c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482
VOLUME 34, SPECIAL REPORT
JULY 2022 TM
ISSN: 1043-2094
“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”
“Opening the Book,” Revisited: A Special Report on Open Access Monographs Guest Edited by Mary Beth Barilla
“Opening the Book,” Revisited: A Special Report on Open Access Monographs.....................6 Every Book, Every Format, All at Once: Exploring the Multiverse of eBook Open Access Models...............................8 Future Prospects for Open Access Books — History and Perspectives from a European (Humanities) Press.................... 11 Open Access eBooks in South Africa............................................ 14 Open Access Monographs: An Aggregator’s Perspective......... 16
(Program Director, Society for Scholarly Publishing) Begins on Page 6
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THIS SPECIAL REPORT:
Launching an Open Access Model for Books — Lessons Learned on the Road with MIT Press Direct to Open................. 18 Help Wanted: Supplier Services and Sustainable Funding Incentives for OA Monographs............................... 20
PROFILES ENCOURAGED Amy Harris.................................. 23 Phillip Hearn.............................. 23 Laura Ricci.................................. 23 Rachel Fox Von Swearingen.... 24 Clarke & Esposito..................... 25 The MIT Press............................ 25 Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press......................... 25 Plus more...................... See inside
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
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Openness and Choice: A Natural Partnership GOBI now supports the Knowledge Unlatched Open Access (OA) e-books funding model Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is committed to supporting the development of the OA infrastructure and making scholarly content available to everyone. This partnership builds upon GOBI’s longtime commitment to providing choice and highlights the importance of an open community that values and supports the needs of libraries.
How does it work?
By participating in this model, libraries can:
•
•
More than 20 Open Access eCollections
content and workflows
on the Open Research Library platform are available for pledging in GOBI from May – December •
support investment in OA
•
help make quality OA e-books more easily available to libraries around the world
Once the eCollection has reached a set pledge threshold determined by KU, it will become freely available to all readers worldwide from the start of the next year
•
benefit from de-duplication, visibility of OA e-books in GOBI and a single point of invoicing and customer service
Simplify your library workflow with GOBI. gobi.ebsco.com
AGAINST THE GRAIN – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2022 by the name Against the Grain, LLC is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/ January by Against the Grain, LLC. Business and Editorial Offices: PO Box 799, 1712 Thompson Ave., Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. Accounting and Circulation Offices: same. Subscribe online at https://www.charleston-hub.com/membership-options/.
Editor:
Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)
Associate Editors:
Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston) Matthew Ismail (Charleston Hub)
Research Editors:
v.34 Special Report July 2022 © Katina Strauch
FEATURED ARTICLES “Opening the Book,” Revisited: A Special Report on Open Access Monographs............................................................................................ 6 Every Book, Every Format, All at Once: Exploring the Multiverse of eBook Open Access Models........................................................................................... 8 Future Prospects for Open Access Books — History and Perspectives from a European (Humanities) Press............................................................... 11 Open Access eBooks in South Africa................................................................ 14
Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)
Open Access Monographs: An Aggregator’s Perspective................................. 16
Assistants to the Editor:
Launching an Open Access Model for Books — Lessons Learned on the Road with MIT Press Direct to Open................................................................ 18
International Editor:
Help Wanted: Supplier Services and Sustainable Funding Incentives for OA Monographs............................................................................................... 20
Ileana Jacks Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)
Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)
Contributing Editors:
Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Deni Auclair (De Gruyter) Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University) Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico) Todd Carpenter (NISO) Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University) Will Cross (NC State University) Anne Doherty (Choice) Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County) Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University) Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte) Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University) Donna Jacobs (MUSC) Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University) Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) Tom Leonhardt (Retired) Stacey Marien (American University) Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University Libraries) Alayne Mundt (American University) Bob Nardini (ProQuest) Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries) Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s) Jared Seay (College of Charleston) Corey Seeman (University of Michigan) Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)
ATG Proofreader:
Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub)
PROFILES ENCOURAGED Amy Harris....................................................................................................... 23 Phillip Hearn.................................................................................................... 23 Laura Ricci....................................................................................................... 23 Rachel Fox Von Swearingen............................................................................. 24 Clarke & Esposito............................................................................................ 25 The MIT Press.................................................................................................. 25 Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press................................................ 25
ADVERTISER’S INDEX Berghahn Books................................................................................................. 5 Charleston Briefings........................................................................................ 13 Charleston Conference.................................................................................... 26 De Gruyter.......................................................................................................... 2 GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO.................................................................. 3 Michigan Publishing.......................................................................................... 7 ATG Advertising Deadlines................................................................................ 4
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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 cell: 843-509-2848 <kstrauch@comcast.net> Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This issue was produced on an iMac using Microsoft Word, and Adobe CC software under Mac OS Monterey. Against the Grain is copyright ©2022 by Katina Strauch
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Open Access from Berghahn INTRODUCING THE KU MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES COLLECTION Berghahn Books is proud to be partnering with Knowledge Unlatched to present the Berghahn Migration and Development Studies collection. Every year until 2023 we will be adding 20 front-list titles to the collection, covering the topics of international migration and movement as well as the social implications of economic and environmental change for communities. We would like to extend our thanks to the libraries who have already signed up to the package, as their support has allowed KU to ‘unlatch’ a number of Berghahn titles, including the following in 2022:
If you would like to find out more about how your library can sign up to the Berghahn Migration and Development Studies collection, visit www.knowledgeunlatched.org/anthropology The Berghahn Open Anthro - Subscribe-to-Open initiative in partnership with Libraria, has entered its 3rd year of providing full open access to 14 journals in the collection. Enthusiastic support from the library community has made this groundbreaking pilot possible. We would like to acknowledge the following institutions who have shown their commitment to this equitable and sustainable model of open access at the multi-year collections level: Columbia University Erasmus University Rotterdam Humboldt University of Berlin Harvard University Iowa State University Leiden University Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity New York University
Princeton University Spanish National Research Council University College London Université de Montréal University of Bern University of Bristol University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Riverside University of California, Davis University of Exeter
University of Kent University of Manchester University of Neuchâtel University of Pennsylvania University of Queensland University of Rhode Island University of Sussex University of Texas—Austin University of Zurich Yale University Anonymous
@BerghahnBooks www.berghahnbooks.com/open-access www.berghahnjournals.com/BOA
“Opening the Book,” Revisited: A Special Report on Open Access Monographs By Mary Beth Barilla (Program Director, Society for Scholarly Publishing – SSP) <mbarilla@sspnet.org>
B
ack in November 2021, I had the pleasure of working with Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, to organize SSP’s annual preconference at Charleston. Entitled “Opening the Book,” the event opened with a stage-setting introduction to open access (OA) monographs, courtesy of Laura Ricci of Clarke & Esposito. Lisa then led a lively panel discussion featuring speakers Viv Berghahn, Berghahn Books; Steve Fallon, De Gruyter; Rachel Fox Von Swearingen, Syracuse University; and Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan Press. The event was such a success with attendees that shortly thereafter, Against the Grain approached me about editing a special report on the topic. Accepting this invitation was an easy decision for me. With an educational background in the humanities and professional experience in book publishing, I appreciate the importance of monographs to the scholarly communications ecosystem. I remember well when OA monographs were in their infancy and publishers were considering how best to follow in the footsteps of academic journals, which began their transition to OA much earlier. I was eager to hear from our writers and learn more about what has changed since those early conversations. Laura, Steve, and Rachel, all present for the November live event, agreed to contribute to this report, and we were also joined by a few new voices: one from a content aggregator that hosts a large collection of OA monographs, and two from university presses with OA book publishing programs. As in the preconference, Laura’s piece lays the groundwork for the discussion, opening with a description of several OA monograph publishing models, placing OA books within the broader publishing ecosystem, and then exploring some of the challenges that publishers and librarians have encountered following the launch of their OA programs. While progress has certainly been made on the road to OA, books lag behind their journal counterparts in a number of ways, particularly in the lack of infrastructure supporting their distribution. As Laura notes, this presents an opportunity for intermediaries willing to explore ways to fill the gap. Following Laura’s introduction are two articles from scholarly book publishers, De Gruyter and Wits University Press. Three authors from De Gruyter examine the rapid growth in recent years of the number of OA book publications (including their own). They note, however, that given limitations on funding, a full shift to OA is unlikely to occur quickly, and they consider
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how best to develop an accessible, sustainable publishing model to meet the needs of stakeholders in the humanities and social sciences. Author Andrew Joseph of Wits University Press also cites the widespread support for OA books across publishers in South Africa. To facilitate the transition, he calls for more regional cooperation and policymaking to support their efforts, particularly in the development of digital infrastructure, standards, and systems that support OA book publishing and distribution. A little further downstream, we have views from an aggregator, Project MUSE, and a third publisher, MIT Press. Philip Hearn describes how Project MUSE is doing its part to support OA content by ensuring that it is just as discoverable as any other content in their extensive collection. Next, Amy Harris describes MIT Press’s “Direct to Open Model” and lessons learned since its launch in 2021. Working directly with libraries in her role at MIT, Amy pays particular attention to how the model is perceived by institutional customers. She also shares some of the unanticipated challenges of promoting OA books in an environment built for paywalled content. Finally, Rachel Fox Von Swearingen of Syracuse University Libraries shares her thoughts on how OA monographs have been problematic for library workflows, particularly in the collections development and acquisitions processes. She outlines the difficulties of retrofitting industry and institutional systems and tools designed for paywalled titles and envisions what it might take to develop infrastructure that works for both libraries and their vendor partners. She also highlights issues inherent in tracking and evaluating the growing number of new and highly variable OA funding models offered by publishers. And, concerned that library budgets can’t accommodate indefinite growth in this area, she questions whether the altruistic motive for participation, often promoted by publishers, is sustainable. Although this special report is by no means an exhaustive account of all the new models and innovations supporting OA monographs — nor of the challenges and opportunities they present — these authors have provided a great starting point for anyone interested in learning the latest about this complex and evolving landscape. I look forward to their future contributions to the ongoing conversation.
