University Presses and Commercial Publishers should start offering green OA for monographs

"Green open access refers to making academic, peer-reviewed research that has been published elsewhere (even subscription/sales venues) available for anyone to read freely on the internet by depositing the work in an institutional or subject repository. A large number of journal publishers allow this. Ideally, this is done without embargo. To protect revenue, however, often a publisher imposes a delay. That said, in over 90% of journal submissions to the UK’s 2013 Research Excellence Framework, the publisher would have allowed the researcher to make a version available online within a period acceptable to HEFCE for its next REF exercise (why not, at this point, go back and check that all of your existing publications are available for anyone to read if allowed?). The same cannot be said, however, for books, which is a shame. My optimism comes from the fact that I believe in the humanities and university education. I currently feel, however, that by restricting our research to often-unaffordable venues and modes of dissemination, we lock out the general, wider audience from the benefits of the institution. With a large swathe of the population now educated to university level, over time, were material available, we might see a shift in culture. We also make research and teaching a far harder proposition for independent scholars and those at less-wealthy institutions through the paywall setup. Green open access could address these problems. Instances of green deposit for books have been confined to sporadic one-off cases, though, or instances where a gold open access version was also deposited. I’d like to suggest that researchers/universities should begin to ask for this (perhaps via the SPARC addendum) and that publishers should begin to tentatively consider allowing it for books. Some reasoning ..."