Category Archives: Open Access

UC Press Pioneers the Scholarly Monograph’s Open Access Future

Posted September 8, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Tom Leonard, University Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley.

Image derived from one by Mike Fernwood, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Last Spring the view out the windows of the University of California Press was a glass-skinned energy lab dedicated to saving the planet. This fall, the Press’s move from Berkeley to Oakland completed, editors look out on a glass-skinned cathedral that is dedicated to saving souls. The Press now wants to use both technology and exaltation to save the book.

Not all books, but simply the good ones that scholars write to be read. These need saving. Today, most original scholarship, well written and edited, can expect book sales of only several hundred copies. A few score research libraries buy these books; they are not easily found by anyone. Their authors would like to see their contributions to knowledge discovered, explored, and discussed, but all too often traditional publication models don’t serve these ends.

Indeed, if they are not available as e-books that easily pop into view, they join the ranks of the great unread. We used to use that term for volumes that had slept quietly in the stacks for decades because they were off the reading lists of the academy. Shorter press runs and high prices needed to cover fixed costs commit more books to this fate than ever before.

Most university presses face this challenge. National organizations such as the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries have sketched ways to save the long arguments that are uniquely supported by books. Mellon and other foundations have worked with the Association of American University Presses to find solutions. As a veteran of many big think meetings on this problem, I have found the good will a sign of the health of higher education. But what we have not had until now is a first mover with a sustainable business plan. UC Press is now taking the lead (a judgment that I do not believe is biased by my service on their Board).

Alison Mudditt and her deputy director Rebekah Darksmith have stepped over the morass of platforms and ways to “capture reader eyeballs” for press output that has slowed other publishers. UC Press will find high-tech partners to produce e-books. The Press, however, will control the selection and editing, maintaining its stringent standards and removing any impression that the author’s vanity is the true driver. Books will be “free at launch” as an e-book. The open access (OA) book will display on the platform of the reader’s choosing. These titles will be marketed, supported for awards submission, and available in a print on demand (paper) copy at an attractive price.

UC Press figures that books it publishes in traditional editions cost $34,000 to produce, warehousing and distributing paper being a significant part. This will continue to be the path for many Press titles. The new OA approach for perhaps 15 titles in 2015, looks to be a $14,000 investment per title. That sum can be captured from the subsidies that are now going to produce these volumes with a paper edition only, the costs that Libraries would willingly contribute because they are now pointing readers to resources that are free and not always making purchases, and from the revenues that will flow from print on demand revenue. As is the case today, the author too will be tapped and so her dean or department will be asked to support the publication. UC Press will be building a fund to help authors, particularly important for independent scholars.

This will take some getting used to. But long arguments in the social sciences and humanities do not have bright futures if left to the business logic of scholarly book publishing. These books will not make the leap to an e-book reading culture. Today, after much hard work, most university presses gain no more than an eighth of their revenue from selling e-books. The market is not really telling them to find an alternative to high-priced traditional volumes with very low press runs; even though this approach disfavors the accessibility scholarly authors need in order to be read. There may have been gains in watchful waiting, but surely we have now banked all of these dividends. Today academic publishers need a first mover, as much to help these disciplines as to help themselves. A print-first/only model will, the Press has concluded, risk leaving these fields “out of the vibrant world of digital scholarship and debate.” Indeed, exaltation about scholarship is as important as the bottom line.

Authors Alliance Members Lead Push toward Open and Accessible Legal Education

Posted September 2, 2014

Textbooks are essential instructional tools but they’re not without problems. Most familiar to students is the problem of cost: textbook prices have been significantly outstripping inflation for some time, rising 82% between 2003 and 2013 and giving rise to charts like the one below. But there’s also the issue of tailoring. There might not be a textbook that’s a perfect match for a given instructor’s needs, but the traditional model requires students to purchase material their instructors may have no interest in teaching.

Authors from a variety of fields are making strides to bring accessible and open educational resources that provide educators with choice regarding the price and contents of course materials. Legal education, which relies in large part on public domain texts like cases and statutes, is particularly poised for change. Authors Alliance members, committed to authorship in the public interest, are leading the charge.

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STM’s “Open Access” Licenses: Extend, Embrace, and Extinguish

Posted August 18, 2014

Guest-blogged by Authors Alliance founding member Ariel Katz, Associate Professor of Law and Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce at the University of Toronto.

Authors Alliance recently joined a coalition of research, science, and education organizations that called on the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to withdraw a set of New Model Licenses for purportedly “open access” publishing.

Beyond the flaws in those Model Licenses, the STM move raises some potentially serious antitrust issues. In other words, by adopting these set of model licenses and recommending that their members adopt them, STM and its member publishers might have broken the law. This is problematic for authors who write to be read, and who deserve a competitive publishing environment that allows them to find publishers who share their commitment to openness.

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Authors Alliance Joins Call for STM to Withdraw its Open Access Licenses

Posted August 11, 2014

Authors Alliance firmly believes in the importance of open licensing to vibrant and productive scholarship. But open licensing is legally complex and simply calling a license “open” does not make it so. We need open licenses that work to promote access and that enable open resources from various publication platforms to be used together in innovative ways.

The Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) recently released a set of model licenses for use in open access publication. Unfortunately, these licenses do not actually provide the openness they promise. Instead, each license places significant restrictions on reuse of covered publications, including a vague and ominous prohibition on “misrepresent[ing]” the “meaning, interpretation, context and conclusions” of a covered work. Even worse, the licenses are incompatible with existing standard licenses (including Creative Commons licenses), and they will therefore cause more confusion and expense than progress.

Accordingly, Authors Alliance has joined with more than fifty other organizations in calling for STM to withdraw its licenses.

Authors Alliance wants a world in which, as the letter says, knowledge “is accessible, usable, reusable and interoperable.” Going forward, we should “work within the legal frameworks that have already been globally adopted as a base for building the rest of the tools we need to make this a reality.”

Read the letter (web)
Download the letter (figshare)

SHERPA/RoMEO publisher copyright policies search engine

Posted May 20, 2014

Knowing a publisher’s copyright policy is essential to making informed choices in the publication process, particularly for authors who wish to ensure they have the rights needed to ensure their work’s availability and to keep it up to date. Fortunately, the SHERPA/RoMEO search engine makes the process much simpler by presenting copyright policy information for many academic publishers in an accessible, color-coded manner.

For more information on authorship and ownership, please read our FAQ on the subject.