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Bates College • Bowdoin College • Brock University • Broward College • Bucknell University • Buena Vista University • Cardiff University • Colby College • College of Coastal Georgia • Columbia University • Cornell University • Denison University • Drake University • Duke University • Duquesne University • Emory University • Franklin & Marshall College • George Washington University • Georgia Gwinnett College • Gettysburg College • Grinnell College • Harvard University • Haverford College • Indiana University • Iowa State University • Johns Hopkins University • Kenyon A College • King’sMODEL CollegeFOR London KU Leuven • Lafayette ColSUSTAINABLE OPEN•ACCESS BOOKS ON lege • Loyola University Chicago • Luther College • Macalester College OPEN SOURCE INFRASTRUCTURE THANKS TO... • Michigan State University • Montana State University • Mount Royal University • New College of Florida • Northeastern University • Northwest Florida State College • Northwestern University • NYU • Occidental College • Pennsylvania State University • Princeton University • Purdue University • Rowan University • Rutgers University • Saint Ambrose University • Simon Fraser University • Southern Methodist University • Stanford University • Swarthmore College • Syracuse University • Temple University • The Claremont Colleges • The Ohio State University • Trent University • UNC Chapel Hill • UNC Greensboro • University of AlCollection support Individual title support over of Arizona • UBC • UC Berkeley • UC Davis from• UC Irvine berta • from University 100 •Libraries support • UCLA UC Merced • UCProgram Riverside • UCfrom San DiegoExternal • UC SanFunders Francisco the University • UC Santa Barbara • UC Santa Cruz • UCLof• University of Illinois • University of Iowa • University of Michigan Kansas • University of Maryland • UMass Amherst • University of Minnesota • University of Nebraska • University of Oregon • University of Ottawa • University of Pennsylvania • University of Redlands • University of Rhode Island • University of Rochester • University Saninvest Francisco • University of Scranton • University Learn how youofcan in diamond open access books at of Sheffield • UT Knoxville • University of Texas Austin • University of Toronto • University of Utah • University of Washington • University of Wisconsin • University of York • Vassar College • Washington & Jefferson College • West Virginia University • Yale University • More to come!
University of Michigan Press
Ebook Collection
ebc.press.umich.edu
Every Book, Every Format, All at Once: Exploring the Multiverse of eBook Open Access Models By Laura Ricci (Senior Consultant, Clarke & Esposito) <lricci@ce-strategy.com>
Introduction As a research and consulting firm focused on scholarly publishing, Clarke & Esposito serves a range of publishers, libraries, aggregators, university presses, and member societies with strong publishing programs. In recent years, we have helped many clients consider the implications of open access (OA) for journals and books. It is clear that models are increasingly diverging: the terms “gold OA” and “green OA” — standard terminology for journal publishers — are not sufficient to describe the innovative and experimental ways “The primary that publishers are incorporating cause of the open access options into their divergence scholarly book publishing programs. This matters because without a clear between journal understanding of how publishers and book OA are adapting and funding these can be broadly initiatives, it is difficult to articulate summed up the standards and best practices required to scale programs beyond in one word: their experimental stage.
infrastructure.”
Instead, we have come to view open access book publishing through a different framework — beyond the binary of open v. closed, or adherence to a certain Creative Commons license. Specifically, we look at the unique ways that book distribution infrastructure can allow combinations of closed and open formats that can together sustain a book publishing program. As with any new models, there are several challenges for providers in supporting this evolution, but — I would argue — opportunities, too.
Open Access Monograph Models The primary cause of the divergence between journal and book OA can be broadly summed up in one word: infrastructure. Journal publishers exert a great deal of control over the hosting and distribution of their content. Publishers are themselves the primary content distributor, via a single online platform. Additional platforms, like content aggregators, play a secondary or complementary role in extending distribution, often of a subset of content, or after an embargo, to protect the primacy of the core platform. Book publishing, by contrast, is the opposite: book publishers rarely control distribution directly and are instead reliant on a broad network of distributors and intermediaries. This network formed over time for the distribution of print sales (on which many publishers still depend), but it has since grown to accommodate digital formats. Though some publishers and aggregators offer licensed access to bundles of book titles to libraries, most book publishing is supported by nonrecurring revenue, from sales of discrete units sold one at a time. While there are plenty of books that enjoy a substantial long tail of residual sales, the most important time for a publisher to recoup investment in a title is in the first two years. Publishers
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have therefore developed a multichannel strategy to reach the broadest possible market and maximize income during this crucial frontlist period.
Many Ways to Be OA Book publishers have taken advantage of the different mix of channels and product types when developing open access programs. In the “Opening the Book” preconference session at the 2021 Charleston Conference, I presented a few common examples that illustrate the complexity of these models: • Born OA. These are books that became open access at the moment of first publication, in all electronic versions. An example scenario would be if an author pays a book processing charge (BPC) to the publisher, which enables publication of the book under a CC BY license via the publisher’s website, eBook aggregators, and consumer channels like the Amazon Kindle. Importantly, print versions of the book may still exist — these are by definition not open access and would have to be purchased. • Selective OA. Some publishers offer open access to their scholarly books through some channels but not all. An example would be if a publisher makes a title available for free on its online platform (again, let’s say funded by a BPC), but then also offers a paid access version through consumer channels (e.g., allowing someone to buy for their Kindle). This is a way to maintain a mix of traditional and OA incomes, by pursuing different models through different channels. • Flipped OA. These are books that were initially published as paid access titles, and at some point were “flipped” to open access. In this scenario, the book has become open access at a point when it has already completed its all-important frontlist sales period, so to be sustainable the publisher only needs to offset its “lost” long tail revenues (if any are anticipated). This comparatively low-risk approach may be one reason why early pioneers of OA books, like Knowledge Unlatched, developed their first collaborative funding initiatives to focus on the flipped OA model. • Anticipated OA. Other collaborative funding initiatives have since emerged that focus on frontlist content. In this model, publishers pledge to publish new titles as open access once they have met a certain funding threshold. The funding threshold is typically set based on how many libraries are purchasing a certain (paywalled) collection. If the funding threshold is not met, participating libraries continue to benefit from access to that content. If the funding threshold is met, the publisher fulfills its pledge to publish some or all of its next year’s frontlist as OA. Examples of this model include MIT Press’s Direct to Open, in which libraries pay a recurring participation fee that goes toward opening all new MIT Press scholarly books and
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edited collections published in that year (roughly 90 in total); and the University of Michigan Press’s Fund to Mission, which aims to open 75 percent of the Press’s collection by 2023. This “anticipated OA” model might also be called “Schrödinger’s OA,” because until the funding threshold is met, publishers (and distributors) do not know whether titles will be published on a paid or open access basis. • Single-Chapter OA. This form of open access is possible when publishers offer edited volumes or collections with multiple authors contributing a section or chapter. Some of those authors (or their funders) may pay to make their own contribution open access, meaning that chapter will be freely available to read on the publisher’s website and other platforms. The book in its entirety would otherwise be for sale, through the usual online and print library and consumer channels. By experimenting with new OA models, book publishers are gathering evidence about how to build a sustainably resourced publishing program. Instead of relying solely and exclusively on sales revenue, new OA models incorporate additional funding sources such as author and funder payments, institutional and library subsidies, and other grant funding. Publishers can experiment with the right mix of closed and open, in different formats and throughout a book’s life cycle, to achieve the dual aims of sustainability and accessibility for their titles.
Challenges Publishers are not the only stakeholder in this ecosystem, and the multichannel, multiplatform approach brings as many challenges as it does opportunities. In 2021, Clarke & Esposito prepared the “OA Books Supply Chain Mapping Report” for the Developing a Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This report documents the current state of stakeholders, metadata and usage data flows, and supply chain for OA books (Clarke and Ricci 2021). We found many instances where intermediaries struggled to support multiple access models, which — rather than empowering publishers to develop new, innovative models — can create buyer and user uncertainty. For OA book models to work, publishers need support from the supply chain in two ways: • The supply chain must support specific metadata elements of critical relevance to open access. These can include elements that establish the title as open access, but also those that describe the license model. For books published under a single-chapter OA model, the metadata must contain an additional level of detail about each chapter (which is a layer of granularity often not supported by metadata feeds). Crucially, often causing the most problems is what’s missing: some book distributors presuppose each book will carry a price point and will fail to load titles with a price of $0.00. • The supply chain must support the ability for publishers to update these metadata elements over time. In circumstances like the flipped OA model, a book may become open access years after it is published, long after copies first appeared in sales channels and storefronts. If those channels can’t ingest the metadata that transforms those titles to open access, some copies may remain — inaccurately — available for sale.
