SIVACRACY.NET: University Presses on the Open Access movement

It seems like a measured, thoughtful response.

... So where do university presses come in on this debate? The paper released Tuesday opens with the famous quote with which Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins University, in 1880 outlined the purpose behind founding the first university press in the United States: “to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures — but far and wide.” It’s the sort of rhetoric that could turn up easily in an open access document. Further, the university presses note that they weren’t created with commercial goals. And so, the paper says, it’s not surprising that university presses support a range of projects — such as The New Georgia Encyclopedia, Columbia International Affairs Online and Rotunda — that place materials online and are either open access or use nontraditional pricing models.

But while the press report expresses enthusiasm for such models, it then outlines what it sees as severe economic consequences of imposing the “more radical approaches” to open access, which “abandon the market as a viable basis for the recovery of costs in scholarly publishing.”

Among the concerns:

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If publishers lose revenue from selling copies of journals, their support will need to come either from authors or other sources, such as foundations and libraries. The AAUP paper warns that scholars at institutions unable to make such contributions “may experience greater difficulty in publishing.”
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Requirements that journal contents be made available online and free will “undermine existing well regarded services,” such as Project Muse, that sell access to packages of journals to academic institutions.
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If university presses lose significant portions of the $500 million they generate in sales (90 percent of their operating costs), those funds will need to be replaced or the presses will have to cut back on what they do.
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If, as some have threatened to do, some commercial publishers back out of scholarly publishing in the wake of any open access regulations, would university presses be expected to pick up these projects and, if so, who would pay for them?

While those points express skepticism, another part of the paper suggests a broadening of the open access concept. “Open access need not be limited to journals,” the presses state. And while applying the model to monographs would create another set of issues for university presses (the paper notes that only 17-20 percent of publishing costs for monographs are on manufacturing), there might also be models that mix print and online, open access and fees, the paper suggests. It adds that it would be “unwise not to explore the implications of open access for all fields of knowledge lest an unfortunate new ‘digital divide’ should arise between fields and between different types of publishing.”

This is significant. But it's important to remember that university press journals are rarely part of the problem. The real problem is corporate publishers and harvesters like Elsevier.

Ideally university publishers will continue to integrate elements and principles of open access into their work. For instance, they should welcome authors who insist on using Creative Commons and similar licenses in their contracts.