Open Access News

Sanford Thatcher, From the University Presses — The Hidden Digital Revolution in Scholarly Publishing: POD, SRDP, the “Long Tail,” and Open Access, Against the Grain, April 2009.  Excerpt:

...[The] digital printing revolution...is, in fact, probably the single most important contributor to the eventual success of “open access” for book publishing. Even though the aim of open access is to make publications available for unobstructed full-text browsing online, it is unlikely to succeed in the arena of book publishing without the appendage of POD [print-on-demand] unless and until an even greater revolution occurs in how the costs of migrating monographs to open access are paid. In journal publishing, the transition is well under way, and various funding models to cover upfront costs have been tried, including fees from authors, subsidies from foundations, and costs built into the prices of subscriptions (so that faculty from a university whose library pays the premium can publish in these journals for no additional fee). No one has yet confronted the fact that the upfront costs for publishing a monograph are at a whole different level, from about $20,000 on the low end to many multiples of that for certain types of complicated books. There seems to be no inclination on the part of university administrators to encourage the movement of open access into monograph publishing, partly no doubt because they are at least dimly aware of what the higher level of upfront costs involved would be....For the time being, then, the only feasible way economically to proceed toward open access for monographs is to provide a system, as the National Academies Press has done since the mid-1990s and we at Penn State Press have done for our Romance Studies series since 2006, whereby the purchase of books in print form through POD produces enough income to support the whole enterprise. From the perspective of authors, of course, this kind of system represents the best of both worlds: a print copy may be used for all the various purposes where eBooks are not yet fully accepted, such as promotion-and-tenure reviews, nomination for book prizes, submission to professional journals for review, and even gifts to family members; meanwhile, the entire community of scholars worldwide who may have an interest in the author’s research can have immediate access to it over the Internet; and teachers who may want to assign a chapter or two for their classes simply need to include the URLs in their syllabi. Mention of this last advantage, of course, reveals one difference between the open access and print only models: with the dual OA/POD model, the publisher does sacrifice the subsidiary income that would normally come from licensing course use through the Copyright Clearance Center or directly. A dollar or two added to the retail price for the POD edition would, for most books, suffice to make up this difference, however, so it is not a crippling concern. And the greater access OA affords to use of these books is a significant contribution the scholarly publisher can make to the dissemination of knowledge far and wide, which is after all the fundamental mission of a university press. Only if the online access were to completely displace the sale of paperback editions for course use would this economic model break down. But since teachers often do not assign entire books anyway but have chapters photocopied or scanned into e-reserve systems, there would appear to be little reason to fear that this greater erosion of sales will occur. It has not so far, anyway, in our experience with the Romance Studies series....