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Consider two scenarios illustrating what happens when intermediaries can’t support certain metadata elements or update them over time: • A book is published open access, but its print version is available for sale. A book published under a “born OA” model is available in electronic format on the publisher’s proprietary platform under a CC BYNC-ND license, and is simultaneously available to buy in print. The publisher sends metadata about both the OA and the print versions to a library distributor that cannot load the open access version, because it does not support “free” eBooks. Librarians will instead see only the print version in their online storefront or in their approval plans. They therefore do not know that the OA version is an option, unless they follow a separate, OA-specific workflow. • A book is published paid access but is made open access after two years. A book published as a paid access title two years ago is flipped to open access through a collective funding model. Versions of that title are available through library aggregators on a subscription basis. The publisher attempts to push a metadata update to the aggregator, but because the platform does not support a zero-dollar price point, the update fails. The aggregator continues to offer this title on a gated access basis. The next question is usually, Why don’t these intermediaries simply update their systems to support OA? The problem is competing incentives. Many of the goals shared by publishers, authors, funders, and librarians to support an open access program involve increasing the reach and access of each title and reaching new audiences around the world. Channels that rely on sales or gated access to content earn revenue by taking a commission from sales, so with no payment required to access the title, that incentive disappears. How do these channels sustainably perform the same service if the content is open access?
The Way Forward In our conversations with publishers and librarians, who sit at opposite ends of the supply chain, we consistently hear about pain points beyond just the purchase and sale of content. Intermediaries are sorely needed here. Many libraries rely on vendors for metadata management and cataloging services, particularly where the library wishes to curate individual titles to add “...intermediaries to their collection rather than rely on large packages. Rather are important to than spend precious staff time on make OA books creating high-quality or customized discoverable cataloging records for OA titles, some libraries may be more than in places like willing to outsource this task (as Google Scholar they do with paid access titles). and library Additionally, simply adding an open discovery access book to a platform or package is not sufficient; intermediaries services, and are important to make OA books to enhance the discoverable in places like Google value of all Scholar and library discovery content...” services, and to enhance the value of all content (both paid and OA)
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across each platform. The challenge for intermediaries, which is not unique to books, is how to turn these services into a viable business model unto themselves. One question publishers and intermediaries will be eager to answer is the extent to which the primacy of print books may help — or hinder — this transition. Previous studies have found no clear negative effect between open access availability and print book sales (Ferwerda et al. 2013, Collins and Milloy 2016). Most of these studies were conducted when open access books were comparatively nascent and before the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have had a dramatic impact on “The library and consumer purchase behaviors. In January 2022, the challenge for intermediaries, Association of University Presses received a National Endowment for which is not the Humanities grant to study the unique to books, impact of open access on print sales, which should result in an important is how to turn update on this topic.
these services into a viable business model unto themselves.”
In the meantime, publishers continue to develop new open access models, buoyed by increasing interest and investment from funders and librarians. This will
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increase the market need for intermediaries that recognize what is unique about OA books and can develop a sustainable support network that takes into account the many ways a book can be OA. Publishers of OA books are actively engaged in new ways of thinking about open access, and this creates new interactions and opportunities for the rest of the supply chain. The challenge is to see OA books not as “replacing” a market made for paid access books, but rather as enhancing it.
References Clarke, Michael and Laura Ricci. 2021. “OA Books Supply Chain Mapping Report,” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.4681725. Collins, Ellen and Caren Milloy. 2016. “OAPEN-UK m a t c h e d p a i r s p i l o t : F i n a l R e p o r t J a n u a r y 2 0 1 6 ,” OAPEN-UK. https://oapen.fra1.digitaloceanspaces. com/3bcb7895c4b3477d91c538b245ba248c.pdf. Ferwerda, Eelco, Ronald Snijder, and Janneke Adema. 2013. OAPEN-NL — A project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands: Final Report. The Hague: OAPEN Foundation.
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Future Prospects for Open Access Books — History and Perspectives from a European (Humanities) Press By Carsten Buhr (Managing Director, De Gruyter) and Steve Fallon (Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Steve.Fallon@degruyter.com> and Christina Lembrecht (Head, Open Research Department, De Gruyter)
Looking Back: How the Open Access Book Journey in Europe Began Recently, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) announced that it had reached an important milestone: more than 50,000 peer-reviewed open access books, published in more than 90 languages by 560 scholarly publishers, are now indexed in what has become one of the most comprehensive and relevant sources for tracing and understanding the development and the current physiognomics of the global open access book landscape. The DOAB was founded in 2012, in a period that can be understood as the formation phase for open access books in Europe. At that time, the first initiatives were launched to fund open access books (the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which started its OA books program as early as 2009, was a pioneer here). New publishing houses were founded that specialized exclusively in open access publications for the humanities and social sciences, and infrastructure emerged to drive the development of OA books (in addition to the already mentioned DOAB, these include OAPEN and Open Edition). And in summer 2013, a landmark conference entitled “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences” took place at the British Library in London, with more than 200 participants discussing how to foster open access for books and — more broadly — how the digital change can be used to fundamentally reform the publishing ecosystem and publishing habits in the humanities and social sciences. In this formation phase of open access book publishing, De Gruyter started to build our open access list. The first two open access books (one in library and information science, one in classical studies) were published in 2010, just two years after introducing eBooks for all new titles. After selling and sending print copies to libraries and end customers around the world for more than two centuries, electronic formats as a first step and open access publications as an (optional) second step have added new possibilities to fulfill our mandate to grow the reach and visibility of our publications. While the eBook was introduced across the board for all our titles, open access publications initially remained in the clear minority compared to what we today — for lack of an appropriate term — often call the “traditional” publications. We published only a handful of open access monographs per year in the first five years. But from 2015 onward a clear and continuous increase in open access frontlist titles can be observed due to the rise in OA funding in Europe, particularly in the context of larger third-party funded research projects (figure 1).
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Figure 1. Development of OA frontlist book publication at De Gruyter 2010 to 2021. At the same time, we started to open — often in collaboration with partner institutions — backlist and archive titles. As a result, we surpassed the threshold of 1,000 open access books available on our platform in 2017.
Present Times: What the Structure of Our Portfolio Reveals about the State of Open Access Book Funding In 2021, more than 10 percent of our total book frontlist output were published immediately open access, the large majority in the humanities, where gold open access publications account for up to 20 percent of our publishing programs in select disciplines. Most of our OA books are funded through publication grants or subsidies, often referred to as book processing charges (BPC), which means that one party — generally the author or their institution — funds the OA publication of the book. Looking at our OA book portfolio over the past two years, just under 90 percent of our OA books are financed through BPCs (figure 2). Just over 10 percent of OA books are non-BPC funded, so there is no direct link between the author and the OA funding source.
Figure 2. BPC vs. non-BPC models share of total OA books at De Gruyter, 2020–2021.
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We can distinguish three different funding streams: more than one-third of our OA books published in 2020 and 2021 were financed via regular budget funds of the researcher and/or their institution (figure 3). Just over a quarter of our OA books are funded through third-party research grants (almost entirely from Europe), for which there is often a recommendation or even a mandate in place to publish (gold) OA, and — as in the case of European Research Council (ERC) projects, for example — OA costs are eligible. For another quarter of our OA books, funding applications are submitted (usually by the author) to so-called OA book funds on a national level (Switzerland and Austria). In Germany, OA book funds are established locally at the level of individual universities or research institutions analogous to APC funds for journals.
Figure 3. Funding structure of total OA books at De Gruyter, 2020–2021. Although enabling our success in developing our open access book portfolio over the past years, this funding model also raises some concerns. The funding structure makes it clear that access to open access book funding is still relatively exclusive. It is limited to scholars granted with major third-party funded research projects, to academics based at institutions that are well-financed and/or have a dedicated open access orientation and policy with established funds to support academic books. Funding depends on the author’s affiliation or nationality. Or, put differently: the BPC model raises questions about equal access to publishing opportunities, especially if funding opportunities for OA books are as limited as they are today. There is a danger that we have substituted a paywall restricting access with a paywall restricting the ability to publish. These concerns are why we and other publishers have started to explore new approaches that avoid the use of book processing charges. These models are often referred to as non-BPC models or diamond models. In one way or the other, they intend to translate one of the significant advantages of legacy publishing into the open access publishing ecosystem. Many institutions are paying a small amount to finance open access publications. The call for collaboratively funded OA books is by no means new. At the London conference in 2013 mentioned above, Francis Pinter already presented her thoughts in this regard, which resulted in the foundation of Knowledge Unlatched; and Martin-Paul Eve introduced the membership model underlying the Open Library of Humanities. While we participated in the pledging rounds of Knowledge Unlatched until recently, we started to work in 2019 on launching our own collaboratively funded OA book projects in the German market. For the third time in 2019, we built a library consortium for OA books, enabling the transformation of approximately 30 monographs and collected volumes from
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the humanities to OA per year. We are now expanding this approach to the global, English-language market by collaborating with JISC on the Purchase to Open pilot. While collaboratively funded models currently enable only a little over 10 percent of our OA books (figures 2 and 3), the model is significant for us as a publisher. It enables us to publish more authors who do not have access to OA funds. It also gives us, as a publisher, an active role in shaping the OA transformation for monographs and collected volumes.
