At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 01/21/2010
For the SPARC-ACRL Forum summary from ALA 2010, please see "At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Catching Up on Cases and Legislation"
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- Unprecedented dissemination opportunities, but difficulty for business models
- "Average" OA humanities monograph runs at a deficit
- Experiments under way to see what works
Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled "The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs."
The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.
Introducing the panelists, David Carlson, incoming chair of the SPARC steering committee and dean of library affairs at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, said that the scholarly market demands ebooks, regardless of the difficulties they pose for publishers and libraries. The three panelists then described their attempts to meet that demand.
Bearish outlook for OA monographs
Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the National Academies Press (NAP), was the first to suggest the bad news/good news proposition: the press’s sales have actually declined, but NAP has fulfilled more of its mission of achieving maximal dissemination.
"There's an awful lot of reading going on," Jensen said of NAP's open content, which draws on average ten page views for each distinct visitor. However, only 0.3% of visitors purchase anything. The press has experimented with making the best non-optimal version (HTML page access) free, while offering the optimal version (PDF download) for a fee. The content is openly available, he said, but you can't easily read the free version on an airplane, for example, since pages must be requested individually online. This encourages users to buy the text as an ebook.
Aside from not worrying about royalties for the content it publishes on behalf of the National Academies, Jensen said NAP faces slightly less pressure since its support is guaranteed by the Academies. Similarly, the press functions under the umbrella of scientific funding rather than under a humanities mindset, where requests as small as staff computers can pose budget anxiety.
"I've never been more bearish on the future," Jensen concluded, adding that the near-term holds serious risks for monograph publishers, and that specialty markets for OA monographs likely won't function without explicit institutional support.
Taking stock of the "average" OA monograph
Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, similarly cited tension between OA and “the practical goal of sustainability," then analyzed the press's open access Romance [language] Studies collection.
A 256 page "average monograph" has a list price of $57.88 for a cloth edition and $30.50 for paper (though many sales are at a significant discount). Meanwhile, it’s also made available at no cost to the end user in PDF sections. This press sells an average of just 95 copies in cloth and 279 copies in paper.
Thus, the "visible" first copy costs total about $5223, including editing and materials, as well as Cataloging in Publication filing and copyright registration. Beyond that are “invisible costs” for processes like validating metadata and software training for staff. Other overhead costs such as university support, facilities, personnel, and equipment add up to another $5,188, he said, bringing the total cost for the first digital and print copy to about $10,411.
In the end, each title runs a deficit of $9,898, Alexander said, with the obvious conclusion that the current model doesn't demonstrate financial sustainability. Still, the press has reached most of its dissemination goals, with some titles still getting significant traffic online two years after publication, an unusual sign of interest for this specialized field.
Value of experimentation
Finally, Maria Bonn, newly appointed associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan, described her institution's similar experiments with "calculated risk-taking" in the service of scholarly access.
She described three open access efforts, including an imprint called digitalculturebooks, the inclusion of retrospective press titles in the HathiTrust, and a partnership with the Open Humanities Press. As with the other OA efforts described at the panel, Bonn said that making the digitalculturebooks materials available online represented purely additive costs on top of regular cost of producing a print title.
The response to the imprint—which covers topics particularly suited to an online audience—has been generally good in terms of both sales and online visibility, but Bonn said it’s unclear whether this and other efforts would be viable over the long term.
Weak sales or not, "we think it's the right thing to do," she said. "It's the purpose of the press to support scholarly access."
For now, it seems, publishers support such experiments to generate valuable data about open publishing models, but it is also clear they can't continue forever.
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