By Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty
What is open access?
Open Access (OA) is a simple idea, but it’s also one that challenges
our established norms of scholarly communication. Peter Suber (2012), who
directs the Harvard Open Access Project, defines OA as making “research
literature available online without price barriers and without most permission
barriers.” The growth of the Internet has provided scholars with the power to
widely share their knowledge in digital format, freely available to all readers
and at virtually no distribution cost. But this basic definition often raises
deeper questions about the entire academic publishing enterprise, and its
tangled relationships with authors, libraries, and readers.
Historians of
education may be somewhat familiar with the idea of OA
journals, including
the excellent multilingual journals Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de
l'éducation, and the recently-launched
Espacio, Tiempo y Educación and Nordic Journal of Educational History, to name just a few. But what about OA
books?
What do OA books look like?
They can include monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings
and other types of scholarly publications. Many are PDFs whose format mirrors
their on-paper incarnations. Some can be downloaded while others may be viewed
online only. Some incorporate multimedia and opportunities for commenting or
annotation. One example of an OA book is the volume of essays we co-edited,
entitled Writing History in the Digital
Age, which is free to read in both a blog-like interactive WordPress version and in an online version of the final text hosted by its publisher, University of
Michigan Press. Media-rich formats such as Scalar, which have so far been used to create
media-rich companion and extension websites for traditional print monographs, offer
fascinating opportunities for the creation of born-digital (that is,
digitally-conceived and -produced) monograph-length OAs scholarly publications.
Interestingly, having a book published in OA form does not preclude its
simultaneous publication in for-purchase forms, including print on paper or in
some other proprietary electronic form such as Kindle. In other words: not all
digital books are OA, and OA books may exist in additional forms that cost
money to access.
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| http://www.digitalculture.org/books/writing-history-in-the-digital-age/ |
Who publishes OA books?
Individuals and institutions, including major academic and for-profit
publishers. Well-known publishers of OA works include The University of
Michigan Press, Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge.
There are several catalogues of OA books published by academic publishers,
including doabooks.org, oapen.org, and knowledgeunlatched.org. The history of education is not well represented in
such catalogues - not yet, at least.
Does OA book publishing
require different financial models?
Conventional book publishers rely primarily on post-production
sales revenues to recover publication costs. This means that academic
institutions typically pay twice for scholarship: once for the faculty salary,
and a second time to purchase the book for the library.
OA publishers tend to rely on pre-production budgets, with support from
academic libraries and/or authors’ fees, to pay expenses. For example, when we
published Writing History with the
University of Michigan Press, the Press had just moved into the University
Library system, with a mission and budget to freely disseminate its digital culture book series on the public web, regardless of paperback
book sales. Alternatively, Routledge’s OA books program requires the author to pay GBP 10,000
(plus tax) upon manuscript submission. In other words, OA makes a book free to
readers, but is not free to produce.
Does OA mean that authors
give up copyright?
Not necessarily. Many publishers accommodate OA publishing under Creative Commons licenses, which allow authors to retain copyright and
distribute their own work freely with (or without) stipulations regarding
attribution, commercial sales, and derivative products.
Does OA result in lower or
higher-quality scholarship than conventional publishing?
The short answer is: it depends. Judgments about scholarly quality are
separate from how works are distributed. OA books published by well-known
academic publishers normally go through the same processes of peer review and
editing as conventionally published works. However, even the old-fashioned
proxies (with blind or quasi-blind peer review) were not necessarily reliable
across the board.
Most importantly, OA publishing allows your work to reach
more readers who can judge your work on its own merits, which allows for more
engagement with your scholarship, more chances for feedback, review, and
citation, and a furthering of scholarly conversation and of historiographical
understanding in general.
Does OA publishing make more
sense for some types of scholarship than others?
In general, we think OA is suitable for any author in
search of readers. OA journal articles get read and get
cited more often
than traditional publications, and although OA book publication is relatively
new, it’s reasonable to expect that the same will be true for books in general
as well. Want people to read the study
you spent years and plenty of blood, sweat, and tears on? Let them access it freely by publishing it OA.
Having said that, OA may be of particular benefit to
authors of particular types of works, including
- born-digital, multimedia, and non-linear works. This includes works moving beyond (improving upon!) the traditional book form to provide direct points of reader-author interaction (e.g. commenting or annotating), or incorporating video, sound or other media. OA digital publishing is also especially suitable for forms of non-linear historical analysis that publications on paper simply cannot accommodate.
- those pursuing topics, studying periods, or using methods that for-profit academic publishing houses consider unmarketable: if publishers don’t think they can sell enough copies, they won’t publish it - no matter how high its quality. OA allows such works to reach readers.
- expensive-to-publish works (e.g. long works, or those including many figures).
Do any mandates require
scholars to produce OA works?
Researchers at some colleges and
universities have voted for OA policies that strongly encourage colleagues to
place papers and articles in library repositories, but books have usually been
exempt. Also, some research funding bodies now require OA publication as a
condition for receiving funding, but whether this will extend to book-length
works is unclear.
Can
I get a job (or tenure) if I publish OA books?
Yes. The American Historical Association has recently published guidelines for the evaluation of digital
scholarship, which
in their definition includes “scholarship that is either produced using
computational tools and methods or presented using digital technologies.” OA books - whether simple PDFs or media-rich
web-based interfaces -- certainly fit this description. Here, too, judgments
about scholarly quality are separate from how works are distributed, so that
high-quality OA works may be expected to contribute positively to evaluations
for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion.