Moving Forward: Bringing Accessibility, Sustainability and Digital Formats Together Looking at the notes from the London conference in 2013 these days is quite revealing. Many of the questions around open access for books have lost none of their relevance. While the open access book landscape has evolved significantly since 2013, the discussion around business models, the cost for sustainable OA book publishing, commercial v. noncommercial players, and dissemination and metadata standards, among others, continues to be very much alive. And almost 10 years later, it is still a given that the funding landscape for OA books is limited (especially compared to the journal market), even though research funders, especially in Europe, have been providing funding for OA books. The funding options available to date are far from sufficient to advance and enable the OA transformation in the book sector on a global scale. In this sense, the German Science and Humanities Council stated in a position paper on OA at the beginning of the year that the open access transformation in the book sector could only be expected in the medium to long term. For us as a publishing house, committed for centuries both to the humanities and social sciences and to the publishing of highly specialized research monographs and edited volumes, obligations arise from the in-between space in which we find ourselves: between an old world of scholarly publishing that still exists and a new one that is only very, very slowly emerging. In this space, our task is to work with other stakeholders in scholarly communications to continuously find the right balance between accessibility, economic sustainability, and digital formats. We need to respond to the following challenges: (1) While immediate open access is undoubtedly the gold standard to strive for — and we will continue to expand our gold OA book share and experiment with new models for this purpose — it is equally vital that we continue to keep an eye on our traditionally published books, which still represent the majority of scholarly output. Maintaining and improving their accessibility and dissemination within the given framework conditions is vital to avoid drifting apart and creating a two-class society in scholarly publishing. The question of whether and what role green OA or delayed or retrospective OA can play here remains to be answered with a view to sustainability considerations. (2) The use and distribution of the research monograph in the humanities and social sciences must be examined from a holistic perspective. The interaction or coexistence of print and digital formats and comparing OA books to traditionally published books must go beyond an analysis of usage and download statistics and sales figures.
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(3) We should discuss and also actively test, for example, in pilot projects, how the potential of digital publishing can be made more fruitful for the further development of book publications in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the benefits and costs of digital features should be compared and evaluated, also with a view to the economic viability of highly specialized books in the humanities and social sciences. With a view to the goal of making all results and process steps of a research project openly accessible, solutions are also needed here that correspond to the publication culture, structures, and funding of the humanities and social sciences, not only for data sharing and publishing.
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These are just some of the tasks ahead. Our task as a publishing house is to actively and responsibly help shape the changes in scientific publishing — and to do so in a way that is in the best interests of academia. Carsten Buhr is Managing Director of De Gruyter, a familyowned international publishing house headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Steve Fallon is De Gruyter’s Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships. Christina Lembrecht heads the publishing house’s Open Research department.
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Open Access eBooks in South Africa By Andrew Joseph (Digital Publisher, Wits University Press) <Andrew.Joseph@wits.ac.za> “Never minded working hard. It’s who I’m working for.” — Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, “Everything Is Free”
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he state of South African research output appears to be rather healthy. Proportionally, we have the second highest number of female researchers in the G20, a very strong impact in medicine and health-related research (despite relatively low output), and high output (but relatively low impact) for the humanities and social sciences (HSS). There is a general increase in scholarly book production (up about 19%), and on the whole, research and research output in South Africa is growing at a rate of about 12%. (Adams and Rogers 2021). What we don’t see is a corresponding increase in publications by local publishers (Le Roux and Cassells 2022; DHET 2020). It is apparent that most researchers continue to choose to publish with nonlocal publishers. This is especially true of open access (OA) monograph publishing which, while offered by some local presses, is certainly not the norm. At the onset of OA monograph publishing, especially in Europe and North America, there was for local publishers a sense of not knowing exactly where to begin, despite strongly supporting its fundamental intention and wanting to participate. Notably, the HSRC Press was one of the early adopters and initiators of an OA monograph publishing program in the early 2000s. There has always been strong enthusiasm for OA publishing in South African institutions, usually from the institutional or reader perspective. The benefits were obvious particularly for journals: increased accessibility and lowered cost for libraries and readers in a deeply unequal society. Combined with state-planned digital infrastructure in the early 2010s, and the envisaged increase in access to internet services and devices, the assumed uptake/access/usage appeared to be a sure thing. However, both infrastructural development and increased internet and communication technology services came to be provided by private enterprise, not the state, which put paid to the hoped-for coherence of implementation. The enabling of local publishers to develop their own, or participate in existing, OA programs was limited to the outcome-driven need for OA. It would have been far more useful and productive for a program for local stakeholders to be developed, in which aspects such as changing business models and technology skill improvement were systematically approached. Instead, local publishers have had to contend with the continued (and rightly so) calls for increased OA offerings, while not having had the benefit of participating in a coordinated program to enable them to do so. Publishers in South Africa have however risen to the challenge, and through cooperative and individual efforts, most presses are publishing OA monographs. Most if not all university presses have participated in Knowledge Unlatched initiatives since its inception, and many have taken this impetus further. Wits University Press has made a number of backlist titles OA and attempts to publish 10% of its frontlist program as OA. Similar initiatives are underway at UNISA Press and African SUN Media, with HSRC Press continuing its OA offering. The
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University of Johannesburg Press and the recently relaunched University of Cape Town Press have been established following a library publishing model, and are “OA only” publishers. Nonuniversity-press OA publishers too have been active in this sphere, including AOSIS and African Minds. Recent collaborative projects, which have helped presses begin to collectively identify issues and potential solutions, include the OA Committee in the National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum (under the auspices of the Academy of Science of South Africa) and an OA working group in the Scholarly Publishers Committee of the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA), which looks into OA more generally. These initiatives include publishing staff at both management and operations levels and are attempting not only to develop practical collaborations, but also to ensure information and skill sharing. It is essential, to my mind, that these groups grow and extend their inclusion. The participation of policymaking bodies is essential to mitigate the effects of this delayed start. Discussions with such bodies as the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), Universities South Africa (USAf), PASA, and the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC must continue to grow, and programs should be developed around this activity. In a twist on our usual mode of “South African exceptionalism,” I believe we should imagine that we’re the slipper being tried on by many feet, and not a Cinderella waiting for the opportunity to assume our “rightful” position. What may be observed from the South African example is a strong ideological impetus, with neither planned infrastructural support nor comprehensive future planning. As a result, better OA book services appeared to be offered by North American and European publishers, despite great local initiatives at the time, such as that of HSRC Press. This perception has taken great effort to alter, particularly in the minds of authors and institutions. What could make it all come together? 1. Local publishers should refocus on processes, constantly re-examine underlying intentions and mission, propose regulations, and consider the role of technology organizations. We should not simply focus on immediate outcomes (i.e., instant access for readers and institutions), but should work towards coordinated capacity building, alignment with standards, and participation in the development of OA monograph publishing initiatives. This approach will lead to a deeper, structurally embedded, and accountable offering. 2. Increased coordination at a policy level for national government, institutions, libraries and local publishers. A greater gain would include regional cooperation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This would be an important first step in the internationalization of knowledge (production, access and control). Further, this must tie into the Open Science initiatives (we
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are, for instance, contributing to the International Science Council Future of Scientific Publishing program (https://council.science/actionplan/futureof-scientific-publishing/)), and journal-focused programmes such as the Plan S Small Publishers Toolkit program (https://www.alpsp.org/SPA-OPSproject-report-and-toolkit). 3. There will have to be a definitive realization of digital infrastructure projects at a state level. This matter is laden with the historical and geographic baggage of apartheid and colonial legacies of course, but managed, practical gains can be made, particularly in relation to higher education institutions. (Czerniewicz 2022) 4. You’ll forgive my lack of enthusiasm for initiatives such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals project. For a multitude of reasons, previous iterations have never come close to achieving the aims and good intentions. They do provide a set of principles, but my fear is that without regulatory clout and infrastructural enabling, this non-achievement may repeat itself, though I do, of course, hope that I am proved wrong. Perhaps supporters of the intent and allies from outside the region could advocate for consultative, sustainable, and practical implementation of the principles. What has been particularly problematic in the past has been the reliance of the private sector in infrastructure provision. The focus on economic growth, not on economic development, and a lack of regulation has contributed to the lack of delivery and must be avoided in the future. 5. There is a necessity for the involvement of the local publishing industry — UPs and commercials — especially in future planning for metadata, identifiers, metrics, and reporting obligations. Usage data in particular is something of interest (especially the work of the Open Access Data Trust Project https:// www.oabookusage.org/) that should see an alignment between research management systems, funders, and publishers. 6. Fundamental to an understanding of the need for accurate, consistent standards-based metrics are the licensing and copyright regimes that underpin the dissemination and reuse models. We face serious challenges with the proposed Copyright Amendment Bill in the country, to which scholarly publishers have raised serious objections; unanalyzed changes to the already fragile supply chain, the lack of socioeconomic assessment, and specifically a reduction of the term of copyright to 25 years will have serious implications for OA monograph publishing, especially in HSS. (Joseph and Wightman 2018; Tomaselli 2019)
Open access is as much a policymaking issue as it is a practice. We should avoid redefining this as a “problem” to be solved through individual action(s), nor should we maintain a reverential regard for technology “solutions.” The fundamental principles are easily agreed to; democratizing the production of, and access to knowledge; and that that knowledge will encourage debate and thus “change” society. The devil is, of course, in the details regarding the form this should take and how implementation would best suit the very people it is intended to benefit. If not, we run the risk of a technopopulist solution: a “decontextualized, event-driven” activity (Streeck 2022) with little location in history and thus no substance with which to deal with the challenges faced collectively.
