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