A range of open access (OA) monograph experiments and studies are upon us, or are about to be, and it’s worth taking a look at what we know now and what we can expect to know in the next year or so as a result. OA poses very different challenges and opportunities for journals and scholarly monographs. That point will be obvious to regular readers of the Scholarly Kitchen as well as to most within any orbit of planet Scholarly Communications. But it is worth repeating, because too often OA is presented and discussed as a unitary philosophy and practice. The basic issues are the same for OA journals and monographs, yet cost, use, licensing, distribution, and the varied significance of the form across disciplines and within fields play out very differently.
In January of this year, several OA monograph projects were announced or initiated. All have the goal of addressing both challenges in publishing scholarly monographs and of distributing that work more widely. The University of California Press, for example, announced their Luminos Project, which proposes a model of cost sharing among authors (or their institutions), publishers, and libraries. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) published their report on “Monographs and Open Access.” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been active in discussions about OA monographs, and has helped to fund a variety of studies that look at cost structures, including Ithaka S+R’s one year “Study of the Costs of Publishing Monographs,” which commenced in January. Also in January it was announced that Mellon has funded a three-year study at the University of North Carolina Press for scaling digital publishing capability for university presses. Led by press director John Sherer, the project will build on Longleaf Services, the press’s fulfillment company.
This fall another Mellon-funded study, this one at Indiana University and the University of Michigan, issued a report on “Direct Author Subvention for Publishing Humanities Books at Two Universities.” Humanities disciplines such as my own, history, tend to be book disciplines. Books are now generally required for promotion and tenure, and books are widely understood to be a critical genre for developing a scholarly argument. Some ambivalent conclusions about the feasibility of subventions were predictable: where will the money come from? How much would be available, and to whom? Authors Carolyn Walters and James Hilton note that differences in cultures at their two research universities led to some slightly different conclusions at each, but also point to the importance of likely wider variation among other campuses.
Where the two campuses came together, however, was in finding clusters of support and concern about a system of subventions for monographs. The study was based on feedback from faculty and administrators, the former in salon settings, the latter in interviews. Although salon attendance was modest at both places, the authors draw some important conclusions. Among the most serious in my view is that “a good many faculty possess only a vague awareness of the on-the-ground conditions of academic publishing.” This might be a feature of faculty at these two research universities; one faculty member at the University of Michigan remarked that “our faculty don’t have a problem getting published.”
For Walters and Hilton those “on-the-ground conditions” are serious and the sustainability of academic presses is at stake, given that resources beyond revenues will be dependent on ever more constrained university administrations. When Alison Muddit of the University of California Press recently interviewed Geoffrey Crossick about the HEFCE report, however, she asked him about a claim similar to the impulse of the university faculty, that there is no particular crisis in monograph publishing. His response was pretty interesting: “There has been talk of a crisis of the monograph for the last 25 years and I couldn’t see that the problems that currently exist amounted to a significantly different crisis. This is important because by focusing on open access as the way to resolve a crisis we may end up neglecting the many positive reasons for wanting to move to open access.”
While it might be true that tenured and tenure-track faculty at Indiana and Michigan didn’t express a sense of urgency about the state of scholarly publishing, they and their non-tenure-track (NTT) colleagues shared a strong concern about how subventions might exacerbate inequities in universities. For example, if only tenured and tenure-track faculty were guaranteed subventions for their monographs, while NTT faculty and staff would compete for a separate pool of funds, wouldn’t that not only perpetuate these status inequities but also undermine a system of publishing the best scholarship regardless of rank (or status inside or outside the academy)? Faculty saw clearly that this move to make scholarship more accessible for readers could easily (perhaps inherently) make publication less accessible for researchers; said one, “open access is dear to our hearts, but it can’t lead to inequality among scholars.”
It is worth mentioning a longer historical context and two potentially contradictory trends: a broad requirement of book publication for tenure and promotion, and the increasing reliance on NTT faculty. When I was hired to my first tenure track position at a university with a medium-heavy teaching load, for example, most of my senior colleagues were not book authors. It wasn’t expected of them or required for tenure and promotion, though by the early 1990s it certainly was for my cohort. What we see now of course is a much larger pool of NTT faculty and attacks on the system of tenure. So tenure has come to require much greater research output even from faculty at universities not as well situated as Indiana and Michigan, while more faculty positions are not eligible for tenure. Adding another layer of differentiation through a subvention system such as that proposed in this study smarts not only because of the perceptions that it will exacerbate already intolerable inequities within universities, but also because university presses have been seen to stand outside that system. A strong monograph, though surely much harder to produce with a heavier teaching load and fewer resources, would be evaluated no matter the author’s status inside or outside the academy — certainly for first book authors.
So this is still the rub. How much does it now and will it cost in the future to support monographs, and who will pay? If we knew more about the costs, the interlinked questions about urgency (or even crisis), who pays and how might become clearer. Thus a key feature of the Indiana-Michigan report is the per-monograph cost analysis in Appendix E. Using comparable data from each press, researchers found that the cost before printing was $27,576 at Michigan and $26,714 at Indiana. These figures seemed to compare closely with inflation adjusted figures from a 1998 study of monographs published by Rutgers University Press, also between $26-28,000 for each. The authors of the Indiana-Michigan study also report that Ithaka shared early data from their study suggesting a $23,500 figure per monograph, leading them to conclude that “the majority of figures are converging around the $25,000 mark.”
There are other issues for OA monographs beyond financing. Two major challenges remain in delivering an electronic version of a book: 1) the desirability of the e-format for reading in the distinctive way that scholars tend to do and 2) the importance some scholars identify in preserving long form scholarship when it is so easily disaggregated into chapters (or smaller bits/bites/bytes). The first is critical. Scholars routinely mention the desirability of the material book. The technology for creating a reading experience that simulates the interactive, individualized advantages of paper simply isn’t yet there. As for the second, Crossick mentioned this issue as a potential benefit to fully OA monographs as opposed to making only smaller chunks available. In sum, it’s going to be an eventful and important year or so as we gather more information and get a clearer sightline on what OA may offer for monographs.