Athena Unbound by Peter Baldwin

Author:Peter Baldwin [Baldwin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Open access; science; scholarship; academic knowledge; dissemination of knowledge; peer review; moral rights; networking; collaboration; author�s rights; moral rights; work-for-hire; copyright; Romantic authorship; libraries; serials crisis; article processing charges; controlled digital lending; intellectual property; social media; research and development; privacy; social justice; public domain; postmodernism; version of record; predatory journals
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Publishing Open Access

Though scientific articles have attracted most attention, scholarly books present their own problems. They fall into at least two categories. Those with commercial potential are often sold to trade houses that treat them like other books. University presses, in turn, are nonprofit and often subsidized by their parent institutions. Their mission has traditionally been to publish scholarly works with only marginal market appeal, purchased mainly by university libraries and a few researchers. Library budgets have financed university press books. To make up for cutbacks, these presses have also established trade divisions, eager to spot works that sell beyond the academy and fatten the bottom line. Occasionally, they strike gold. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century turned into a nice little earner for Harvard University Press in 2014, selling millions. Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit worked similar magic for Princeton.

Who will pay for scholarly books, if not the research libraries? As budgets suffered under rising subscriptions, monograph purchases declined. The library sales in four figures that university presses relied on in the 1980s have shrunk. In 1980, 2,000 copies of a history monograph might sell, by 2005, only 200.45 The average scholarly monograph these days sells 60 copies.46 Who will pay to publish humanities research? Specialized open publishers and the open-access divisions of existing academic presses stand ready to deliver, but their expenses must be met.

For a sense of the cost of making scholarly books accessible, consider what publishers currently bill authors. Among the Anglophone publishers, Palgrave charges $17,500, Brill $12,200, Ubiquity between $5,000 and $12,000, Cambridge $10,000, Bloomsbury £6,500 to £12,000, the University of California Press’s Luminos series $15,000, and MIT Press the same. Open Book Publishers, a nonprofit open-access house, charges about $8,000.47 These are the sums announced on the publishers’ websites. Some charge higher fees for works under CC BY, the less restrictive form of licensing that allows competing editions, than for CC BY-NC.48 Other sources show that the mean book publishing charge in recent years has been somewhat lower than list prices suggest, namely $5,205.49 Another study indicates that UK publishers average £7,500, or $9,700 at the going rate in 2017.50 Dutch monographs cost €12,000.51 Swiss monographs cost 13,800 francs in 2018, or almost $15,000.52

To put this in perspective, a recent study of the actual expense of publishing conventional academic monographs by American university presses arrived at per title costs for producing the final finished copy (but not its physical printing) that varied from $15,000 to $130,000.53 That suggests much higher expenses for open editions, too. Are the open-access presses delusional, cross-subsidized from other sources, or wondrously efficient? The study also revealed that the single biggest cost for academic publishers was staff time. Acquisitions make up the largest share of staff costs, around half, depending on the size of the press. That is unexpected, since university presses primarily sort through manuscripts sent them by eager scholars.

Staff interviewed insisted of course that they were more engaged than that. But one of the activities driving up costs

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