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Building Inclusive Community-Based Models for Open Humanistic Scholarship
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Building Inclusive Community-Based Models for Open Humanistic Scholarship
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Segment:0 .
Thank you for watching this recording of the session. Building inclusive community based models for open humanistic scholarship, which was originally given in person at the 2024 SSP annual meeting. My name is Sarah McKee. I'm project manager for amplifying humanistic scholarship at the American council of learned societies, or acls.
In this session, we focus on new developments in open humanistic scholarship with a particular focus on monographs or book length works that present a sustained argument. Monographs have long been the gold standard for the presentation of new research findings in the humanities, and they are generally required publications for the tenure and promotion of faculty working in humanistic disciplines.
But the humanities themselves are changing. Growing interest and production in the digital and public humanities among scholars and students are forging new ways to conduct and share research. At the same time, significant transitions in scholarly publishing from the open access publication of conventional monographs to experimentation with new forms in the digital environment, offer opportunities to expand audiences and demonstrate the continued relevance of humanistic research.
This is an exciting moment of change and possibility in the humanities. But change is hard and requires us to rethink processes, expectations and funding models that have been in place for decades. The challenges of such transitions cannot be overcome by publishers or libraries or authors working in isolation. Collaborations that engage stakeholders across the scholarly publishing community and contribute to shared understandings are essential.
The in-person session offered two case studies for community based models that bring together diverse expertise to support open and innovative humanistic scholarship. The panelists explored how many of the ships occurring in scholarly publishing are cultural as well as technical and financial. How developing solutions in isolation often creates unintended obstacles that hinder both innovation and accessibility, and why the complexity of these changes require us to work together toward solutions that benefit everyone.
We hope that session attendees will recognize the importance of collaborating with diverse stakeholders from across the scholarly publishing community, including the authors as vital participants to support emerging forms of humanistic scholarship. By sharing our experiences in community building, we hope to offer models that attendees can adapt to their own situations. The first case study was advancing hbcu scholarship, diversifying digital publishing, a collaboration among the hbcu library alliance, brown university digital publications, or BDP and the university of Michigan press to build capacity for developing enhanced monographs.
Librarians at three hbcus mentored by BDP and Michigan press, will obtain the necessary skill set to support a member of their faculty in authoring a born digital publication. The resulting works will be published via an open access publishing model that disseminates the digital publications to the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. This session is not included in the recording, but the panelists were.
Claire Jones, assistant editor of brown university digital publications. Claire also served as co-moderator for this session. Sarah Jo Cohen, editorial director at the university of Michigan press. Marco Robinson, associate professor of history and assistant director of the Ruth j. Simmons center for race and justice at prairie view A&M university and Jordan signator reference and instruction librarian at prairie view A&M university.
The second case study is the path to open community advisory committee. Path to open is a multi-year pilot hosted by jstor that tests a new funding model for open access monographs. In summer 2023, the American council of learned societies, or acls, began developing a mixed stakeholder community forum that offers guidance to jstor in developing transparent policies and creating a sustainable structure beyond the pilot.
The resulting committee launched the spring and brings together scholars, libraries and publishers to build a more equitable model for open monograph publishing across the community, not just for individual presses and libraries or well resourced authors. The original panelists for this session were myself, along with John Lenihan, vice president of published content at jstor. Catherine Cox, director of Syracuse university press, and Danielle fossler Lucier, professor of music at the Ohio state university.
The original agenda included an overview of path to open from John Lenihan about jstor's implementation of the path to open pilot, which tests a new funding model for open access books. Unfortunately, John was not able to join this recording, so I will provide that overview before sharing with you our efforts at acls to build a cross sector community that supports and guides the development of path to open to ensure its equitability and sustainability.
And then we'll hear from two committee members, Catherine Cox, who will present her perspective as a university press director, and Danielle foster Lucier, who will share her thoughts as an open access author and advocate. So first, a quick overview about how path to open works. In this model, libraries pay an annual participation fee to access a growing corpus of titles that are submitted by university presses and exclusively available on jstor for three years from their publication dates.
The books are also available in print and consumer versions, but not in any other library aggregation to minimize acquisition, workflow challenges and publication costs for the model. The library annual participation fees are redistributed to the participating presses as a $5,000 stipend per title. Jstor has provided the initial funding of $5 million to pay publishers and release these titles as open access. Even if library subscriptions don't end up covering the stipend costs.
