Academic Presses Explore Open Access for Monographs | AHA

"Nonetheless, as sales shrink, presses tasked with supporting scholarship require approaches that allow them to publish in areas and fields where the market is so limited that traditional modes of publishing have become inviable. One approach, which avoids the problem of up-front author payments, is a consortium. This type of arrangement brings together a group of presses, university libraries, and other academic entities to enter into a fee-based arrangement that helps cover publishing costs. The most developed of these is the UK-based Knowledge Unlatched, in which libraries pay subscriptions to provide funds to “unlatch” titles. Lever Press, a new consortium of nearly 60 US liberal arts college libraries, works on a similar model. Institutions bear the costs of supporting all stages of the digital publication process through a sliding-scale annual subscription fee of $2,000 to $8,000 for five years. Fees are based on the acquisition budget of the participating library. The Lever Press initiative is still in its planning stages, but within five years aims to publish 40 open access titles per year.

Another response to the shrinking academic publishing market is a joint initiative by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Their joint Task Force on Scholarly Communication has worked with a group of research universities to agree on a plan to create a pilot program that would partially fund open access monographs published by university presses. The project is particularly focused on fields and disciplines where market realities have made publishing difficult. The task force overseeing the project has set up a group to assess the impact of open access books published under the program over the next five years. Their research will undoubtedly influence the future of open access publishing in the humanities.

One way to measure the impact of open access publishing is to count the number of people who are accessing the work. Evidence shows that providing free and unrestricted access to digital monographs increases their usage significantly. In 2009, Amsterdam University Press made 137 books on their list open for 9 months. During that period, each title on the list averaged 1,900 uses. Other studies and anecdotal evidence provide similar evidence. The University of California Press reports 1,000–5,000 downloads per Luminos title. Open access affords global reach; Luminos in particular has seen significant downloads from Vietnam and other parts of the world that US-based university presses find difficult to reach. While number of downloads or views of an electronic file does not necessarily indicate that the book has been read, comparing this figure to the sales of academic books—which are usually counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands—makes it clear that allowing free and open downloads helps scholarship reach a wider audience.

While digital publication in various forms plays a growing role in the discipline, books still hold preeminence as a means for transmitting ideas, building communities of practice, and establishing professional and scholarly reputations. Just as the web and digital delivery have changed the way we find and use journals and primary sources, open access publishing offers the possibility to rethink how monographs are published. Initiatives such as Luminos and Lever Press allow publishers to investigate the possibilities offered by publishing on the web and provide a chance to explore alternative and mixed business models. With most traditional university press books unable to recoup publication costs, the need for new ideas is greater than ever."