Seeking a Path toward Open Access for Books | The Scholarly Kitchen

"A friend recently asked me to give some thought as to how to devise a financially sustainable program to make books open access (OA).  This is not an easy problem ... Putting politics aside, the question about OA books took me to Eric Hellman, founder of Unglue.it, an innovative service designed to make books OA. (The company name is also the URL.)  Hellman’s notion is that one could bolt together a number of features of social media and create a kind of OA marketplace around them.  It’s a clever idea.  Unglue.it is essentially a sophisticated eBay; it brings together people with an interest in OA books and the copyright owners of those books.  The transactions on the site aim to purchase the rights for the books and make them OA.  Here is how it works.  A Web community is built around Unglue.it, which proposes books that it would like to see OA.  Some of these nominations are fanciful (there is no way the estate of George Orwell is going to sell off the rights to 1984), but some are within reason, mostly academic monographs with little market potential, but of value to a narrow but dedicated group of scholars.  Publishers (or the estates of authors) respond to these nominations and offer to make some titles available on the site.  The community then switches to crowdfunding mode, attempting to chip in enough money to release the copyright.  Once a threshold is reached, the book is 'unglued' and made available with a Creative Commons license.  So a Web marketplace, crowdfunding, and OA:  all of these elements were not on the horizon 15 years ago, but perhaps the desire for OA books has been with us a long time and only now is its consummation within reach, made possible by the shrewd application of technology.  Unglue.it is now changing its program to soften the hard edge of the threshold for funding, eliminating the all-or-nothing formula.  Instead of waiting until a certain sum of money has been pledged before making the book OA, now advocates of the book will purchase an electronic version of it.  When enough people purchase copies, the book becomes OA.  Thus a purchaser/funder gets full access to the digital edition for him or herself, and when enough purchasers get on board, the book is made freely available for everyone.  So in this formulation Unglue.it is a kind of bookstore that is running a special promotion:  buy enough copies of this book and it will be free for one and all.  I don’t know if this will work or not, but I am impressed with the ingenuity of the design ..."