After three years in the collection, the books are converted to open access. After that, they can be published on any platform the publisher selects in addition to jstor. Every title in this program is guaranteed to become open access, and by the end of the pilot period, we expect to open 1000 titles to the world. A few questions that will be studying through the pilot include looking at the three year embargo and deciding is that the right amount of time?
Is it too short? Is it too long? We're also going to look closely at the $5,000 plus print sales. Does that combination generate enough revenue for presses and will we have enough libraries committing to the program or perhaps have more than we need? And would that scenario enable us to publish more open access books?
During the title selection process. Each year we move this. Participating presses submit between 5 and 15 titles in 2023. Store selected 100 of these titles for the path to open collection and added 300 more in 2024. 300 more titles will be selected in both 2025 and 2026 to reach the goal of 1000 titles by the end of the pilot. Subject areas of path to open titles represent those with the highest level of usage on jstor as licensed open access and converted to open titles globally.
But key subjects that support the program's goals of bibliodiversity are also included in the collection. To date, 42 small and medium university presses from various locations across the globe are participating. The goal is to continue expanding globally to 50 university press publishers in 2025. Since launching in October 2023. The program now includes more than 160 libraries representing seven countries and including nine consortia that have joined in at various levels, from community colleges to large research institutions.
A quick update since our in-person session is that jstor has announced an expansion of access to path to open for libraries at historically black colleges and universities, as well as tribal colleges and universities. Path to open fees for these institutions are being covered for the full pilot period, which is 2024 through 2026, with grant funds provided to the university of north Carolina press by the Mellon foundation to incentivize and support participation in path to open by historically marginalized communities, including their authors, libraries and readers.
We hope you'll support path to open at your home institutions as a model that offers a sustainable effort to open more high quality humanities monographs, as well as the university press community that publishes them. And now I'll share with you an overview of the path to open community advisory committee. Formally announced in may.
The committee provides a structure convened and administered by acls that brings together engaged members of the scholar library and publishing communities. Over the course of the pilot, this committee will work alongside jstor and further developing path to open as a model for open access book publication that centers bibliodiversity equity, sustainability and transparency.
Acls is a non-profit federation of 81 scholarly organizations that upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. We are widely known for our array of grant and fellowship programs which have supported generations of humanistic researchers from graduate students to late career scholars. In recent years, acls has also launched a host of new programs and initiatives designed to meet the needs of today's academy and in particular, to work with the humanities community in addressing some of the many challenges it faces.
One area of challenge that interests acls is scholarly publishing, which, as we all know, is experiencing a moment of rapid and significant change. Our interest here is to support the vitality and to extend the reach and relevance of humanistic scholarship. In 2022, we launched an initiative called amplifying humanistic scholarship and support for path to open is one of our first efforts within that initiative.
One of the committee's first tasks was to write a charge for the group that articulates who we are and defines our role in the path to open pilot. The full charge will soon be available online, but this excerpt lays out the key goals and responsibilities for the committee. Our primary focus is to support the longevity, effectiveness and sustainability of the path to open pilot initiative.
The committee includes representative community members who provide feedback, recommendations and insight, as well as outreach and community building support for the pilot stewarded by acls. Responsibilities of the committee include advising acls and jstor in areas related to the path to open initiative representing perspectives of path to open stakeholders, which include but are not limited to publishers, libraries, scholars and other open access initiatives to support the development and sustainability of the program.
We also represent path to open by engaging and communicating with stakeholders and by participating in affinity working groups as needed. The committee currently includes seven members with representation from library, publisher and scholar communities. The two year terms will be staggered to ensure that we invite new perspectives into the group, and we also hope to expand the number of committee members before the end of 2024.
In addition, we also plan to engage the wider path to open community, providing opportunities for involvement well beyond the committee itself. As the pilot progresses, we hope that the committee will offer helpful support to jstor's implementation of the pilot and facilitate shared understanding among all the participants. But we also hope to bring more scholars and administrators into the conversation and to apply lessons learned to creating a robust and sustainable model for open access books that will continue well beyond the pilot period.
