Open Access News

Reports from the Association of American University Presses annual meeting (Philadelphia, June 18-21, 2009):

Scott Jaschik, Change or Die?, Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2009.

[Kathleen] Keane of Johns Hopkins, in her debut speech as president of the association, noted that the current debates over open access "appears to put us at an impasse with members of the library and faculty communities" and that this appearance was "unfortunate." But she didn't suggest any change in association policies. ...

Stuart M. Shieber, director of the Office of Scholarly Communication and professor of computer science at Harvard University, said that the current publishing system is "not economically sustainable," but he offered a take on open access that differed from that of its most fervent supporters. Shieber said that we shouldn't be talking about how to pay for open access, since open access doesn't cost much at all. Rather, the question should be about "paying for publisher services" such as managing peer review and marketing (which apply to digital work as much as to printed editions). He said that it may be time to consider a model where libraries don't pay for subscriptions in the typical way, but pay "first copy costs" (those that still exist digitally) or that universities pay a fee for work published by their faculty members. ...

Michael Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for the National Academies Press, noted that his publisher offers more than 4,000 books in free, digital form, "and we are not broke." Jensen -- who, when he isn't thinking about the future of scholarly publishing, is thinking about environmental issues -- said that university presses need to acknowledge "an inconvenient truth about book publishing," namely that its basic structure won't work anymore. ...

Scholarship must be "de-linked from print publication," such that books are "the exception" and no longer the norm for disseminating new scholarship. With colleges and universities unlikely to be providing major budget increases to libraries, the reality is that within a decade "we will be unlikely to be able to sell print books to to libraries at the prices we need to charge," adding that "it's crazy to think we can continue to do what we have been doing."

While stressing that he believes book publishing is essential to promote and spread great new intellectual ideas, Jensen said there is no good reason to keep print and to keep charging. Print distribution hurts the environment, he says, and charging (while failing to make university presses economically viable) limits readership. ...

Jennifer Howard, Scholarly Presses Discuss What It Takes to Survive, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2009. Access restricted to subscribers.

... One indication that university-press publishing has life in it yet: Many more presses have moved from talking about electronic books to producing them. On June 12, for instance, the University of Chicago Press made 1,000 of its titles available as e-books, using Adobe Digital Editions. Garrett P. Kiely, the press's director, said he was already seeing some indications that the digital books were finding a market. He noted that other scholarly publishers, including the University of Alabama Press, the University of Iowa Press, and Utah State University Press, have recently begun to sell digital editions of books. Having big players like Sony and now Google in the e-book game has lit a fire under academic presses, Mr. Kiely said.

"It's one of those things that's just bursting to happen," said Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press. "Once we make a hole in the dam, the water's just going to rush through. It's going to change fast."

Mr. Holzman and the directors of New York University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, and Rutgers University Press have an idea about how to push the transition along. Over the weekend, they learned that they had gotten a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the first phase of a project to help presses make the leap to electronic monographs.

The project, which does not have an official name yet, will survey librarians--­major buyers of university press output--­to figure out what they want from electronic books. It will also analyze current systems for delivering digital books, to see what might work best for university presses and whether something new needs to be built. ...

"As we know, the crisis in scholarly communication is now in its fifth decade," joked [Douglas] Armato of the University of Minnesota Press as he moderated the plenary session in which Ms. Bonn, of Michigan, took part.

The comment got a laugh, but it also set up an assault on what Mr. Armato called the "polarizing and self-serving rhetoric" that fills the debate over open access and scholarly publishing. Yes, we have to learn to live with and through "the transformation that lies not ahead of us but all around us," he advised. Nobody wants to be the ancien régime, Mr. Armato said­--look what happened when the tumbrels rolled­--but he pointed out that "revolutions often begin without much consideration" of what's lost on the road to utopia. Revolutionary rhetoric has done more to harm scholarly communication than to advance it, as revolutions tend to ignore "the human, social, and cultural consequences of those steps and what is destroyed along the way," he warned. ...