References Adams, Jonathan and Gordon Rogers. 2021. “The Annual G20 Scorecard — Research Performance 2021.” https://clarivate. com/lp/the-annual-g20-scorecard-research-performance-2021/. Czerniewicz, Laura. n.d. “Multi-layered digital inequalities in HEIs: the paradox of the post-digital society.” Global University Network for Innovation. Accessed June 3, 2022. https://www. guni-call4action.org/article/multi-layered-digital-inequalitiesheis-paradox-post-digital-society. Department of Higher Education and Training. 2020. “Annual Report 2018/19.” South African Government. https://www. dhet.gov.za/Commissions%20Reports/DHET%20Annual%20 Report%2019-20.pdf. Joseph, Andrew and Jeremy Wightman. 2018. “Copyright Bill threatens publishers.” New Frame, December 5, 2018. https:// www.newframe.com/copyright-bill-threatens-publishers/. Le Roux, Elizabeth and Laetitia Cassells. 2022. “South African Book Publishing Industry Survey.” Publishers Association of South Africa. https://publishsa.co.za/wp-content/ uploads/2022/02/2019-2021-Publishing-Industry-Survey.pdf. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2022. “In the Superstate.” London Review of Books, January 27, 2022. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/ n02/wolfgang-streeck/in-the-superstate Tomaselli, Keyan. 2019. “South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill: Implications for universities.” The South African Journal of Science, 115(5/6). https://sajs.co.za/article/ view/6283/7657 Welch, Gillian and David Rawlings. 2001. “Everything is Free.” Time (The Revelator). Acony Records.
7. The influence and possible (yet to be proposed or realized) contributions of Big Tech organizations must be mediated by regulatory mechanisms and a clear separation of power, a client-supplier relationship with clear controls and restrictions.
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Open Access Monographs: An Aggregator’s Perspective By Phil Hearn (Publisher Relations Manager, Project MUSE) <phearn.muse@jhu.edu>
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roject MUSE operates within a bustling cross section of the knowledge community, built upon the balance of the (often competing) needs of libraries, publishers, and users. While this balance has been carefully calibrated and iterated across our institutional sales models for books and journals, open access (OA) completely resets the scales of each stakeholder’s roles. How does an institution best serve its users when the content is freely available outside of its walls? How does a publisher sustain a monograph publishing list as the scholarly winds push more toward a fully open access norm? What responsibility (if any) falls on the user of OA content, and how is that responsibility best enforced? And, to push into the focus of this essay, what is the role of an aggregator platform like Project MUSE to help answer these questions? Open access monographs have been part of the Project MUSE platform since 2018, when we launched our Mellonfunded MUSE Open initiative. In four years we have grown the program to include about 4,500 OA books in the humanities and social sciences from over 80 nonprofit scholarly publishers. These publishers operate across a wide spectrum of scale and resources, from the largest North American university presses to small independent presses operating on a shoestring budget and publishing one book per year (or less). Our role as an aggregator is, in large part, to enable these publishers to reach their intended readers with minimal barriers, regardless of size and resources. We charge a modest hosting fee from participating publishers and encourage them to account for these hosting fees when acquiring funding. Open Access seems unlikely to rest on a one-size-fits-all model across different publishers, countries, subjects, and use cases. And in one respect, the aggregator that hosts an open access monograph is simply the end point of a long process of securing funding, editorial, production, distribution, and marketing of the content itself. But MUSE and other aggregators are responsible for ensuring that the access is indeed open for this content, as well as secure, stable, preserved, accessible, and, most importantly, discoverable, so that it can rise above the infinite search results and be selected by researchers to play its part in the scholarly discourse. Ensuring that a book is available open access does not guarantee that users will discover it. It is one thing to place a monograph’s metadata and PDF in an institutional repository or on a web page for anybody to download free of charge; it is quite another to make sure that scholars can find that page to begin with. When so many users begin their research on Google, what systems are in place to make sure that relevant scholarly open access resources are returned prominently among endless search results? Authors and publishers, of course, want their open access books to be read as widely as possible, and this is often the challenge that encourages them to seek wider aggregation for these titles. A major function of MUSE’s technical infrastructure is in fulfilling access to users at institutions who pay for our gated content. When a book is OA, and the role of arbiter
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for institutionally purchased access is not necessary, MUSE’s primary responsibility becomes making sure that as many users who want to find a book can do so. This means leveraging our scale to send open access metadata to as many linking and discovery partners as possible. Project MUSE has decades of experience navigating SEO trends and requirements to boost the discoverability of content on the platform, and we track closely with the evolving standards around open access metadata in this space. We initiated a partnership with the Directory of Open Access Books, automatically distributing data for any OA title that launches on MUSE from a member publisher, so long as it has a Creative Commons (CC) license. We deposit DOIs through CrossRef, either as the primary depositor or via their Co-Access program, to ensure stable reference linking even for books that appear on multiple platforms. We actively encourage institutions familiar with Project MUSE to ingest our Open Access title lists into their discovery layers, and maintain constant feeds flowing to discovery services like EBSCO Discovery Service, OCLC, and Ex Libris (among many others) to enable this ingestion. For those who prefer to update their holdings manually using MARC records, we offer those too, free for any librarian to pull from our site. This, I should note, is how data for all content on MUSE flows downstream; the difference with open access content is that the downstream activities are not limited to purchasing institutions for certain collections or titles, but are instead available to any institution who wishes to add them to their holdings. MUSE’s approach to open access is to fully integrate it with our existing processes, and to expand the reach of that content to broader channels made possible by the open access model. More and more institutions are choosing to add open access books to their holdings. Just from 2020 to 2021, MUSE saw discovery system and MARC record ingestion of open access books more than double, and the uptake continues to increase to well over 1,000 institutions. It is important to stress how meaningful this is: libraries are, at an increasing rate, choosing to place open access books in their holdings right alongside content that they have carefully selected and deliberately purchased or subscribed to for their users to access. This tracks with growing library support for open access initiatives across the market. We are seeing institutional investment in projects like Central European University Press’s “Opening the Future,” in which paid access for backlist books supports the publication of new open access titles. Library membership programs are emerging to fund OA projects from OAPEN to MIT Press’s “Direct to Open,” and Subscribe to Open (S2O) experiments (which MUSE is exploring on the journals side) encourage libraries to take an active role in sustaining open access publishing via existing funding channels. This dovetails with the deeper symbolic value of open access books appearing on an aggregator like Project MUSE, a nonprofit entity that hosts only peer-reviewed, scholarly content from nonprofit publishers and societies. OA books and journals
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are not differentiated from gated content on our site in any meaningful way apart from access tags; there is no implication of lesser scholarly value, because of course there is no inherent difference. In pushing for a more open access future, it was important for us to place OA content on the same playing field as our most popular traditionally gated journals and books. It is encouraging to see institutional libraries around the world actively make the same determination. All this focus on discoverability would be empty without a similarly robust focus on usage statistics. When sales are not part of the picture, usage becomes the key metric for publishers to track the success of their titles on Project MUSE and elsewhere, with applications from mere curiosity to acquisitions planning to grant applications. The launch of open access books on Project MUSE included a completely rebuilt in-house usage statistics suite for providing publishers with as much information as possible about the readership of their OA books. These tools enable publishers to view OA usage alongside the usage for their gated titles, compare year-over-year performance, identify highest-performing chapters, and easily identify trends over time. Project MUSE has taken a collaborative approach to
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collecting and analyzing the usage of OA books, providing usage statistics to efforts like University of North Carolina Press’s Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and Knowledge Unlatched to help facilitate a holistic view of how OA books perform online across hosting platforms. These efforts to boost and understand the discovery of OA books on MUSE have yielded great success for our young open access program. In 2021, usage of OA books on MUSE increased about three times over the previous year to over 6 million hits, with users from almost every country in the world. With our scale as an aggregator, we have the critical mass of data to expand beyond anecdotal successes to attempt to pinpoint more systemic trends and movements in how users are engaging with OA books. We are actively studying this data to inform future platform updates, linking arrangements, and other adjustments to our approach or infrastructure that might further reduce any barriers to entry for readers seeking OA scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
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Launching an Open Access Model for Books — Lessons Learned on the Road with MIT Press Direct to Open By Amy Harris (Senior Manager, Library Relations and Sales, MIT Press) <aeharris@mit.edu>
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n 1960, when founding Director Lynwood Bryant laid out objectives for what the nascent MIT Press should be, he opined that “the Press ought to be interested in the development of new techniques in the design, printing, and distribution of books. It should be willing to take risks with new methods that a commercial publisher cannot afford to take.” This drive to push boundaries, experiment, and innovate recurs throughout the Press’s history, and its pioneering leaders have frequently pursued ideas on the publishing industry’s bleeding edge.
to move subscription journals to OA received new urgency in the last five to seven years thanks to funder mandates and legislation. Many open access models for journals including Subscribe to Open, PLOS’s Community Action Publishing, and Read and Publish leverage the standard revenue model for serial publications: annual subscription. There’s also a longstanding market expectation that customers will pay in advance for content published in a journal over the course of a year and that they will review and hopefully renew that commitment the next year.
I’ve had the honor of working on the development, launch, and promotion of an initiative that I believe rates among the MIT Press’s boldest and most pathbreaking projects: the new, collective action open access (OA) model for scholarly monographs and edited collections, Direct to Open (D2O). The experience of launching the model and bringing libraries on board has been thrilling but also, occasionally, surprising. Inevitably, despite years of research, dozens of conversations with librarians and stakeholders — despite rigorous analyses of everything from library budgets to title counts to costs — our team has still been rumbled by some unexpected situations and challenges in promoting a nonmarket business model for books.
The market and funding model for books, on the other hand, has been much more diffuse and diverse. Historically, books have been acquired by methods as various as approval plans, firm orders, standing orders, and even orders through vendors that sell primarily to consumers. More recently, libraries have acquired eBooks in collections, via short-term loan (STL), or through demand-driven acquisition (DDA) or evidencebased acquisition (EBA) programs. The mixed wholesale and consumer channels for books and eBooks make it especially difficult to track sales with precision. All of this, in turn, makes it hard for publishers interested in pursuing an open model to identify and engage the institutions that are most likely to participate.
