Rupert Gatti

Trinity College, Cambridge

Co-founder, Open Book Publishers

21 March 2014

New Approaches to Academic Publishing

What is Open Access?

•Free to read online

•Free to share a digital edition

•Free to reuse (subject only to author attribution)

Ref: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Green & Gold OA

Green OAA final copy of the published work is available under

an OA licence from a repository.•There is no requirement for an embargo period.

Gold OAThe published edition of the work is available under

an OA licence.•There is no requirement for an apc.

Some examples

Green OAarXive (Institutional funding)

900k e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics

founded 1991 <http://arxiv.org/>

PubMed Central (Public funding)3 million articles in biomedical and life sciencesNIH Public Access Policy <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/>

Gold OAPLOS (apc)

PLOS One – published 33k articles in 2013Different ‘acceptance’ standard <http://www.plos.org/>

AHRC (UK) Data

Source: Nigel Vincent “The monograph challenge” in N. Vincent & C. Wickham (eds) Debating Open Access, British Academy 2013. (p. 106) <https://www.britac.ac.uk/openaccess/debatingopenaccess.cfm>

•

Discipline Books Chapters Journal Other

  (%) (%) Articles (%) (%)

English 39 27 31 3

French 37 23 39 1

Philosophy 14 20 65 1

Sociology 22 10 64 3

Law 18 15 65 1

Politics 29 9 62 0

Economics 1 2 89 7

Chemistry 0 0 100 0

Proportions of output types in a sample of RAE 2008 submissions

Journals

•Many thousands of Gold OA journals exist in the humanities.

•The vast majority make NO charge on authors to publish.

•Within HSS, apc's are important for the 'legacy' and the 'predatory' publishers.

Some Data

•9,763 Journals listedfrom 141 countries

6,527 (2/3) make no author charges

About 45% are in HSS

http://www.doaj.org/

Humanities dataLiterature: 672 journals

55 languages (498 in English)

67 countries (Brazil 84, USA 81, UK 29)

625 (93%) have no charges, 37 with charges

•History: 238 journals28 languages (141 in English)

35 countries (Brazil 37, USA 28, UK 8)

223 (94%) have no charges, 9 with charges

Published by Universities (50%), Research Institutes (20%) and Societies (15%)

Business Models

•apc model small in Humanities

•Academics input

•University/Institutional support–the entire internet developed that way

•Open infrastructure – vitally important–Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/)

–Open Edition – revues.org (www.openedition.org)

–Directory of Open Access Journals

No mega journals / repositories

•No equivalents of–PloS (apc),–arXive (institutional),–PubMed Central (public funding),–PeerJ (membership)

•Open Library of the Humanities<https://www.openlibhums.org/>

–library subscription

Books•The existing publishing model is broken–high prices (£50) & low sales (300)

–financial model: relies on DENYING access to knowledge

– at a time when HSS is fighting for recognition and funding we have a system where almost all our research is inaccessible to anyone beyond an elite few.

•This has nothing to do with Open Access, this is where the publishing industry, and academia, has led itself.

•Open Access is potentially a saviour – not a threat – for HSS

Opportunities

•Broader readership

•Reader interaction

•Multi-media publications

•Relating research and primary sources

•Reuse of publications

•Innovation in research & dissemination

1662 books

55 publishers

Languages:

English (909)

German (319)

Italian (93)

French (16)

Spanish (2)

Portuguese (0)

Published 2013-14: 185 books

http://www.doabooks.org/ http://books.openedition.org/

1161 books

33 publishers

Languages:

French (959)

English (118)

Spanish (72)

Italian (11)

Portuguese (0)

Published 2013-14: 46 books

Broader ReadershipOBP Online Readers

18 Jan – 18 Feb 2014

OBP Reader 7,349

Google Books 7,512

Total Online Readers 14,861

Av per title in month 391

133 countries

UK 25%

USA 20%

Algeria 6%

Reader InteractionHaving full text available online enables readers to

comment on and add to the work.

•Ingo Gildenhard - Cicero, Against Verres, 2.1.53–86 (OBP) Uploaded to The Classics Library

(http://inverrem2_1.theclassicslibrary.com/)

•Kathleen Fitzpatrick - Planned Obsolescense (NYU) http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/

•Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty - Writing History in the Digital Age (UMichiganPress) http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/

All three use free WordPress plugins

Multimedia Publications

Born Digital research output – incorporating, text, video, audio and web applications.

•Digital resources can be linked to and integrated with the ‘publication’•Allows new ways of presenting research findings•Reader can order/structure content as required

http://scalar.usc.edu/

http://scalar.usc.edu

Alternative Funding Models

Institutional SupportAthabasca University Press, ANU Press

Research Centre & Society PartnershipsWOLP, IES, CREATe

Research Funding SubsidyWellcome Trust, Max Planck Society

Library ExpenditureOpenEditions, Open Library of the Humanities, Knowledge Unlatched, Unglue.it

Direct Publication Chargeslegacy publishers: Palgrave Macmillan, SpringerOpen ....

Next steps: Enabling a diverse OA publishing ecology

The publishing cycle:

Step 1: The text

Print on Demand, typesetting software (not OA), competitive market for services

Step 2: The published work

This is dominated by publisher provision

Need: Libraries take an active role to facilitating this process

Step 3: The reader

Need: Universal standards/protocols to facilitate creation of broadly applicable tools to prevent publisher hijack

Step 4: (Re)use

Need: Publisher independent methods for assessing, archiving etc new media formats

Libraries/funders need to recognise the important role they can take in providing platforms and developing standards to create an architecture which allows competitive publishing initiatives to operate.

Incentives are all wrong if this left to publishers to provide and (so) control.