Bonfire of the Humanities: Publishing Challenges, Opportunities, and Open Access | H-Net

A guest post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications.

Guest post by Tom Grady, Copim project co-Lead, Birkbeck, University of London.

I’m based at Birkbeck College, University of London and am attached to the Copim Open Book Futures project. The team is an international group of scholars, publishers, librarians, and infrastructure providers working to develop an ecosystem for open access (OA) book publishing to support and sustain a diversity of publishing initiatives and models, particularly within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS). Why do we need this ecosystem? We’ll examine some reasons why below, and I ask you to note that while I write from the UK, much of what I talk about is also happening elsewhere.

Challenges for AHSS publishing and scholars, and the OA carrot

As the summer semester of 2024 drew to a close in the UK and graduation ceremonies around the country took place amid record rainfall, a total of 64 UK universities were running redundancy programmes (i.e., layoffs) in an attempt to cut costs. By spring 2025 that figure had grown to 96 UK universities with ongoing staff redundancy programmes, and the majority of departments under the axe are in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. During the 2024 general election,  the news frequently reported Government claims that  universities were “failing”, degrees were “getting easier” and some courses (invariably AHSS) were “worthless” (this last always with reference to graduates’ earning potential). It felt like the storm clouds were gathering both physically and metaphorically, and it’s interesting to note similar language being used by the White House this year.

Alongside these developments we’ve seen the traditional sales of AHSS books declining gradually over a number of years: according to the 2023 Ithaka S+R Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs report, written in collaboration with the Association of University Presses, there has been a “decline in monograph sales over the last couple of decades, [and] margins on academic books are so thin that publishers may fear that anything that threatens to cannibalize anticipated print sales of a scholarly title… is a threat to its viability”.

If traditional book sales are struggling, then how does making them freely available online through open access help scholarly publishing, or the pursuit of AHSS scholarship more broadly? I argue that OA could be one of the strongest tools that AHSS departments have for proving their relevance, their reach, impact and vibrancy. Unlocking books from ivory towers of small print runs and paywalls and allowing them to be shared freely and globally can demonstrate the deep public interest in AHSS research, and the many ways it can be used across the world – making it more difficult to portray these disciplines as trivial, frivolous or irrelevant. The possibilities for global dissemination and increased citation when publishing OA are well documented - there are many articles and reports, including this summary on the London School of Economics Impact Blog: ‘Open Access to academic books creates larger, more diverse and more equitable readerships’. And as to declining sales, that same Ithaka S+R report concludes that “OA titles can generate significant print revenue [and] OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue”. 

Mandating open access for books with a big stick

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