Prof. Martin Paul Eve discusses open access for academic monographs. He notes challenges in developing business models for open access monographs given their importance in humanities disciplines. As a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group, he focuses on funding models, cultural change, and sustainable business models to promote open access monographs. Key barriers include reliance on traditional publishers, costs, copyright issues, and concerns about quality control and revenue streams. Academics prefer prestige publishers to adopt open access without requiring changes, while publishers want to maintain lucrative income streams. Transition will require experimentation, changes in practices and funding, and difficult conversations within institutions.

1. Prof. Martin Paul Eve on Open Access
Monographs

2. Open Access in the Humanities
Humanities disciplines are not centered solely around journal articles.
Problems with devising and implementing business models for research
monographs.
Progress, Nonetheless
Open access in the humanities continues to grow

3. Member of Universities UK
Open Access Monographs Working
Group
General remit
to promote and educate on Open Access Monographs, to enable more academic
books (particularly in Arts and Humanities) to be made available via open access.
Focusing on three broad areas
• funding OA monographs
• supporting cultural change
• developing supportive business models

4. Core barriers
• Prestige barriers making the sector reliant upon a narrow set of conventional
publishers.
• Costs (BPC:s).
• Third-party copyright/licensing concerns – continued misinformation about open
licensing.
• Learned societies continue to draw revenue from their book series.
• There is a persisting belief in open access meaning a dip in quality control/peer
review.
• The continued material/print form of the book is important to many stakeholders.

5. In short
Academics would ideally like prestige presses to do OA without academics
having to change their practices or payment methods.
At the same time, such publishers do not want to jeopardize their (often
lucrative) income streams on new open access models.

6. What to expect?
• Hiring and assessment panels should expect that books will be available for free
online and understand and value these in the same way as traditional books.
• Funders should take a hard line on OA monographs over a decade-long period to
ensure that the seriousness of a need for transition is understood.
• Libraries should expect there to be offsetting and a gradual move to paying for OA
rather than it being an additional burden on top of their historical expenditure.
• Readers should expect to be able to access books for free online, in a version that
is academically identical to a print copy.

7. How to approach the transition?
• Far more experiment and risk-taking is needed from those who can afford to take
such risks (big, well-funded presses).
– Otherwise, the risk always falls on to small, new, players and the results are
discounted as “not working at scale”.
• Academics should be prepared for some changes to their practice to publish with
presses that act as prestige indicators.
• Institutions needs to begin the difficult internal conversations to make the
transition work.
– And to respond with positive suggestions for how the barriers might be
overcome.

8. Characteristics of monographs to be
retained
• Monographs should remain subject to quality controls that academics themselves
feel are appropriate.
• Monographs should continue to be available in print, where the form permits -
allowing for new forms of born-digital long-form writing.
• Monographs should be both physically and digitally preserved.
• Traditional publisher functions should be retained.

9. Optimal future for the monograph
My ideal would simply be that gold OA versions of long-form writing
were openly available simultaneously with print –
with a business model to support this that makes it easy for
academics to go on with their work.

10. Recent international reports
• Inclusion of OA monographs in OA policies
• Funding streams to support OA monographs
• Business models for publishing OA monographs
Perspectives from publishers, libraries,
and intermediaries. Highlight some key
issues that arise from those different
perspectives.