New Approaches to Academic
Publishing
Rupert Gatti
Trinity College, Cambridge
Co-founder, Open Book Publishers
21 March 2014
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 OA
A final copy of the published work is available under
an OA licence from a repository.
•There is no requirement for an embargo period.
Gold OA
The published edition of the work is available under
an OA licence.
•There is no requirement for an apc.
Some examples
Green OA
arXive (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 sciences
NIH Public Access Policy <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/>
Gold OA
PLOS (apc)
PLOS One – published 33k articles in 2013
Different ‘acceptance’ standard <http://www.plos.org/>
AHRC (UK) Data
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
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>
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
http://www.doaj.org/
•9,763 Journals listed
from 141 countries
6,527 (2/3) make no author charges
About 45% are in HSS
Humanities data

Literature: 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 journals
28 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
http://www.doabooks.org/
http://books.openedition.org/
1662 books
55 publishers
Languages:
English (909)
German (319)
Italian (93)
French (16)
Spanish (2)
Portuguese (0)
1161 books
33 publishers
Languages:
French (959)
English (118)
Spanish (72)
Italian (11)
Portuguese (0)
Published 2013-14: 185 books
Published 2013-14: 46 books
Broader Readership
OBP 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 Interaction
Having 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 Support
Athabasca University Press, ANU Press
Research Centre & Society Partnerships
WOLP, IES, CREATe
Research Funding Subsidy
Wellcome Trust, Max Planck Society
Library Expenditure
OpenEditions, Open Library of the Humanities, Knowledge Unlatched,
Unglue.it
Direct Publication Charges
legacy 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.