Open Access Book Publishing? Some frequently asked questions

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.

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. 

It was not meant to be like this: The Great War and an English public school

One hundred years ago, in December 1915, Harry McKenzie resigned as Headmaster of Uppingham School. McKenzie was approaching his sixty-fourth birthday when the Great War began and, under the terms of his appointment, he had three more years to run. Now, however, the stresses of leading a school in wartime had taken their toll. So too did the strain from the constant news of the deaths of his Old Boys from three schools – for he had been headmaster at Lancing College and Durham School before coming to Uppingham. Matters came to a head when his own son, also called Harry, left Uppingham in July 1915 to enlist with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. McKenzie’s health broke soon after the school’s return in September; he informed the trustees that he wished to resign at the end of term. He did. It was not meant to be like this.

Mr & Mrs McKenzie with Harry

On 27 April 1914 The Times published a piece from its correspondent in Tokyo under the headline, 'Japanese Precepts for Boys'.  McKenzie spotted it during the Easter holiday and he used the contents in his Speech Day address on Saturday 11 July. The article referred to the late General Nogi, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and well-known in Britain. On retirement from the army he had been appointed President of the Gakushūin, a school for sons of noble families, and in 1912 he gave the boys his fourteen precepts. The report on McKenzie’s speech suggests that he used some precepts for comic effect and that the audience greeted each with laughter. Then McKenzie changed to a serious tone to close with the message he wanted his boys to remember. It was the final precept: 'Be a man useful to your country. Whoever cannot be so is better dead.'

News of Nogi’s death had been published in The Times on 14 September 1912. He had committed an elaborate ceremonial suicide to coincide with the funeral of Mutsuhito, the Japanese Emperor. McKenzie and many in his audience would have known that Nogi’s actions were in accordance with the Bushidō code of the Samurai: a warrior following his master in death. McKenzie’s commendation of Nogi’s final precept was an endorsement of its European equivalent, the Homeric code of honour, and of its legacy, the public-school ideal of manliness. No-one at that Speech Day could have known that this ideal would soon be put to the test, even though the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in distant Sarajevo a fortnight earlier had already set the course that would lead to the Great War. It was not meant to be like this.

Brittain, Leighton & Richardson at Uppingham, 1914

Wednesday 29 July was the last day at school for 69 of the 430 boys who had heard their headmaster’s valediction. All were McKenzie’s boys, joining Uppingham during his headmastership. They were a successful year-group: fourteen boys had secured places at Oxford and Cambridge, thirteen served as prefects, and twelve won colours in sport. Most of the 69 took part in Speech Day’s ceremonial parade and marched before the inspecting eye of General Lord Luck.

Uppingham Cadet Corps, 1918

School was now over. Members of the cadet corps set off for the annual camp near Aldershot on Tuesday 28 July, expecting to be there until Thursday 6 August. Events across Europe, however, had unfolded quickly in the wake of the assassination and war suddenly seemed likely. The camp was disbanded on Monday 3 August to make way for reservists recalled to the colours; the boys went home. War was declared the following day.

All but two of the 69 served in the armed forces during the Great War. Nearly all joined the Army, most were officers. Eighteen were commended for gallantry. The first of the cohort died on 22 May 1915. Three more were killed that year; another six in 1916; then nine in 1917; and finally three in 1918. Nearly a third were killed in action or died of their wounds – 22 of the 69. Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton and Victor Richardson were among the dead: their friendship formed the subject of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. It was not meant to be like this.

Brittain on the Lower School Roll of Honour

McKenzie’s life before Uppingham spanned the evolution of the ideal of manliness from its adoption by the public schools in the 1850s, through the muscular Christian years of the 1860s, onward to the hardiness of the 1870s and the games mania of the 1880s, through the imperial frenzy of the 1890s, and finally to the military manliness of the new century. McKenzie had been at some of the key schools at key times: as a boy at Guildford grammar school; two spells as a master at Wellington College; a period at H. H. Almond’s Loretto; and then two headmasterships. He imbibed the ideal as a boy and transmitted its practice as a man. He was a brisk, breezy, efficient, popular, decent and athletic man but he was neither scholarly nor intellectual. He was a thoroughly orthodox headmaster. It is unlikely that he ever questioned the ideal of manliness: he contributed nothing to its theory or development; he wrote nothing about it; he simply and unthinkingly conformed to conventional public-school practice. But by 1915 he must have had doubts. It was not meant to be like this.

McKenzie

 It was not meant to be like this – dis aliter visum. In an age when cultured men and scholarly boys expressed their thoughts through classical tags, this phrase would surely have come to mind – whether recalled from Virgil’s Aeneid or remembered as the title of a poem by Robert Browning. They would also recognise the poignancy of the original context. Dis aliter visum – literally: 'It seems otherwise to the gods' – comes from Aeneas’s account of the Homeric legend of the Sack of Troy (Aeneid 2, 428). Ripheus, the most just and faithful of all the Trojans, was killed defending his city against the Greeks after the gods decided to withdraw their protection: his righteousness went unrewarded.

Father, who lived to ninety-one, and son both survived the war. Extracted from the prologue of Malcolm Tozer’s The Ideal of Manliness: The legacy of Thring’s Uppingham (Sunnyrest Books, 2015) - http://www.sunnyrest-books.co.uk/