As background, the MIT Press launched Direct to Open in March 2021. Developed over two years with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund and in close collaboration with the library community, D2O aims to • open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections from 2022 via recurring participation fees, • provide participating libraries with term access to backlist/archives (roughly 2,500 titles), which will otherwise remain gated, and • cover partial direct costs for the publication of highquality works that are also available for print purchase. The model was designed to be inclusive and equitable — ensuring access for authors, regardless of ability to pay and providing affordable and fair participation terms for all types of contributing institutions. It also is designed to encourage wide participation, as, once the success threshold is achieved, additional participation reduces the fees for all. Perhaps as a result of its name and its focus on redirecting revenue from traditional sales channels into funding for open access publication, Direct to Open has sometimes been called “Subscribe to Open for books.” However, there are some important differences between the way that books and journals are structured as products and the ways in which they are acquired by libraries that make this comparison misleading and potentially detrimental. Conversations about open access have been dominated by journals, and the subject of how
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Moreover, through there is still a strong tradition of subjectlevel acquisition, librarians (and book buyers in general) tend to think of and evaluate each book individually. Unlike scholarship that appears under the aegis of a journal’s brand and editorial curation, books — even those included in the same subject collection from the same publisher — do not necessarily have the same perceived relevance from year to year, as acquisitions librarians use inputs such as reviews, publisher reputation, and patron demand to choose individual titles for their collections. Though libraries often acquire books consistently from trusted publishers, the formal business practice of annually renewed support does not exist for books in the same way that it does for serial publications. The disparate channels and methods that libraries employ to collect books have not been the only challenge we have encountered in finding interested institutions and partnering with them on an open access business model. There have been structural barriers as well. For example, though many libraries employ scholarly communications librarians or have committees or special interest groups devoted to scholarly communications and open access, we found that there is no consistent degree of interaction or collaboration between those individuals or groups and the collection development side of the house. There are a few libraries where there is a reporting relationship between collections and scholarly communications, but this is relatively rare. More often, these librarians may be working independently and may even have separate budgets and different restrictions on how they can spend the funds they steward.
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The strategic promise of Direct to Open is that it is an opportunity for librarians to use the same collections dollars earmarked for purchasing a single paywalled copy of a book to instead make that same book available, on an open access basis, to the world. It is vital that we interest and engage collections librarians for this model to succeed and be sustainable. However, we often encountered libraries that — due to institutional policies and practices optimized to the procurement of materials under conventional market models — could not spend their collections budgets on anything but paywalled content. Though the product itself was still the same, the fact that we were asking for open access funding rather than payment for restricted access to it raised issues. For libraries where this was a barrier, however, there was a silver lining. Though the term “subscription access to the backlist collection” is primarily intended as an incentive to drive participation, it also gave some libraries a path to support the model, since they could show that they were getting access to a collection of approximately 2,500 titles that would otherwise remain gated and for-purchase only. We found that still other libraries had carved out dedicated budgets to support open access projects. In some cases, they felt that Direct to Open made sense to support with that money. In other cases, librarians felt a strong sense of responsibility to maximize the impact of those precious, hard-won funds and wanted D2O to go farther or do more before they would consider it (e.g., include many other publishers or more books). Clearly, libraries in these situations felt bound to spend these dollars in a way that could maximize their impact, and they were judging each project extremely carefully. There is one other practical, systemic issue that I’ve found both fascinating and dispiriting. Raym Crow (managing partner at the Chain Bridge Group) very thoughtfully designed Direct to Open with equity at its heart. He painstakingly analyzed library budget numbers in an effort to make the model affordable for institutions of all types and sizes. He prioritized keeping fees as low as possible and we adopted a granular, tiered fee structure that recognizes a great deal of variation — not just between doctoral, master’s, bachelor’s, and associate’s institutions, but also between PhD-granting universities with varying FTEs. The participation fees do not cover the full costs of publishing MIT Press’s scholarly monographs, only partial direct costs; if more institutions participate in D2O than are needed to fully fund the program in any year, it does not result in a profit for the Press. Instead, it results in lower fees for participating libraries.
In the spirit of collective action and thanks to an extremely generous grant from the MIT Libraries, one way that we’ve been able to further reduce fees for smaller libraries without discounting is through subsidy. Using those grant funds, we offered master’s, bachelor’s, and associate’s institutions a reduction in their fees for 2022. As the first year draws to a close, we have been surprised that fewer libraries than we hoped took us up on this reduced fee. Though there are likely numerous factors in play — including the budget restrictions discussed above — did it make a difference that we called it a reduced or subsidized fee rather than a discount? Future conversations may tell. We are learning a lot from working with Direct to Open, but it is important to acknowledge that we are not alone among university-based publishers1 in exploring a sustainable, values-based future for open books. In the months before and after the launch of D2O, Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press announced that they would be adopting COPIM’s Opening the Future model to open access to collections of their scholarly books, and the University of Michigan Press introduced Fund to Mission — a new open model for their monographs. These important offerings from missiondriven publishers present exciting and affordable options to libraries seeking to invest in making access to knowledge more open and equitable. They may seem new and different. At first, they may not easily conform to systems and processes optimized for conventional market models, but they offer important alternatives to for-profit models and encourage a fairer future for OA. Wide support from the library community will help ensure that they endure, thrive, and ultimately gain adoption by other publishers.
Endnotes 1. I’ve focused on the university press experience here since that is the perspective I have to offer, but also want to acknowledge the innovations and successes of the ScholarLed consortium and other campus-based, bornOA publishers like Lever Press that are opening scholarly research and offering non-market-based approaches to academic publishing based on collaboration and partnership.
While I’m proud of our focus on equity and feel it is morally right, it has also been a harsh reminder that this approach is a departure from how the book business has historically operated. To navigate the market for books, librarians have become expert negotiators, for good reasons. In the traditional, market-based model, savvy customers are often wise to ask for a deal, but the Direct to Open fees weren’t calculated to bear discounting. Under this nonmarket-based model, the result of giving one library a discount on their fee would be that we would simply need to bring more libraries on board to make up that shortfall.
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Help Wanted: Supplier Services and Sustainable Funding Incentives for OA Monographs By Rachel Fox Von Swearingen (Collections Lead Librarian, Syracuse University Libraries) <rsfoxvon@syr.edu>
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ublishers, vendors, and libraries exist in a commercial ecosystem of mutual benefit. From the library perspective, publishers create information products, vendors make library workflows scalable, and libraries provide significant funding. Robust vendor services from both publishers and suppliers have adapted to simultaneously serve both print and paywalled electronic monograph collection development. A monograph is a monograph, no matter how (or whether) a library pays for it, and our collection development evaluation process and metadata supply needs do not change for an open access title. However, the tumultuous rearrangement of the funding ecosystem to accommodate open access (OA) monographs has affected the services provided to us by our vendor partners. As a result, libraries are experiencing significant service gaps and a proliferation of disparate sales models, impeding our ability to collect titles and sustainably participate monetarily in the ecosystem. These struggles from the library side are a labor supply issue. Library staff lines have slowly been transitioned from collections and technical services to other services like digital scholarship, research impact support, and digital preservation due to changes in the collecting landscape and outsourcing to vendor services. OA monograph collecting is not currently serviced well through our vendors, but it is difficult to craft an administratively justifiable proposal to transition library staff lines back to fill a gap previously met by vendors. Libraries are partners with other members of the open access publishing ecosystem, and we can understand why the gaps exist, but libraries unfortunately cannot simply move to fill those gaps with our own labor. Collecting OA monographs requires manual workflows, and those are still in flux and development at my institution. Understanding “push” and “pull” when it comes to the labor involved is important. For example, detailed approval plans, standing orders, and notification services push title discovery our way with relatively low labor on the library end once everything is set up. Our technical staff then load a tidy batch of precurated and precleaned final records into our catalog. Outside of that, we monitor news, email, and websites for discovery and pull titles and catalog metadata to us. Our subject selectors do have some monograph types for which we utilize the title-by-title pull method, such as maps, music scores, video titles, or art publications. If a library pulls records from an open metadata repository, they must still have the in-house expertise to query the API and then clean the records before loading. This pull workflow at the scale we are headed toward for OA monographs is not possible. Our first early steps for collecting OA monographs have relied on our existing monograph workflows for title requests. Then, those individual title requests become package selections where we acquire metadata from our electronic resource management system (ERM) services, which are powered by a knowledge base. Historically, if a requested title isn’t in our ERM, we have not added it. Title requests to date have been from a few history faculty, from our subject librarians, and a few I have selected.
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Our faculty cited their desire for their students to encounter all course readings side-by-side with their pay walled counterparts within library systems. Because package-level or publisher-level collecting falls into the duties of interdisciplinary collection development librarians like me, our subject selectors have not been able to dedicate the time to regularly collect OA titles for their individual subject areas. The titles don’t appear within our supplier workflows, nor within their subject-specific discovery sources, so relying on their labor isn’t a viable solution.
“The potential for growth of a centralized OA monograph metadata repository is fantastic ... It does not, however, address the library need for vendor services like approval or notification profiles ... nor does it address the library labor needed to develop scripts to harvest from the repository API.”
