I’m not going to edit your £10,000 pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series for you | Monica Berti's Blog

"Over the last three or four months, I’ve been talking with an academic publisher – one of the big names that most people have heard of – who approached me to talk about launching a series in Digital Humanities. Now, Digital Humanities is quite fashionable at the moment, with many presses launching books and series about digital arts, culture, humanities and heritage, but goodness knows there is a need for a series that would publish only academic monographs in the area, rather than text books like this and this. I’ve been enjoying talking through the issues of publication with the press in question, and I asked Bethany Nowviskie to join me as co-editor, hoping to work together and thinking about how we could do something that suits our academic neck of the woods: offering good digital as well as print content, and tackling the open access monograph issue in as brave a way as possible, committing to delivering a high quality print publication that would also be available in open access too. Last week they emailed me with their new company policy on open access. They are fully committed to offering high quality open access versions of their high quality academic books. But to produce open access versions, authors would be required to pay £10,000 (with applicable taxes added on top) to cover the “number of costs” that are involved to 'produce' these titles. I believe – at a time where rumours are flying that the next Research Excellent Framework will require all submissions to be available in open access, including monographs – that placing a £10,000 cost-to-publish fee onto monographs is iniquitous and will exclude many, if not most, early career scholars in the humanities from publishing their books in open access, as well as excluding any academic who is not at a very rich institution who has the resources to meet this publisher’s ransom demand. (There’s an excellent blog post by Mercedes Bunz which demonstrates this very point).  This will have deleterious effects on humanities academic career progression, as the monograph is still seen to be the proof of academic excellence (even if “just print” will no longer “count”.) I believe that this stance by publishers to place the costs of publishing open access monographs onto humanities academics (in particular) is perfidious, and the only way we can counteract it is to stop engaging with presses who behave in this manner, refusing to submit manuscripts to them, but also, refusing to peer review manuscripts for them, and refusing to edit manuscripts – or a series of manuscripts – for them. So I’m not going to edit their £10,000 pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series. And here is my reply to them. I’m not sure about the legalities of talking about this, so I have stripped out any identifying information regarding the individual publisher to safeguard myself. I would very much welcome your comments ..."