Some of our questions include how do we build a sustainable, equitable and diverse open access funding model for books that accounts for the needs of authors, libraries, publishers and readers? How do we build trust and foster shared understanding among all of these different stakeholders? And how do we engage the larger humanistic community in understanding the benefits of open access publication and finding new means of supporting it?
We look forward to adding new questions from the wider community as they emerge. But for now, I will turn over the conversation to Katherine. Thank you. Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to our panel at SSP. I am here to represent the publisher perspective on path to open. My name is Catherine Cox.
I'm the director of Syracuse university press. So I want to briefly talk about. Why open access is existentially difficult for humanities, monographs and for the small and medium sized university presses that publish most of them and then make the case that I think path to open addresses those issues and opens a way for us to. Publish more open access monographs and achieve hopefully the equity issues behind.
The open science movement. So if open access is so difficult for humanities publishers, why. Do it at all? Well, partly it is our mission to circulate humanities scholarship broadly. But at this moment, as many of you may know, the average monograph sells 300 or fewer copies. So obviously, we're not achieving our mission there.
But we also saw during the pandemic lockdown in the summer of 2020 that when the books we publish are made easily, freely accessible around the world, the demand for them is actually tremendous. It's far, far higher than the sales numbers would indicate. So you've heard some data from John Lenihan of jstor already. I will just quote from a recent webinar. Jstor has more than 125 licensed ebooks on its platform. But the 11,000 open access ebooks account for some 45% of the total usage.
Similarly, non open access monographs sell to an average of 14 countries, while the open access monographs again this is on jstor's platform are used in 134 countries. So the demand is there. We know there is actually very strong demand for humanities monographs. What we don't have is the business model. Not yet.
So if we're not meeting our mission, we're not reaching those readers. We need a new way to do that. And we hope, of course, that open access would be the way to do that. But unfortunately, the existing models of open access for funding, open access, really just don't work for monographs. The whole book publishing charges model doesn't work.
I would also point out, frankly, that the article processing charges model that is commonly used in the sciences in scientific journals is also not working in the sense that it is not achieving the equity issues that the proponents of open scholarship really hoped for. So why would we adopt a model that has no. Problems that many people know and talk about all the time. The other reason why book publishing charges to focus back on monograph publishing why they don't work is that the funding in the humanities is simply much less.
And it's you know, tends to be a few small grants here and there. Humanities scholars simply don't have the institutional support that many stem scholars do. Second publishing monographs is far more costly and more variable than articles. They tend to be much less standardized and of course they're much, much longer. The other thing that I will point to is the fact that those of us who publish monographs tend to be smaller presses, more variable in size and focus, more variable in the kinds of resources that we can draw on.
So the monograph publishing landscape. Most of those publishers are university affiliated. They're small in staff and revenue of the members of the association of university presses. There's about 160 of us. 70% are what are classified as group one. That means we have less than we earn less than $1.5 million in revenue annually.
Tend to have staffs between about five and 15 people. As you can imagine, with at that scale, and because we are part of larger institutions, we have a pretty limited capacity to establish stand alone digital platforms and a limited capacity to seek and track external funding sources. That's just for most of us. It's part of what we try to do, but we are not in a position to create those resources on our own.
On the other hand, you know, size matters in really positive ways as well. The monograph publishing landscape is highly biodiverse. There are a lot of different publishers. We are regionally rooted and responsive, including to publish in a variety of different languages, and we have a strong incentive to seek out new scholarship and new voices because we are competing with each other to publish those new voices and new scholarship.
And many of us, you know, we may be constrained by our university affiliation, but in other ways we are also highly flexible and have models that are adaptable to local circumstances as well. So there are real pluses to this landscape and I would not like to see that bibliodiversity lost through standardization and consolidation. So how do we work from this landscape to come up with a sustainable publishing system for humanities monographs?
There have been a number of pilots, as I think many of you know, and they've been very exciting and we've learned a lot from them. So my criticisms of the sort of existing options for open access monographs is not meant to denigrate any of those really terrific pilots and thoughtful experiments that we've seen. But right now, when we look at options for open access monographs, some of them are commercial products with limited transparency.
You know what's in the black box. In many cases, you know, they're book processing charges. That's the basis of funding them. So authors and presses need to find or bring funding, which is highly challenging in some cases. You know, the book the ebooks produced have only limited availability. These are small, relatively small scale pilots. So it's not really scalable for publishers.
