From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:09:56 -0500

Sandy, I'm all for OA to monographs, of course.

It's mandating OA to monographs that I am very skeptical about,
because there is unanimity among researchers about desiring -- even if
not daring, except if mandated, to provide -- OA to peer-reviewed
journal articles, whereas there is no such unanimity about monographs.

Not to mention that prestige publishers may not yet be ready to agree to it.

So mandate Green OA to articles first; that done, mandate (or try to
mandate) whatever else you like. But not before, or instead.

Meanwhile, where the author and publisher are willing, there is
absolute no obstacle to providing OA to monographs today, unmandated.

Stevan Harnad


On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that some academic authors still have visions of fame and fortune they'd like to achieve through publishing books in the traditional manner, so he believes that the time for OA in book publishing has not yet arrived. But perhaps a simple terminological distinction may suffice to place this problem in proper perspective.  Academic books may be divided into two types: monographs and trade books. Monographs, by definition, are works of scholarship written primarily to address other scholars and are therefore unlikely to attract many, if any, readers beyond the walls of academe. Trade books encompass a large category that includes, as one subset, nonfiction works written by scholars but addressed not only to fellow scholars but also to members of the general public.
>
> There is an easy practical way to distinguish the two: commercial trade publishers (as distinct from commercial scholarly publishers that do not aim at a trade market) have certain requirements for potential sales that guarantee that monographs will never be accepted for publication.  It is true that the authors of monographs, published by university presses and commercial scholarly publishers, are sometimes paid royalties. But these amounts seldom accumulate to large sums (unless the monographs happen to become widely adopted in classrooms as course assignments--a phenomenon that happens less these days when coursepacks and e-reserves permit use of excerpts for classroom assignments).  Thus not much is sacrificed, financially speaking, by publishing these books OA. And, indeed, a scholar may have more to gain, in terms of increased reputation from wider circulation that may translate into tenure and promotion, which are vastly more financially rewarding over the long term than royalties are ever likely to be from monograph sales.
>
> Also, of course, financial opportunities do not need to be sacrificed completely by OA if the CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs, preserving some money-generating rights to authors even under OA.
>
> It also needs to be said that even trade authors can benefit from OA, as the successes of such authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the free online versions of their books serving to stimulate print sales.
>
> Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite pragmatic enough in recognizing that the time has arrived for OA monograph publishing also, not just OA article publishing.
>
> Sandy Thatcher