From the University Presses-Open Access Monographs and the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
From the University Presses-Open Access Monographs and the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
Alex Holzman 0 1
0 Temple University Press
1 Column Editor: Alex Holzman, Director, Temple University Press; Phone: 215-926-2145
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From the University Presses — Open Access Monographs
and the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
WAsbury Park, New Jersey, during a
hen I was a child, my family was in
hurricane. We were not evacuated,
and so I was able to watch the storm. The
massive waves and the destruction wrought
on the boardwalk impressed me mightily, my
first lesson of nature’s power. But my
greatest thrill was the free ice cream handed out
by boardwalk shop owners the day before the
storm, an unloading of inventory in
anticipation of the inevitable power outages they knew
were coming. My entirely logical conclusion
from this first experience — hurricanes provide
wonderful theater and free ice cream. Let’s
have more of them!
My adult reaction to Sandy’s devastation
this past fall and to Katrina and other horrific
storms in recent years was, of course, entirely
different as I learned to view their effects
through a much broader lens. Sometimes point
of view is everything.
I’ve been thinking about point of view
lately, especially as it relates to those of us who
think about open access in terms of monograph
distribution. We university press publishers see
a grave threat to course adoption sales, our
largest source of revenue. We also — if we think
about it a bit — see that OA has the potential
to resolve the free rider problem inherent in
the current system, where those universities
with presses indirectly underwrite the costs to
those who don’t through the subventions they
provide to their presses.
Librarians tend to articulate their open access
positions in terms of ideology — the societal
benefit of making scholarship available to all at
no direct cost. But I think their advocacy stems
at least as much from economic concerns created
by the ever-increasing serials costs and the
concomitant decline in their budgets as a percentage
of overall university expenditures.
Faculty, because they rarely directly pay
to access scholarship, seem mostly to support
OA, but while a core few actively promote it,
most do not engage it as actively as librarians
or university press staff. The need for faculty to
publish their own research in outlets that
promise both the widest dissemination and maximum
prestige via brand association, thereby
enhancing their chances for tenure and promotion,
frequently takes precedence over their desire to
promote the common good. (My sense is that
faculty see institutional repositories as a way to
have their cake and eat it, too. But unless I’m
misinformed, their relatively low compliance
with institutional repository deposit mandates
indicates a certain apathy in the matter.)
I’m not quite sure where administrators
stand, but my overall impression is that they
tend to see scholarly communication through
small windows pointing in different directions.
Library acquisitions budgets are seen through
one pane whose view lends itself toward
support of open access. The pane yielding a view of
university presses, however, strongly suggests
the need to generate revenue when distributing
scholarship. Few administrators have the
opportunity to consider the scholarly
communications ecosystem as an integrated whole.
It seems worthwhile, then, to spend a little
time first on bringing all of us scholarly
communication constituents to a window focused
on the specific question of cost and how it
opens up the need to consider the full-window
view of the entire ecosystem and one idea that
full view suggests.
For a moment I’ll narrow the cost window
even further, sticking to the cost of publishing
monographs. This is practical because a) I
know monographs far better than I do
serials and b) most university presses are more
focused on the long-form argument book than
the journal-based article.
No recent study I know has quantified the
“first-copy” costs of scholarly monographs
— everything involved in production up to
printing and binding of physical books and the
creation of the various files needed for digital
publication. Costs vary depending on length,
number of illustrations, complexity of design,
permissions (university press publishers are
as scrupulous about copyright when buying
as they are when selling rights), how soon the
book is needed, and other factors. Based on
some recent conversations with other press
directors and industry experts plus the data at
my own press, it’s not unreasonable to suggest
that the cost per title, counting marketing and
overheads — staff salaries, the cost of running
an office, research and development, Website
and platform updating, new post-publication
formats, etc. — is $20,000 per title.
The traditional “sale-to-end-user (...truncated)