It's also not really scalable for the library. So we're trying to purchase these ebooks. Some of these pilots resulted in in options that where there's a lack of built in distribution and discoverability. So those are all pieces that we need to figure out in order to have a really successful and sustainable open access program for monograph publishing. So, you know, what would that model look like?
And of course, I'm going to argue that passed open is that shared solution. We need something that is scalable for publishers and libraries. We need it to come with built in distribution and discoverability, and we need it to be shared. We need it to be collaborative, we need it to be community based if it is to work again for this highly biblio, diverse, mostly university university affiliated landscape of monograph publishers, it needs to be transparent and responsive to the concerns of all the stakeholders to make sure that we're actually creating a sustainable and equitable system.
And that equity is really important. It's important for us to talk about as we build the system. Having seen some of the shortfalls of open access as it has worked out in stem publishing. So as a member of the community advisory committee for path to open, I do see this model as as one that addresses all of these criteria for a sustainable and equitable open access monograph publishing system.
The committee itself is a big part of that. And the reason why I joined is because I do want to be part of a solution here. The committee is designed to ensure constant feedback from stakeholders, and that includes publishers like me. Also librarians and scholars. It's our role to continually evaluate the sustainability and effectiveness of the pilot so that at the end of the three years that it's planned for, we have a good sense of both its strengths and its weaknesses and how we can address those.
The membership of the committee itself will expand. We are actively looking for new members and it will turn over every few years to make sure that we get broad representation from all of the stakeholders and that that sense of who that those stakeholders are is also always under conversation. And we hope also to re-examine title selection criteria periodically to make sure that the collection itself is growing and changing along with scholarship and with library needs.
So those are all roles of the committee. And that's why I do think path to open is a really good option, a really good model for creating a more equitable, sustainable, open access monograph publishing system helps us maintain bibliodiversity increases the equity of access. Since authors don't need to bring money to the table, their institutions don't need to bring money to the table except for what's already in the system of supporting publishing.
Because acls is partnering with jstor, we've got good distribution and discoverability right off the top. Librarians are familiar with jstor. They worked together well on other collections. So there's a model in place. And what I really hope in the end is that we have developed it or are developing a model that will create a sustainable flow of resources that will support humanities scholarship for the long run.
And so with that, I'd like to hand the mic off to my colleague Daniel Lucier to tell you what path to open looks like from a scholars perspective. Thank you. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be with you. And I wish I could be there in person. My book music on the move was published under the tome initiative in 2020.
My previous books, not open access, attracted a few 1,000 readers each. My open access book has been used 100 of thousands of times. Open access was a career changing opportunity for me. But not everybody has that opportunity. My employer, Ohio state university, provided a subsidy of $15,000 through the tolm program so this book could appear. Open access.
I'm lucky to have that support. Some academic institutions cannot afford to cover that upfront expense, and some authors work outside the academic ecosystem with no institutional backing. This kind of subsidy has not been available. In the humanities. There aren't a lot of external grants that would cover this cost. Authors were closed out of the system.
Has to open invites more authors to publish open access books. This business model does not require a fee paid on behalf of the author. The books are available by subscription for the first three years covering the cost of publication, and then after that, the books are free to use. By not relying on fees coming from the authors, path to open allows more kinds of authors to participate.
Open access. Digital publishing also has the potential to change what a scholarly book is, and the broad availability of these books amplifies the innovative potential of new formats. My book contains embedded digital objects like interactive maps that show change over time. This is not just a fun feature.
People who are googling relevant topics find the digital objects first and they're drawn into the book. Readers who are not connected to any academic institution end up finding my scholarly work. I get more readership and more impact. More powerful still. Jeffrey Blevins and James jae hoon. Lee's book on social media and social justice allows readers to access their data and visualize it in different ways.
In the margins. This book also includes audio visual instructions for readers who want to learn more about techniques of gathering and interpreting data. Or work with the data themselves combined with open access. This strategy makes both knowledge and skills available to anyone. That's not just academic. In a time when the public is flooded with misinformation, helping people understand what good evidence looks like and learn how to work with data themselves seems vitally important.