Package-level discovery, and incorporating its metadata into our systems, typically occurs in our ERM. ERMs are not designed for collection development discovery, so this already disadvantages OA content. Cambridge University librarians Jayne Kelly and Clara Panozzo (2021) review many of the difficulties they have encountered with this process in their Open Access Books Network blog post “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective.” They describe vendor degradation of publishersupplied metadata, duplication among collections, unclear OA or paywalled status, disjointed workflows to accommodate dozens of different publisher pulling cycles, broken links, and other gaps. Some publishers I have spoken to weren’t aware of ERMs and focused only on providing MARC records directly to libraries. Others do not submit records out of adherence to the open philosophy of not working with a for-fee vendor. If a publisher does submit metadata, the ERM vendor does not always accept it, and the reasons vary from lack of perception of library demand for the collection or inadequacies in the data itself. I have had discussions with several of my publisher sales representative colleagues on how we can get the metadata for their package into the knowledge base, and it is a very long and uncertain process. Librarians from the Council of California Community Colleges (McMillan and Flores 2021) shared their experiences researching their ERM’s process for identifying and including OA metadata collections. In their blog post “Open Access Collections in the Ex Libris Central Discovery Index,” they outline their ambitious project to curate a list of trusted OA collections that other libraries could activate within their own ERMs, and some of the under-the-hood details provided by Ex Libris. For OA monographs, and overall, we need for ERM vendors to be incentivized to participate more actively in the OA ecosystem as well.
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Metadata is the foundation for our collection development process. It powers both our discovery of titles, as well as our end-user discovery in our local systems. Library perceptions, and vendor models, of how that metadata creation is paid for is a key idea to explore in how we might work together to improve our situations. Suppliers and other monograph vendors spend a great deal of up-front expense in setting up their title catalogs, cleaning metadata, profiling titles, and loading customer holdings before they even generate a customer invoice. These costs are rolled into a library supplier’s unit sales margin or another vendor’s broader fees for ERMs. If looking at invoice line items, libraries only see distinct metadata fees at the very end of the process, associated with the final delivery of metadata for our catalogs or in membership fees for cooperative cataloging services. I can imagine that libraries would balk at increasing the cost of those records, or at charging more for a record for an OA title than a paywalled title. I don’t have solutions, but I can say that I would be willing to consider other payment models to make it more sustainable for both us and our vendors. My vendor colleagues have assuredly spent a great deal of effort working on the metadata part of the ecosystem. Difficulties with metadata delivery from publishers, as outlined by Laura Ricci’s essay in this issue of Against the Grain, severely limit our suppliers’ ability to provide consistent services for OA monographs to begin with. For example, there are difficulties navigating the uncertain OA status of a title at the time metadata for the title is released by the publisher or when the print edition is profiled on approval plans and sold to libraries. I have encountered some publishers who make the philosophical choice to distribute their metadata for free only directly to libraries or to open metadata repositories. The potential for growth of a centralized OA monograph metadata repository is fantastic, as this solves the library issues with too many data sources. It does not, however, address the library need for vendor services like approval or notification profiles that aid in evaluation, selection, and deduplication of titles, nor does it address the library labor needed to develop scripts to harvest from the repository API. This technical hurdle, I speculate, keeps these titles out of many public and smaller institutions with no infrastructure for this work, and it is very spotty for those larger academic institutions who have limited infrastructure. A suggestion is to explore how the repositories could work with suppliers to deliver metadata to them, who in turn would service those libraries who want title-by-title information and already have notification and approval profiles set up. It is not a valid assumption for publishers to believe that all libraries will simply want to collect OA titles at the package level. Some titles may be outside of the curriculum for technical or community colleges, or otherwise out of scope for public libraries or other institutions. Much of the publisher to library collaboration I am seeing is occurring within the large academic library community who are more likely to have the resources to pull from APIs, whereas the libraries that would benefit the most from the OA movement are others who likely aren’t participating in funding OA.
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Knowledge Unlatched (2022) recently announced a vendor partnership with GOBI Library Solutions to facilitate crowdfunding for their OA eBook collections. This likely solves many administrative issues for Knowledge Unlatched, allows libraries to see what has been funded and what hasn’t, and also provides a way for a supplier to generate some income from the inclusion of OA titles. From the library side, I’m excited to see the inclusion of the metadata, as it does what we need to place the open titles within our current workflows. If this is successful for our vendors, I hope to see other funding models work within supplier and vendor systems in a financially viable way for everyone. A side question that comes up for me as a librarian is to look at how OA journals are incorporated into our system, and whether we can borrow workflows from that process. Journal publishers seem to be getting third-party subscription databases to index their content. These databases are already in our collections, so libraries are in turn passively providing discovery to our library users. If a library wishes to add OA journal titles to their journal locator or link resolver, then the process is much more manual, like collecting OA monographs. Users inevitably find the OA journal within the subscription databases and request that the library add it to their systems, so library staff are incentivized to spend collecting time adding access points to OA journals. Record-keeping for OA monograph collection development is also a struggle for my acquisitions colleagues. Luckily, our systems and fiscal administrative policies do not pose issues for adding indexing for zero-cost items nor for contributing to OA funding initiatives. These scenarios are a huge challenge for many other institutions, however. Our initial response was to manually create a custom category for OA collections within our ERM, flagging those collections as we add the indexing to our discovery layer. Fast-forward to a few years later, we began contributing funding to OA initiatives. This has required further granularity for the variety of scenarios under which we are both funding OA initiatives and indexing OA titles. There are a) the package collection development selections we were already sporadically making, b) the “free subscription” backlist access we may receive through publisher OA funding incentives, and c) the collections that might get flipped to OA if a funding initiative is met and our incentive includes access to them anyway. My colleague Jenn Zuccaro (pers. comm., June 2022), Acquisitions Librarian at Syracuse University, offered some of her uncertainties: How can we answer questions about how much we’ve been spending on supporting OA? How do we get notified when an initiative is fully funded, how do we know what titles are flipped, and how do we match the notification to the funding we provided six months or longer ago? We do not have clear answers, and it is very dependent upon the particulars of our vendor system capabilities. Beyond collecting OA titles, libraries have additional workflows and considerations for handling the increasing number of solicitations for OA funding requests from publishers. Early publisher solicitations for OA funding relied
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primarily on appeals to our altruism, and there were a handful per year to evaluate. Fund the retrospective digitization of some content to make it OA, or fund these already published eBooks to be rehosted on an open platform. Our institution gets a nice mention in a press release, or our name listed on a website. Sometimes, we have gotten early access to content as it is digitized before the final release of the collection. I am an advocate for OA publishing, but I also recognize that we function in a capitalistic and competitive world. I have an ethical imperative to responsibly spend my institution’s finite collections funds, and our publishers and vendors have salaries and infrastructure costs to cover. We still contribute funds to programs that are essentially collecting donations, but I could foresee a future where that frequency has decreased. Recent rounds of solicitations have increased in frequency and focused on providing funding incentives. These can look like no-cost leased access to backlists, guaranteed access to the potentially OA frontlist, or other variations. Staff time to evaluate these very disparate programs is hefty, sometimes comparable to time invested in evaluating large paywalled packages that cost 10 times more. It is also quite confusing, as we must determine what to prioritize in the decision-making process. Last fall’s Charleston Conference had a great overview and practical application of how libraries have developed and applied rubrics, titled “Evaluating and Investing in Open Access Monograph Models” (DiPasquale et al. 2021). A few of those factors included comparing the values of the publisher with a library’s institutional values, the nonprofit status of a publisher, and sustainability of the publishing model. We have not strictly developed a rubric at my institution, nor do we prohibit funding requests from for-profit publishers, but we have looked at similar factors. Our confidence in whether the funded content will be reliably preserved and hosted going forward is important. Usage statistics for prior publications are sometimes presented to us as part of the OA funding sales pitch, suggesting that prior use of titles is evidence of the effectiveness and sustainability of their publishing. For OA titles that are included in our suppliers’ systems, like Knowledge Unlatched in GOBI, I expect that the usage statistics will soar once they are discoverable in library catalogs. Usage statistics are not a major evaluative factor for me, because I am aware of the unequal discovery playing field, but it is worth noting as we see more OA content make it into our supplier catalogs. I may reconsider that factor once I am faced with more funding proposals. Budget-wise, for specific publisher funding requests, we do evaluate what we have historically been paying for their paywalled content and reallocating those funds. The funding request, however, is regularly 50–100 percent higher than our prior budgeted expenditures for that publisher. We have planned for that, and the dollar amounts being considered are small in proportion to our overall budget, but the relative increase cannot be completely ignored when we plan for future implications. Again, we make an altruistic choice to fund it, and we do benefit by the incentives offered, but it has typically involved duplicate access to prior print purchases or to other backlist titles that we had not chosen to collect at the time of publication. As more frontlists flip to OA, the value of those backlist incentives decreases over time, so appeals on that level may not be sustainable in the future. At some point, we are defunding other monograph publishers or other parts of our budget.
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I have concerns about what funding requests will look like in the future, as it appears as though the same pool of larger academic research libraries are being regularly solicited. Also, smaller publishers or those who started out as OA do not have a stock of paywalled content to provide for free to libraries as an incentive. This does not bode well on diversity for the potential OA content, as it favors the larger and well-established publishers, nor does it allow for diversity among those with the paying power in the small pool of research library funders. I find the Open Book Collective (Fathallah 2022) to be an intriguing model, where libraries can contribute a lump sum support fee, which can then be divided over several smaller publishers who likely would not sustainably be able to seek funding competitively on their own. I believe that this type of collaboration is also important in the OA ecosystem. These collection development challenges must not stymie the OA monograph movement. In absence of supplier services or easy-to-understand and sustainable funding incentives, usage and reach of OA monographs will not make the gains we have seen with OA journals. And libraries will be neither able nor motivated to provide income to the wide variety of publishers that we do in paywalled publishing. The pool of funding providers is already limited to medium to larger academic libraries, and our budgets will only let our altruism go so far. I look to future collaborations and more education among all members of our OA monograph ecosystem, and we must all continue our advocacy and diplomacy to successfully promote our shared values.
