Open-Access Movement Makes Inroads Beyond Science - Publishing - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Only the first 1.5 sentences are OA. Excerpt: "Open access has gotten its biggest boost from scientific researchers who want to share their work widely via journal articles. It's taken longer to work its way into the humanities and social sciences. But there's growing interest in how open access might work for monographs in those disciplines. Not very long ago, "you couldn't say there was much awareness about open-access publishing" outside the sciences, said Eelco Ferwerda, director of the Oapen Foundation. (Oapen stands for Open Access Publishing in European Networks.) Now "among the humanities there is a sense that this is a step we must take in order to keep on publishing books but also to make it possible to start innovating," he says, "because of course that happens in the digital space." The more content that is openly available, the more authors and publishers can experiment with it. But it costs money to publish a monograph, open access or not, and publishers may need some convincing that open access won't hurt sales. "Generally speaking, I think academic publishers are prepared to publish open access, but obviously they will need some sort of compensation," Mr. Ferwerda said. "Finding that model will take different forms." What does a viable, open-access publishing program for humanities and social-sciences monographs look like? A lot of people are trying to answer that question...."