early 1990s the
presses, libraries, and computer centers of the Committee on
Institutional Cooperation developed a plan for a proto type of open
access publishing of books and journals within the CIC and,
prospectively, beyond it to the wider international academic
community.11 I give more details in footnote 11 there. This idea was
formally proposed as a project in 1996 to the Mellon Foundation, which
declined to pursue it, having invested recently in other online
experiments such as Project Muse.  While this proposal failed, I
decided to write up the idea in an article titled "A Nonmarket
Solution for Scholarly Publishing?" (1996) to suggest that university
presses might consider a dual-track approach to scholarly publishing,
one the traditional model that could still be supported by the market
(for trade books, regional books, paperbacks for course use, etc.) and
the other a model that we would now call OA. Here is the direct
article link: http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/ThatcherNSSP.pdf. (It
is among the articles listed at the web site I earlier referenced.) I
submitted the article to the British publishing journal LOGOS edited
then by Gordon Graham. He declined to publish it, so I just stuck the
article back in my drawer. But years later, when Frances Pinter was
planning a Festschrift for Graham, she talked with him about the ideas
she was formulating that later blossomed into Bloomsbury Academic, and
he remembered my article and told her that she should get in touch
with me. I had known Frances for many years already when she was
working for another British publisher with which Princeton University
Press, my employer at the time, was doing some co-publishing. I ended
up chairing a plenary session at the 2010 Charleston Conference where
Frances presented her "ice cream analogy" for an OA publishing model
for monographs and then in 2011 attended a workshop at Harvard
convened by Robert Darnton to discuss the ideas Frances was then
formulating for what became Knowledge Unlatched. In her article for
the Graham Festschrift, Frances wrote the following:

However, if we look back in time what do we find? Gordon Graham in
conversation with Sandy Thatcher, then Director of Penn State Press.
When Gordon stepped down as editor of Logos he found the letters in
his files (of course in hard copy). They date from the mid nineties
-the early days of the World Wide Web and e-mail still in its infancy.
Gordon kindly sent them to me and warned me that I might need a
magnifying glass to read the faded fax copies from Sandy, though I'd
fare better with the carbon copies of his own letters. In perusing
them I chuckled at the extent to which they anticipated our current
conundrums.

Here are just a few extracts from the last letter Gordon wrote to
Sandy on this issue in 1996

'Let me try to summarize your thesis in my own words, to make sure
that I have understood it:

1.    Monographs of limited appeal would be totally subsidized and
would not appear in print form.

2.  Their availability would be posted on the Internet. They would be
available free of charge to anyone, librarians being the channels
through which they would be made available.

3.       If an end-user wanted such works in printed form, he would
pay only the physical cost. The librarians (not the publisher) would
arrange such production.

4.      Academic publishers would continue on the other track to
publish commercially.'

So there we are, the main issues raised many years ago. How do we
continue to provide the scholarly community with the kinds of services
they clearly still value from publishers, while also allowing for the
widest possible access - which inevitably means free at point of use.
It has taken us a long time to understand that the free flow of
information does not mean that the content that is flowing is
cost-free to get to the point of flowing freely. So how do we achieve
free at point of use?

I apologize for the length of this commentary, but I thought filling
in this little bit of publishing history  about the development of OA
for monographs might be of general interest. I would hope that the
AAUP Statement on Open Access would be read against this background to
help better understand what its intentions were.

Sandy Thatcher