There's potential here for authors to tell new stories in new ways to reach new publics, and to spread transformative ways of thinking. That, it seems to me, is what funding open access at scale might do. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Thank you for watching this recording of the session. Building inclusive community based models for open humanistic scholarship, which was originally given in person at the 2024 SSP annual meeting. My name is Sarah McKee. I'm project manager for amplifying humanistic scholarship at the American council of learned societies, or acls.
In this session, we focus on new developments in open humanistic scholarship with a particular focus on monographs or book length works that present a sustained argument. Monographs have long been the gold standard for the presentation of new research findings in the humanities, and they are generally required publications for the tenure and promotion of faculty working in humanistic disciplines.
But the humanities themselves are changing. Growing interest and production in the digital and public humanities among scholars and students are forging new ways to conduct and share research. At the same time, significant transitions in scholarly publishing from the open access publication of conventional monographs to experimentation with new forms in the digital environment, offer opportunities to expand audiences and demonstrate the continued relevance of humanistic research.
This is an exciting moment of change and possibility in the humanities. But change is hard and requires us to rethink processes, expectations and funding models that have been in place for decades. The challenges of such transitions cannot be overcome by publishers or libraries or authors working in isolation. Collaborations that engage stakeholders across the scholarly publishing community and contribute to shared understandings are essential.
The in-person session offered two case studies for community based models that bring together diverse expertise to support open and innovative humanistic scholarship. The panelists explored how many of the ships occurring in scholarly publishing are cultural as well as technical and financial. How developing solutions in isolation often creates unintended obstacles that hinder both innovation and accessibility, and why the complexity of these changes require us to work together toward solutions that benefit everyone.
We hope that session attendees will recognize the importance of collaborating with diverse stakeholders from across the scholarly publishing community, including the authors as vital participants to support emerging forms of humanistic scholarship. By sharing our experiences in community building, we hope to offer models that attendees can adapt to their own situations. The first case study was advancing hbcu scholarship, diversifying digital publishing, a collaboration among the hbcu library alliance, brown university digital publications, or BDP and the university of Michigan press to build capacity for developing enhanced monographs.
Librarians at three hbcus mentored by BDP and Michigan press, will obtain the necessary skill set to support a member of their faculty in authoring a born digital publication. The resulting works will be published via an open access publishing model that disseminates the digital publications to the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. This session is not included in the recording, but the panelists were.
Claire Jones, assistant editor of brown university digital publications. Claire also served as co-moderator for this session. Sarah Jo Cohen, editorial director at the university of Michigan press. Marco Robinson, associate professor of history and assistant director of the Ruth j. Simmons center for race and justice at prairie view A&M university and Jordan signator reference and instruction librarian at prairie view A&M university.
The second case study is the path to open community advisory committee. Path to open is a multi-year pilot hosted by jstor that tests a new funding model for open access monographs. In summer 2023, the American council of learned societies, or acls, began developing a mixed stakeholder community forum that offers guidance to jstor in developing transparent policies and creating a sustainable structure beyond the pilot.
The resulting committee launched the spring and brings together scholars, libraries and publishers to build a more equitable model for open monograph publishing across the community, not just for individual presses and libraries or well resourced authors. The original panelists for this session were myself, along with John Lenihan, vice president of published content at jstor. Catherine Cox, director of Syracuse university press, and Danielle fossler Lucier, professor of music at the Ohio state university.
The original agenda included an overview of path to open from John Lenihan about jstor's implementation of the path to open pilot, which tests a new funding model for open access books. Unfortunately, John was not able to join this recording, so I will provide that overview before sharing with you our efforts at acls to build a cross sector community that supports and guides the development of path to open to ensure its equitability and sustainability.
And then we'll hear from two committee members, Catherine Cox, who will present her perspective as a university press director, and Danielle foster Lucier, who will share her thoughts as an open access author and advocate. So first, a quick overview about how path to open works. In this model, libraries pay an annual participation fee to access a growing corpus of titles that are submitted by university presses and exclusively available on jstor for three years from their publication dates.
The books are also available in print and consumer versions, but not in any other library aggregation to minimize acquisition, workflow challenges and publication costs for the model. The library annual participation fees are redistributed to the participating presses as a $5,000 stipend per title. Jstor has provided the initial funding of $5 million to pay publishers and release these titles as open access. Even if library subscriptions don't end up covering the stipend costs.
