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Abstract
Several libraries have become active partners in Open Access publishing of books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Not only have libraries started up their own presses, they are also collaborating with existing presses or forming alliances with other institutions on campus such as scholarly communication offices, ICT departments, and academic research centers. By combining institutional strengths and enabling the sharing of resources across institutions, these collaborations offer synergies and efficiencies in the scholarly book publishing business. This paper examines this new function taken on by libraries. Using research conducted by the European project “Open Access Publishing in European Networks” (OAPEN) on OA publishing models and business models for books, we look at libraries’ motives and challenges and explore how their new roles enable them to serve their customers in the most effective way. By combining digital repositories with scholarly publishing, libraries can facilitate and support HSS book publishing and can help sustain the scholarly monograph in the transition towards digital formats and an Open Access future.
Notes
1. For more facts and figures monitoring the growth of Open Access publishing, see Heather Morrison's Dramatic Growth of Open Access, 31 March 2010 Edition: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/03/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-march-31.html
3. Amazon reported that its e-book sales overtook print sales for the first time on Christmas Day 2009.
4. Several sessions at the Tools of Change Conference 2010 addressed this theme: http://toc.oreilly.com/2010/02/toc-preview-ebooks-are-here-bu.html
5. One example is Open Journal System, a journal management and publishing system. Currently, Public Knowledge Project is developing a similar system, Open Monograph Press, for books.
6. One of the earliest collaborations between libraries and publishers involved electronic journals: Project MUSE was launched in 1993 by the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Its aim was to provide affordable and user-friendly online access to a comprehensive selection of prestigious Humanities and Social Sciences journals. http://muse.jhu.edu/about/muse/index.html
10. Soon to be made available at http://www.oapen.org
12. University of California Publishing Services: http://escholarship.org/ucpubs.pdf
13. ibid.
14. See MPublishing's mission statement: http://sansfoy.press.umich.edu/digital/mpublishing/
15. Richard K. Johnson, for instance, mentions partnerships in which a logical separation of content and service components may take place: all services other than content provision (such as those that cover registration, certification, dissemination, preservation, and rewarding) can be assumed by different parties, that is, they can be done by those with the necessary resources and prestige to do so.
16. Frances Pinter argued for an international library-funded Open Access model for books at the 2010 Tools of Change conference.
17. While the Green Road strategy does provide more accessibility, it does not fundamentally change the pricing and funding models that have led to the current unsustainable situation confronting book publishing. Green and Gold Open Access strategies should thus both be pursued by libraries and library consortia.
19. Some presses started with the option of parallel depositing in the institutional repository, then moved to CC-BY-NC, and then decided to use CC-BY, as this allows the widest indexing and reuse of full texts, even by commercial service providers. Others—for example Göttingen University Press—went down a similar path but decided to keep exclusive rights for the printed version to protect the publisher's investment. Moreover, some authors of books currently prefer to choose a slightly more restricted Creative Commons license, excluding derivative works (i.e., CC-BY-ND).
