This document summarizes a presentation on open access and academic books. It outlines the history of open access initiatives and policies from funders like HEFCE and Wellcome Trust. It analyzes publication patterns across disciplines using 2008 RAE data, finding books are more common in humanities while journals dominate sciences. Options for open access books include gold (with fees), green (with embargoes), or mixed models. Key issues discussed are sustaining monographs, peer review, and how open access may impact "trade" books and interdisciplinary work.

1. Open Access:
the Book Challenge
Nigel Vincent

2. Topics to be covered
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open access: the story to date
disciplinary publishing profiles & books in HSS
open access applied to books
HEFCE, open access and the REF
academic vs ‘trade’ books
a role for collected volumes
peer review
‘version promiscuity’

3. Open Access: a timeline
2001
Budapest Initiative
June 2012
The Finch Report
July 2012
Finch recommendations accepted by BIS and RCUK
March 2013
Revised RCUK guidelines
May 2013
Wellcome extend OA policy to monographs
July-Oct 2013
HEFCE consultation on OA and future REFs
2013 - 4
HEFCE project group on OA and monographs

4. RAE 2008 outputs by publication type:
Humanities
Books
Chapters
Journal Articles Other
English
History
French
Philosophy
39%
40%
37%
14%
27%
22%
23%
20%
31%
37%
39%
65%
3%
1%
1%
1%
Chemistry
0%
0%
100%
0%
Totals based on submissions drawn from the top 10 institutions for each field and with
a GPA of 2.5 or better

5. RAE 2008 outputs by publication type:
Social Sciences
Books
Chapters
Journal Articles Other
Sociology
22%
10%
64%
3%
Law
18%
15%
65%
1%
Politics
29%
9%
62%
0%
1%
2%
89%
7%
Economics
Totals based on submissions drawn from the top 10 institutions for each field and
with a GPA of 2.5 or better

6. RAE 2008 outputs by publication type
One institution made two separate submissions to the Anthropology Panel:
Books
Biological
Anthropology
Social Anthropology
Chapters
Journal articles
Other
2%
4%
93%
0
31%
29%
37%
3%

7. 3 broad classes of discipline
• 3/3 journal articles: Natural Sciences, Economics
• 2/3 journal articles: Sociology, Law, Philosophy
• 1/3 journal articles: English, History, Mod Langs

8. HSS disciplines and OA
• HSS fields are not ‘exceptions’ but fit into a multidimensional disciplinary space
• different disciplines = different publication profiles
• profiles relatively constant over time & institution
• similar profiles also hold in Europe and the USA
and define the benchmark for international
research reputations

9. OA in relation to books
• monographs (‘long-form’)
• book chapters
• academic vs ‘trade’ books

10. Monographs
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tend to be single-authored
not captured by usual bibliometric methods
international gold standard in some fields
under threat because of publishing costs and
low sales figures

11. Status of monographs
‘There is no other medium that allows for the
depth of research, analysis and sustained
argumentation.’
[British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, 2012]

12. Status of monographs
‘But if you are a scholar in the humanities, your
gold standard is likely to be the long-considered
and deeply researched monograph, not the brisk
journal article. Making a book available for free is
very different from uploading a ten-page article to
the Web.’
[Jonathan Bate, TLS, 10 Jan 2014]

13. Options for OA monographs
• gold with APC: subventions from the institution
or the funding agency BUT costly – cf Austria
FWF pays €14,000 and new Wellcome policy
• green:with an embargo period BUT how long?
• ‘mixed’: self-organizing co-operatives BUT how
sustainable?; e-version OA and print version
for a payment; etc

14. HEFCE group on monographs
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chaired by Geoff Crossick
aims to explore and understand:
scale/nature of problems for monographs
place/purpose of monographs in the academic
context
– emerging models that accommodate OA

15. HEFCE group on monographs
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sustainability
ethical issues
speed of publication
access to supporting data, texts, images, etc
shorter and longer books
special problems for fields like art history, music

16. “The Wellcome Trust today announces that it is to
extend its open access policy to include all
scholarly monographs and book chapters written
by its grantholders as part of their Trust-funded
research … The Wellcome Trust will make funds
available for the payment of publishers' open
access monograph processing charges.”
[30 May 2013]

17. “The new policy does not apply to textbooks,
'trade' books, general reference works or works
of fiction, or to collections edited but not
authored by Trust grantholders. It would not
affect, for example, a non-fiction work written by
a medical historian aimed at a general audience
and published by a commercial publisher.”

18. The ‘crossover’ book
‘In such a world, without the mediating presence
of publishers and reviewers alert to the needs of
non-specialist readers, jargon, myopia and petty
cavils are sure to prevail. There will be no place
for the work of grand synthesis and bold
interdisciplinary reach. The mantra of openness
will actually close the doors of the ivory tower. ’
[Jonathan Bate, TLS, 10 Jan 2014]

19. Book chapters: contra
‘If you write a chapter for an edited book, you
might as well write the paper and then bury it in
a hole in the ground.’
Dorothy Bishop
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/how-to-bu

20. Book chapters: pro
• a range of views come together in one volume
• benefits of mutual peer review by authors
• whole greater than the sum of the parts
http://peterwebster.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/on

21. Book chapters and online publishing
• chapters can be rescued from ‘invisibility’
• option to access the whole collection or
individual chapters
• same issues as monographs for access and
sustainability

22. Licence type and text mining
• CC-BY preferred by Finch
• allows unlimited text and data-mining
• BUT text-mining less successful on free prose
• AND not guaranteed to detect quotation and text
in languages other than English
• Bioinformatics publishes under CC-BY-NC

23. OA and peer review (PR)
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traditional journal and book publishing built on PR
PR as the guarantee of quality and reputation
PR as the foundation of RAE and REF
OA does not necessarily undermine PR
BUT some OA ventures also question the value of PR (cf
PLOS-ONE and the concept of post-publication review)

24. ‘Evaluation, not publication, should be academe’s new
priority … For the monograph-driven fields, publication has
(except for some copy-editing) therefore been beaten back
to its last function: a proxy evaluation of the work. In a
situation where a million texts clamor for attention, vetting,
not dissemination, is the crux … The quality of the press
becomes a proxy for the value of the work.’
[Peter Baldwin, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17/2/14]

25. Version promiscuity
• an issue in the world of software development
• exists for journal articles (pre-print vs post-print)
• books
– continuous editing and correcting
– the end of the book as a discrete entity?
– Kathleen Fitzpatrick Planned obsolescence. Publishing,
Technology and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press
2011)