After three years in the collection, the books are converted to open access. After that, they can be published on any platform the publisher selects in addition to jstor. Every title in this program is guaranteed to become open access, and by the end of the pilot period, we expect to open 1000 titles to the world. A few questions that will be studying through the pilot include looking at the three year embargo and deciding is that the right amount of time?
Is it too short? Is it too long? We're also going to look closely at the $5,000 plus print sales. Does that combination generate enough revenue for presses and will we have enough libraries committing to the program or perhaps have more than we need? And would that scenario enable us to publish more open access books?
During the title selection process. Each year we move this. Participating presses submit between 5 and 15 titles in 2023. Store selected 100 of these titles for the path to open collection and added 300 more in 2024. 300 more titles will be selected in both 2025 and 2026 to reach the goal of 1000 titles by the end of the pilot. Subject areas of path to open titles represent those with the highest level of usage on jstor as licensed open access and converted to open titles globally.
But key subjects that support the program's goals of bibliodiversity are also included in the collection. To date, 42 small and medium university presses from various locations across the globe are participating. The goal is to continue expanding globally to 50 university press publishers in 2025. Since launching in October 2023. The program now includes more than 160 libraries representing seven countries and including nine consortia that have joined in at various levels, from community colleges to large research institutions.
A quick update since our in-person session is that jstor has announced an expansion of access to path to open for libraries at historically black colleges and universities, as well as tribal colleges and universities. Path to open fees for these institutions are being covered for the full pilot period, which is 2024 through 2026, with grant funds provided to the university of north Carolina press by the Mellon foundation to incentivize and support participation in path to open by historically marginalized communities, including their authors, libraries and readers.
We hope you'll support path to open at your home institutions as a model that offers a sustainable effort to open more high quality humanities monographs, as well as the university press community that publishes them. And now I'll share with you an overview of the path to open community advisory committee. Formally announced in may.
The committee provides a structure convened and administered by acls that brings together engaged members of the scholar library and publishing communities. Over the course of the pilot, this committee will work alongside jstor and further developing path to open as a model for open access book publication that centers bibliodiversity equity, sustainability and transparency.
Acls is a non-profit federation of 81 scholarly organizations that upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. We are widely known for our array of grant and fellowship programs which have supported generations of humanistic researchers from graduate students to late career scholars. In recent years, acls has also launched a host of new programs and initiatives designed to meet the needs of today's academy and in particular, to work with the humanities community in addressing some of the many challenges it faces.
One area of challenge that interests acls is scholarly publishing, which, as we all know, is experiencing a moment of rapid and significant change. Our interest here is to support the vitality and to extend the reach and relevance of humanistic scholarship. In 2022, we launched an initiative called amplifying humanistic scholarship and support for path to open is one of our first efforts within that initiative.
One of the committee's first tasks was to write a charge for the group that articulates who we are and defines our role in the path to open pilot. The full charge will soon be available online, but this excerpt lays out the key goals and responsibilities for the committee. Our primary focus is to support the longevity, effectiveness and sustainability of the path to open pilot initiative.
The committee includes representative community members who provide feedback, recommendations and insight, as well as outreach and community building support for the pilot stewarded by acls. Responsibilities of the committee include advising acls and jstor in areas related to the path to open initiative representing perspectives of path to open stakeholders, which include but are not limited to publishers, libraries, scholars and other open access initiatives to support the development and sustainability of the program.
We also represent path to open by engaging and communicating with stakeholders and by participating in affinity working groups as needed. The committee currently includes seven members with representation from library, publisher and scholar communities. The two year terms will be staggered to ensure that we invite new perspectives into the group, and we also hope to expand the number of committee members before the end of 2024.
In addition, we also plan to engage the wider path to open community, providing opportunities for involvement well beyond the committee itself. As the pilot progresses, we hope that the committee will offer helpful support to jstor's implementation of the pilot and facilitate shared understanding among all the participants. But we also hope to bring more scholars and administrators into the conversation and to apply lessons learned to creating a robust and sustainable model for open access books that will continue well beyond the pilot period.
Some of our questions include how do we build a sustainable, equitable and diverse open access funding model for books that accounts for the needs of authors, libraries, publishers and readers? How do we build trust and foster shared understanding among all of these different stakeholders? And how do we engage the larger humanistic community in understanding the benefits of open access publication and finding new means of supporting it?
