The Public Knowledge Project’s Open Monograph Press By John Willinsky (Khosla Family Professor and Associate Dean for Student Affairs, Stanford University) <willinsk@stanford.edu>
W
hile much progress has been made by academic libraries, societies, and groups of scholars in supporting the publication of independent journals, giving rise to the Open Access Diamond Journal phenomenon (no charge for authors or readers), the same is not true of books.1 Scholarly books would appear to require a publishing house to produce such works. Well, in that regard, Open Monograph Press (OMP) offers a publishing house in a box. Only there is no box. And the house is virtual, but within it one can see the scholarly book through to publication. OMP is actually an open source software file — called a tarball — made freely available by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University. First released in 2013, OMP brings to scholarly book publishing the design principles and technologies of PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS), which was released a decade earlier and the Diamond Open Access journal set’s preferred platform, according to one study. OMP can be downloaded from PKP to any web server with a few basic requirements in place, such as a recent version of PHP, the open source — noticing a pattern here? — scripting language. It comes with an installation script that enables the server admin to set it up, assign it a URL, and designate a “press manager” who will go on to create the online publishing house. The press manager fills in the name of the press, the scope and purpose of its publishing program, its affiliations, and other details. She registers the editorial team with OMP and selects one or more of the 28 languages for which the community of OMP users have provided for others to employ with this software. She can turn to OMP’s internal help system, or seek extended advice on starting and operating a press to be found at the PKP Documentation Hub. Once the basics are in place, the press can open its doors online. We’re talking about more than just another pretty website (although it is open to customization and artful design). The entire editorial, production and publication process takes place through the OMP platform. In one secure place, OMP manages people, roles, and access rights, publishing processes and dashboards, while keeping a running record of what needs to be done and an active catalog of published works. It is like a nonproprietary version of Atlassian Jira, the work management software, for scholarly books. With the press online, authors can begin to submit manuscripts and edited collections in response to calls for submissions and as a result of editors soliciting manuscripts. Submissions are assigned to editors, who then consider whether they are suitable for the press and thus merit review. If the manuscript is passed on to the review stage, the editor, author and reviewers are guided through the peer review process. That is, editors call on prepared emails for soliciting reviewers, whether new reviewers or already registered and rated. The email invitation takes reviewers right to the manuscripts and provides a spot for the review (and possibly review forms). The editor can selectively or entirely share the reviews with the author, along with advice and counsel on how best to utilize
14 Against the Grain / April 2022
the reviewers’ comments, while keeping the process anonymous on both sides, if desired. The author can upload a revised version of the manuscript, vastly improved as a result of the reviews (at least in my experience as an author), for the editor to initiate another “Open round of reviews or to accept the manuscript or, alas, to reject the Monograph manuscript at that stage, which will Press offers a then be archived, if there is no book publishing house to be found within its pages.
in a box. Only If following review and revisions, there is no box. the manuscript is accepted for publication, OMP offers a meeting And the house p l a ce fo r t h o s e a s s i g n e d t o is virtual.” marketing and sales, for artworks and permissions, tables and figures. OMP has a separate stage for managing the back and forth of copyediting with the author, as well as one for the production and design of the book, whether for print or in an eBook format. It offers a book catalog system for marketing the books, along with options for offering open access, and arranging print-ondemand, as well as doing Amazon placement. Up to this point, the principal users of OMP have been academic libraries. Within the Library Publishing Coalition, which provides a great deal of support for both journal and book publishing from among its community members, of which 16 university libraries offer an OMP installation to their community. Among those using OMP, Windsor & Downs Press, which is part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network, offers its books free to read online, with print-on-demand options. In Denmark, Aarhus University Library Publishing Services provides readers with open access not only to monographs and anthologies, but also to conference proceedings, dissertations, and working papers. Scholarly communication librarians have taken to hosting monograph presses for the use of their faculty at a variety of institutions. These library-hosted presses have enabled a flourishing of open access monographs that would not have otherwise been published, whether in Canadian archeology or Mexican geography. Among Spanish-language presses, the Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia’s Ediciones has over 130 titles made freely available in its catalog. And while the most popular book at the Portal de Libros Electrónicos de la Universidad de Chile is the 2015 atlas entitled Insectos de Chile, this OMP installation also shares treasures from the university’s rare book collection, such as the Historiae mundi published in 1582 by Cayo Plinio Segundo. All told, just over 60 OMP presses published more than five books or other items in 2020. Beyond the library-hosted OMP is Mandela University Press, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, offers its books for sale on Amazon paperback and Kindle, Google Books, and JSTOR. As well, the scholar-operated Language Science Press offers its books both as free PDFs and hardbacks at Amazon, while also hosting a collaborative-reading PaperHive.
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