Two fundamental challenges for a transition to open-access monographs | Dr. Martin Paul Eve | Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing

"In my recent book I set out some of the benefits but also the challenges of transitioning to a world of open-access monographs. I’ve also written previously about some of the discourse of double dipping in the monograph space. In the past few weeks I’ve had cause to think some more about this and have come up with two additional areas of difficulty that present a challenge for OA books: sites of risk/selection and offsetting. Not all of this is hugely new or shocking, but I thought it worth articulating it up-front in this way ... I couldn’t think of a better term for this than 'sites of risk' I’m afraid, but what I want to talk about here is what and when we purchase scholarly material in the current subscription and sale ecosystems for scholarly publishing. It works a bit like this: when you purchase a subscription to a journal, you undertake an appraisal of the current content, its disciplinary remit, its standing etc. But what you are paying for is the future output. A year’s subscription gives access to back content (most likely) but it is for the future content. In other words, the risk is placed on subscribers in this environment. Subscribers are banking on past performance as a predictive indicator that will yield them a good value future return for their subscription fees. Of course, in a startup phase a journal must usually take the risk and begin publishing without subscribers in order to build a reputation. Fundamentally, though, journal subscriptions are library speculation/betting on the future output of a container.  Books are mostly different ...  A crucial part of the dialogue around a transition to open access in the journal space has been offsetting. Specifically that, if we can free funds from subscriptions, we can invest in open access models. This is the basis on which OLH grows; if a subscription journal comes to us, libraries should use the offset to fund us. (There are some complications there that I won’t go into, but that’s the basic version.) When publishers don’t offset (i.e. reduce their fees because of OA payments) we call this 'double dipping'. Double dipping is a problematic discourse, though, because it pivots around the existing price point and normalises it, rather than exerting any downward pressure on costs and prices.  But let’s assume that we go with the discourse of double dipping and offsetting. What would this look like for books?  ..."