We look forward to adding new questions from the wider community as they emerge. But for now, I will turn over the conversation to Katherine. Thank you. Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to our panel at SSP. I am here to represent the publisher perspective on path to open. My name is Catherine Cox.
I'm the director of Syracuse university press. So I want to briefly talk about. Why open access is existentially difficult for humanities, monographs and for the small and medium sized university presses that publish most of them and then make the case that I think path to open addresses those issues and opens a way for us to. Publish more open access monographs and achieve hopefully the equity issues behind.
The open science movement. So if open access is so difficult for humanities publishers, why. Do it at all? Well, partly it is our mission to circulate humanities scholarship broadly. But at this moment, as many of you may know, the average monograph sells 300 or fewer copies. So obviously, we're not achieving our mission there.
But we also saw during the pandemic lockdown in the summer of 2020 that when the books we publish are made easily, freely accessible around the world, the demand for them is actually tremendous. It's far, far higher than the sales numbers would indicate. So you've heard some data from John Lenihan of jstor already. I will just quote from a recent webinar. Jstor has more than 125 licensed ebooks on its platform. But the 11,000 open access ebooks account for some 45% of the total usage.
Similarly, non open access monographs sell to an average of 14 countries, while the open access monographs again this is on jstor's platform are used in 134 countries. So the demand is there. We know there is actually very strong demand for humanities monographs. What we don't have is the business model. Not yet.
So if we're not meeting our mission, we're not reaching those readers. We need a new way to do that. And we hope, of course, that open access would be the way to do that. But unfortunately, the existing models of open access for funding, open access, really just don't work for monographs. The whole book publishing charges model doesn't work.
I would also point out, frankly, that the article processing charges model that is commonly used in the sciences in scientific journals is also not working in the sense that it is not achieving the equity issues that the proponents of open scholarship really hoped for. So why would we adopt a model that has no. Problems that many people know and talk about all the time. The other reason why book publishing charges to focus back on monograph publishing why they don't work is that the funding in the humanities is simply much less.
And it's you know, tends to be a few small grants here and there. Humanities scholars simply don't have the institutional support that many stem scholars do. Second publishing monographs is far more costly and more variable than articles. They tend to be much less standardized and of course they're much, much longer. The other thing that I will point to is the fact that those of us who publish monographs tend to be smaller presses, more variable in size and focus, more variable in the kinds of resources that we can draw on.
So the monograph publishing landscape. Most of those publishers are university affiliated. They're small in staff and revenue of the members of the association of university presses. There's about 160 of us. 70% are what are classified as group one. That means we have less than we earn less than $1.5 million in revenue annually.
Tend to have staffs between about five and 15 people. As you can imagine, with at that scale, and because we are part of larger institutions, we have a pretty limited capacity to establish stand alone digital platforms and a limited capacity to seek and track external funding sources. That's just for most of us. It's part of what we try to do, but we are not in a position to create those resources on our own.
On the other hand, you know, size matters in really positive ways as well. The monograph publishing landscape is highly biodiverse. There are a lot of different publishers. We are regionally rooted and responsive, including to publish in a variety of different languages, and we have a strong incentive to seek out new scholarship and new voices because we are competing with each other to publish those new voices and new scholarship.
And many of us, you know, we may be constrained by our university affiliation, but in other ways we are also highly flexible and have models that are adaptable to local circumstances as well. So there are real pluses to this landscape and I would not like to see that bibliodiversity lost through standardization and consolidation. So how do we work from this landscape to come up with a sustainable publishing system for humanities monographs?
There have been a number of pilots, as I think many of you know, and they've been very exciting and we've learned a lot from them. So my criticisms of the sort of existing options for open access monographs is not meant to denigrate any of those really terrific pilots and thoughtful experiments that we've seen. But right now, when we look at options for open access monographs, some of them are commercial products with limited transparency.
You know what's in the black box. In many cases, you know, they're book processing charges. That's the basis of funding them. So authors and presses need to find or bring funding, which is highly challenging in some cases. You know, the book the ebooks produced have only limited availability. These are small, relatively small scale pilots. So it's not really scalable for publishers.