References DiPasquale, Emma, Sharla Lair, Rachael Samberg, and Sunshine Carter. 2021. “Evaluating and Investing in Open Access Monograph Models.” Panel presentation at the Charleston Conference, Charleston, SC, November 3, 2021. Fathallah, Judith. 2022. “Introducing the Open Book Collective: Making the start of our outreach work.” Communityled Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/introducing-the-open-bookcollective/release/1. Kelly, Jayne and Clara Panozzo. 2021. “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective.” Open Access Books Network. https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons. org/2021/02/11/open-access-books-and-indiscoverability-alibrary-perspective/. Knowledge Unlatched. 2022. “GOBI Library Solutions® from EBSCO Partners with Knowledge Unlatched to Support Open Access Initiatives in Academic Libraries.” April 25, 2022. https:// knowledgeunlatched.org/2022/04/gobi-library-solutions-fromebsco-partners-with-ku-to-support-oa-initiatives/. McMillan, Mary and Sean A. Flores. 2021. “Open Access Collections in the Ex Libris Central Discovery Index.” CCL Outlook. https://cclibrarians.org/outlook/december-2021/ open-access-collections-ex-libris-central-discovery-index.
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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED Amy Harris
Senior Manager, Library Marketing and Sales The MIT Press 1 Broadway 12th Floor Cambridge, MA Phone: (857) 331-4265 <aeharris@mit.edu> IN MY SPARE TIME: I love to garden and cook.
FAVORITE BOOKS: Works I go back to again and again over the years George Orwell’s essays and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories (Fictiones). I also still love one of my childhood favorites, the Anne of Green Gables series.
MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Partnering with the University of Kentucky libraries to digitize and make available to all patrons the Press’s full catalog. Also, helping to launch MIT Press’ open access business model for scholarly books, Direct to Open. HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I see more consolidation on the for-profit side of the publishing industry and more of a push into products and technologies that are focused on higher education data rather than content. Nonprofit society and universitybased publishers will seek new ways to work with libraries on initiatives rooted in their shared missions and values. Phillip Hearn
Publisher Relations Manager Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press <phearn.muse@jhu.edu> https://www.philhearnfiction.com/ BORN AND LIVED: Baltimore, MD born and raised.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I recently celebrated ten years at Project MUSE, first as part of the Production team before moving to Publisher Relations. IN MY SPARE TIME: Fiction Writing, Guitar Playing, being a dad.
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I antipicate that a growing percentage of publications in the humanities and social sciences will be available Open Access, driven by forces such as mandates as well as user expectations.
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Laura Ricci
Senior Consultant Clarke & Esposito 1050 30th Street NW Washington, DC Phone: (617) 314-6202 <lricci@ce-strategy.com> ce-strategy.com BORN AND LIVED: Born in Detroit, Michigan; currently live in Boston, Massachusetts.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: As a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito I serve not-for-profit and professional associations, publishers, libraries, and technology providers with publishing strategy and research. I enjoy every opportunity to talk with people in the industry and work through their most challenging questions. In addition to my work at Clarke & Esposito, I am active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing; I have served on the Board of Directors and am a past co-chair of the SSP Annual Meeting, and I currently serve on the Finance Committee and Generations Fund Steering Committees. FAMILY: Married with two retired racing greyhounds.
IN MY SPARE TIME: I’m a runner – I’ve completed almost 30 ultramarathons and last year finished my first 100-mile distance in under 24 hours. (Sadly I’m still too slow to qualify for the Boston marathon.) FAVORITE BOOKS: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.
MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: In 2010 I was embedded in Pearson Education’s New Delhi office for several months through a talent exchange program, which inspired me to earn a MA in International Publishing from Oxford Brookes in the UK.
GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: Continue to support change and evolution in scholarly publishing, both professionally through helping organizations develop sustainable new business models and product lines, and personally by supporting mentorship and outreach programs to keep the industry full of talented professionals with diverse backgrounds and interests.
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: With the growth of available information, machines are going to be in some ways more important than human readers – we’ll be more and more used to technology which can ingest and analyze content at scale, and develop smart and personalized recommendations for researchers and learners. That said there will no doubt be unintended risks and consequences with this shift, so my hope is that in the next five years we can continue to ask questions and do the analysis needed to maintain the foundation of quality and trust which is the heart of scholarly publishing.
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Rachel Fox Von Swearingen Collections Lead Librarian Syracuse University Libraries 222 Waverly Avenue Syracuse, NY 13244 <rsfoxvon@syr.edu> https://library.syracuse.edu/
BORN AND LIVED: Born and raised in Southeast Ohio coal mining country; moved to “big city” (Columbus, Ohio) to find work and eventually attend grad school; moved to Boston, Massachusetts for my first full-time librarian job; now live in Syracuse, New York. PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I’ve been a librarian for 17 years and draw upon my time as a cataloger, public services manager, and subject librarian to apply a holistic view to my work as a collection development and analysis librarian. Some of my larger projects have focused on analysis and data-driven decisions for print collections, including deaccessioning, storage, and approval plans. I engage with the library profession through service, networking and collaborating with colleagues, and sharing that work in various conference presentations and peer-to-peer relationships. Service appointments have included the HathiTrust User Support Working Group, the HathiTrust Shared Print Advisory Committee, and the Music Library Association Board of Directors.
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PHILOSOPHY: Above all else, bring humor into everything. It helps you cope and draws people together. HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I see the “digital divide” for monograph publishers and library collections accelerating and approaching a breaking point, determining both the future fiscal viability of print-only publishers and the financial justification for unique library collections. Fully online degree programs in all disciplines have arrived, along with active institutional monitoring and enforcement of policies that prohibit non-licensed scans for course readings. The point of syllabi conversion to online teaching will be crucial window of time for publishers to capture, as faculty will not be incentivized to revisit that syllabus in the future to re-incorporate past print-only readings. Online format will emerge as the main priority in library collecting, leading to more package purchases, more homogenization between libraries, and decreased ability to financially justify print purchases for uniqueness if they can’t support online learning. These next five years will be crucial in determining if the industry can still maintain diversity of content in the face of format requirements.
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COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Clarke & Esposito
1050 30th Street NW Washington, DC 20007 Phone: (202) 545-7250 www.ce-strategy.com OFFICERS: Michael Clarke, Managing Partner. Pam Harley, Partner.
KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Research and consulting firm focused on strategic issues in scholarly and professional publishing
CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Not-for-profits, societies, publishers, technology providers, libraries, and other organizations with strong publishing programs NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 5-10
The MIT Press
1 Broadway 12th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142 https://mitpress.mit.edu AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Massachusetts Institute of Technology OFFICERS: Amy Brand, Director and Publisher. ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS, ETC.: Presses, Society for Scholarly Publishing. KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Products.
Association of University
Books, Journals, and Digital
CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Scholarly Communications, Publishing. NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 110
NUMBER OF BOOKS PUBLISHED ANNUALLY (PRINT, ELECTRONIC, OPEN ACCESS, ETC.): 350 TOTAL NUMBER OF JOURNALS CURRENTLY PUBLISHED: 40
HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design.
MISSION: To lead by pushing the boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community and aligned with MIT’s mission to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twentyfirst century. VISION: The MIT Press works daily to reimagine what a university press can be, and to use our power as an academic publisher to elevate knowledge to inform and empower. Known for bold design and creative technology, the Press mobilizes knowledge by publishing significant works from leading researchers, scholars, and educators around the globe for the broadest possible access, impact, and audience. We seek to honor real-world complexity by featuring challenging, provocative, and transformative scholarship that crosses traditional academic and
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
geographic boundaries. We support the struggle for social justice and commit to including underrepresented voices and perspectives. Our workplace thrives on an open culture of diverse and spirited individuality that values employee initiative, supports professional growth, and encourages experimentation and learning. Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218 USA Phone: (410) 516-6989 https://muse.jhu.edu/
AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Johns Hopkins University
OFFICERS: Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE. Barbara Kline Pope, Director of Johns Hopkins University Press. ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS, ETC.: Presses.
Association of University
KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Digital institutional subscriptions/ sales of books and journal access. CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Institutional libraries, special markets. NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: ~30
HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Project MUSE debuted in 1995 as a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, the first of its kind in scholarly humanities publishing. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed Project MUSE to go live with Johns Hopkins University Press journals in 1995. In 2000, Project MUSE expanded by inviting other scholarly presses and journals to benefit from this successful publishing initiative, cementing Project MUSE’s role as a leading provider of online journals in the humanities and social sciences. Then in 2011, Project MUSE partnered with the University Press e-Book Consortium to establish the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) Book Collections on Project MUSE. With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2016, Project MUSE developed MUSE Open with the goal of distributing OA monographs on the Project MUSE platform to be broadly shared, widely discoverable, and richly linked.
In 2020, Project MUSE celebrated its 25th anniversary, including the creation of a special website featuring a timeline, 25 MUSE makers, and a celebratory video. Experience these memories with us: https://muse. jhu.edu/25/
More recently and in 2021, Project MUSE received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge Program to study the innovative business model for open access journal publishing known as “Subscribe to Open.” Today, Project MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers around the world.
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