How Publishers Can Navigate Open Access (so it doesn’t navigate us)

By Emily Poznanski (Director, Central European University Press, Hungary/ Austria) <PoznanskiE@press.ceu.edu> https://ceupress.com/

CEU Press

Anyone working at a small- to mid-sized publisher knows that it has both its rewards and its challenges. I experience both of these myself as director of CEU Press, a university press based out of Budapest and Vienna — a small but dedicated team, we put out around 35-40 books a year on topics ranging from International Relations to Literature; History to Economics. What drives my passion for the press amidst the difficulties is that we give voice to the unique perspective from Central Europe, which is essential and yet underrepresented on the global stage.

A region that has historically been, and continues to be, at the fault line of global and ideological tensions, scholarly perspectives concerning countries such as Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Russia can serve as a window into making sense of some of the wider issues of our time. While these places are sometimes portrayed as homogenous entities in global and popular discourse, they are, in fact, distinct cultures, with complex histories and traditions, which have been the theater for the major trials of the 20th century. I believe we need to better understand this region and all of its complexities to understand our world, which is what inspired me to join the press.

The challenges of running a small press in a digital age have driven us to think beyond traditional formats and sales channels. The team has worked hard to increase our reach through social media, audio with podcasts and audiobooks (forthcoming), short form monographs, as well as the recently launched CEU Review of Books.

Open Access at CEU Press

One of the key pillars of our business model and plans for the future is open access. For the last decade, I’ve worked on the various emergent digital models as well as different ways to implement them. Open access is a strategy that definitely has its positives: among others, increased citation for authors, higher readership and usage, decreasing our carbon footprint, and equal and immediate access to research, regardless of institutional affiliation.

While the comparison isn’t perfect, for practical purposes, it’s perhaps simplest to think of open access as the Spotify of publishing. Open access, like Spotify, gives smaller publishers, scholars and authors immediate, global digital reach. Just as record labels turned to these models to resist the pirating of music, so publishers can turn to open access as a legitimate way of combating illegal downloading of research through SciHub and LibGen. It is particularly beneficial for small to mid-sized publishers, as well as emergent scholars and authors, because it is a platform that levels the playing field with the bigger fish in the pond.

One purpose of this article is to explore some of the various models for implementing open access for books, including the one that made most sense for us at CEU Press. As an emergent avenue in publishing, there are new models appearing in the market, each with their benefits and potential drawbacks.

However, my other purpose is more broad, but perhaps more prescient. As each individual press decides what business model works best for them, I believe it’s important for publishers and librarians to reflect and discuss the potential impact of these emergent technological and economic developments on publishing and scholarship as a whole.

Opening the Future — One Model

Our model is called Opening the Future — a model that is particularly suited for presses that have a substantial backlist and no other institutional funding for digital reach. It was founded by Frances Pinter, Executive Chair of the press, together with Martin Paul Eve and Tom Grady as part of COPIM, a Research England and Arcadia funded initiative, and partners MUSE, Lyrasis and Jisc. This model removes author facing fees, Book Processing Charges (BPCs), to allow any author to publish in open access at no cost. It also allows presses to move to full open access gradually, avoiding an immediate and potentially risky or disruptive switch.

The way the model works is that we sell packages of backlist content to libraries, libraries subscribe for three years, and after that time they own the titles DRM-free in perpetuity. We use that funding to support forthcoming frontlist titles in OA. It combines a membership and a subscription model to allow all librarians to participate, irrespective of whether they have dedicated OA budgets or not. The model also allows for dynamic scaling, which means the more funding that is generated, the more books that can be published in open access.

Three years later, now at the end of its first cycle, we have sold over 100 title packages, which allows us to fund around half our frontlist in open access and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the usage of the books published in OA has soared. The first book funded through Opening the Future was Tomasz Kamusella’s Words in Space and Time, a richly illustrated historical atlas of the region, which, on the MUSE platform alone, was downloaded almost 15,000 times in its first year of publication.1

Other OA Transition Models: Books vs Journals

There are many different models for OA books emerging and there are numerous ways to assess these, including the introduction from Sharla Lair on the OA books network, 2 OAPEN’s OA book toolkit, and helpful guides for institutional assessment of OA models.

Looking at models transitioning presses from selling “closed” eBooks to open access, there are those experimenting with delayed OA like JSTOR’s Path to Open and Cambridge University Press’ Flip it Open; and others that use backlists as a leverage to create funding to publish immediately in OA. The second group includes models like Michigan University Press’ Fund to Mission, MIT Press’ Direct to Open, Bloomsbury’s Bloomsbury Open Collections and COPIM’s Opening the Future.

