From the University Presses-Open Access Monographs and the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem

Against the Grain, Jul 2016

By Alex Holzman, Published on 07/14/16

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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 Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation - 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)


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Alex Holzman. From the University Presses-Open Access Monographs and the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem, Against the Grain, 2016, Volume 24, Issue 6,