It's also not really scalable for the library. So we're trying to purchase these ebooks. Some of these pilots resulted in in options that where there's a lack of built in distribution and discoverability. So those are all pieces that we need to figure out in order to have a really successful and sustainable open access program for monograph publishing. So, you know, what would that model look like?
And of course, I'm going to argue that passed open is that shared solution. We need something that is scalable for publishers and libraries. We need it to come with built in distribution and discoverability, and we need it to be shared. We need it to be collaborative, we need it to be community based if it is to work again for this highly biblio, diverse, mostly university university affiliated landscape of monograph publishers, it needs to be transparent and responsive to the concerns of all the stakeholders to make sure that we're actually creating a sustainable and equitable system.
And that equity is really important. It's important for us to talk about as we build the system. Having seen some of the shortfalls of open access as it has worked out in stem publishing. So as a member of the community advisory committee for path to open, I do see this model as as one that addresses all of these criteria for a sustainable and equitable open access monograph publishing system.
The committee itself is a big part of that. And the reason why I joined is because I do want to be part of a solution here. The committee is designed to ensure constant feedback from stakeholders, and that includes publishers like me. Also librarians and scholars. It's our role to continually evaluate the sustainability and effectiveness of the pilot so that at the end of the three years that it's planned for, we have a good sense of both its strengths and its weaknesses and how we can address those.
The membership of the committee itself will expand. We are actively looking for new members and it will turn over every few years to make sure that we get broad representation from all of the stakeholders and that that sense of who that those stakeholders are is also always under conversation. And we hope also to re-examine title selection criteria periodically to make sure that the collection itself is growing and changing along with scholarship and with library needs.
So those are all roles of the committee. And that's why I do think path to open is a really good option, a really good model for creating a more equitable, sustainable, open access monograph publishing system helps us maintain bibliodiversity increases the equity of access. Since authors don't need to bring money to the table, their institutions don't need to bring money to the table except for what's already in the system of supporting publishing.
Because acls is partnering with jstor, we've got good distribution and discoverability right off the top. Librarians are familiar with jstor. They worked together well on other collections. So there's a model in place. And what I really hope in the end is that we have developed it or are developing a model that will create a sustainable flow of resources that will support humanities scholarship for the long run.
And so with that, I'd like to hand the mic off to my colleague Daniel Lucier to tell you what path to open looks like from a scholars perspective. Thank you. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be with you. And I wish I could be there in person. My book music on the move was published under the tome initiative in 2020.
My previous books, not open access, attracted a few 1,000 readers each. My open access book has been used 100 of thousands of times. Open access was a career changing opportunity for me. But not everybody has that opportunity. My employer, Ohio state university, provided a subsidy of $15,000 through the tolm program so this book could appear. Open access.
I'm lucky to have that support. Some academic institutions cannot afford to cover that upfront expense, and some authors work outside the academic ecosystem with no institutional backing. This kind of subsidy has not been available. In the humanities. There aren't a lot of external grants that would cover this cost. Authors were closed out of the system.
Has to open invites more authors to publish open access books. This business model does not require a fee paid on behalf of the author. The books are available by subscription for the first three years covering the cost of publication, and then after that, the books are free to use. By not relying on fees coming from the authors, path to open allows more kinds of authors to participate.
Open access. Digital publishing also has the potential to change what a scholarly book is, and the broad availability of these books amplifies the innovative potential of new formats. My book contains embedded digital objects like interactive maps that show change over time. This is not just a fun feature.
People who are googling relevant topics find the digital objects first and they're drawn into the book. Readers who are not connected to any academic institution end up finding my scholarly work. I get more readership and more impact. More powerful still. Jeffrey Blevins and James jae hoon. Lee's book on social media and social justice allows readers to access their data and visualize it in different ways.
In the margins. This book also includes audio visual instructions for readers who want to learn more about techniques of gathering and interpreting data. Or work with the data themselves combined with open access. This strategy makes both knowledge and skills available to anyone. That's not just academic. In a time when the public is flooded with misinformation, helping people understand what good evidence looks like and learn how to work with data themselves seems vitally important.
There's potential here for authors to tell new stories in new ways to reach new publics, and to spread transformative ways of thinking. That, it seems to me, is what funding open access at scale might do. Thank you.
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