Open Access, Open Minds: Who should be the academic gatekeepers? | Politics @ Southampton

"This raises two significant areas of concern. The first is the major difference between scientific research, in which it is the dissemination of the research findings that matters, and the creative and imaginative labour of the humanities researcher, in which value is created in the acts of thinking about and writing the book or article. The second is how a model developed for journals might be extended to books which, in the humanities and social sciences, are of equal, if not greater importance...."

In academic debates, the assumption is often made that the existence of a free online text will radically diminish print sales and destroy digital sales (thus the need to compensate publishers for lost revenues with an APC). This view has been challenged by open-access advocates – Cory Doctorow argues that as a novelist his problem is not piracy, it is obscurity. But my experience at Bloomsbury is that average commercial sales of ‘open’ titles are about 10% ahead of comparable ‘non-open’ titles. ..."