Aside from larger publishers attempting to reach transformative agreement-like deals for books, the majority of models looking to move books from “closed to open” rely on collective funding and remove BPCs which, as a result, decouples the contingency on author affiliation. They also use existing workflows (no APC payment systems needed) and, in general, in their conception ask the question of what funding is needed to publish a series or entire collection in open access.

This is different to journal transformative agreements which mostly work with Article Processing Charges (APCs) and, by nature of the model, encourage publishing more articles — as the more you publish, the more you earn — or the less quickly you have to flip a journal to OA, if the OA articles are in addition to existing subscription content. Having worked on journal transformative agreements, I can see that these are some of the unintended consequences of the model.

While some may long for the halcyon days of publishing, open access is here to stay. But this doesn’t mean we can’t reflect on the significance and impact of these different models, and consider their unforeseen consequences for our industry as a whole.

As we consider the costs and benefits of different routes to open access, stories of Wiley’s Journal in Political Philosophy and its reaction among scholars3 serves as a warning to us all. Other news on the estimated numbers of “fake” papers published in journals4 leads to the question of what is driving publishing today.

What’s more, with higher usage for OA publications, as shown in numerous studies and our own MUSE data, is there a more urgent need to engage communal agency and integrity in OA publishing as this research is more likely to be read by the public?

If academic publishers cannot guarantee accurate and veritable results, and introduce waste — with new research being built on false results, then what value do we bring? Though publishers and librarians have tried to answer these issues with calls for further transparency and more robust peer review, should we also be asking broader questions — on how to keep our agency in a confusing and changing world.

Conclusion

As we consider these various models, and what might work best for our individual businesses, I think it is important for us to reflect on some of the bigger questions these developments pose to the future of publishing as a whole.

On one level, the history of publishing is nothing if not a history of change. Like so many industries, academic publishing is downstream from technological and economic realities that are typically beyond our control. In an unpredictable market, with declining profit margins, publishers have understandably turned their focus to improving efficiency, increasing output and diversifying revenue streams. In these regards, open access has obvious benefits for keeping our businesses vital and meeting external demands.

But on another level, it’s important to consider who and what is driving these changes, and who will bear the brunt of their impact on publishing and its future. Do publishers have any agency over the future of the industry, or are we simply passive respondents to a rapidly changing and increasingly confusing world? Is there space for communal reflection and dialogue on the long-term and unintended consequences of these developments?

As we meet the demands of a changing world, it’s important to keep one eye focused on the essential role that publishing has, and continues to play, in the world. While equity and democratization of information should remain an ethical priority, we are also living through a global moment of political upheaval and social confusion where sources of quality, trustworthy information and scholarship are desperately needed and yet can be all too difficult to find. The unprecedented explosion of information within the digital sphere has left the public bewildered as to what they can trust. As an example, the unintended global impact of social media platforms can serve as an important word of caution for our industry. As artificial intelligence technologies are increasingly blurring the lines between fact and fiction, these platforms have created social conditions in which the public can no longer be sure of what they can trust. Could the same phenomenon occur in academic publishing with paper mills and large retractions occurring within journals?

From this perspective, I think it’s important for publishers to resist being pigeon-holed as service providers by outside forces, and reflect communally on our agency, integrity, and public responsibility. We should take our role as publishers seriously, not merely for the future of the industry, but, because our integrity plays an essential role in intellectual, political, and social life.

While there is a dimension of our industry that will always be downstream from changing technologies and social and economic conditions, this should not prevent us from reflecting on the unintended consequences of these new developments, and on what is within our agency, individually and collectively, to preserve the integrity of our industry and safeguard its future. Our industry has undeniable social, political, and intellectual value. What if there were channels of discourse within our industry for us to reflect on how to translate this value into economic value?

Endnotes

1. Tom Grady, “Opening the Future at CEU Press: an update on Progress,” May 2023, https://ceup.openingthefuture. net/news/98/

2. Sharla Lair, “Open Access Book Programs: Answering Libraries’ Questions,” Open Access Books Network, October 2021, https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons. org/2021/10/27/open-access-book-programs-answeringlibraries-questions/

3. Justin Weinberg, “Solidarity among Philosophers Leads to New Journal: Political Philosophy,” Daily Nous, January 2024, https://dailynous.com/2024/01/12/solidarityamong-philosophers-leads-to-new-journal-politicalphilosophy/

4. Richard Van Noorden, “How big is science’s fake-paper problem?,” Nature, November 2023, https://www.nature. com/articles/d41586-023-03464-x