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With academia increasingly being abused by budget cuts whilst at the same time being overtaken by the language of business, profit, and sustainability, new ways are being sought to gain funds to subsidize academic projects and publications. Especially scholarly publishers within the Humanities and Social Sciences (be they not-for-profit or commercial) have become accustomed to the mixing of and the experimenting with business and revenue models. As the specialized scholarly book has developed into a format from which it has become very hard to gain a profit (mainly due to library budget cuts, the main buyers of academic books), in most cases (cross-) subsidizing schemes are now a necessity for publishers.
Joseph Esposito gives a nice overview of the different business models in use in scholarly communication in his blog post What We Talk About When We Talk About Business Models: A Bestiary of Revenue Streams. In this post he zooms in on revenue streams derived by publishers using traditional or ‘user-pays’ publishing, author-pays publishing, institutional sponsoring, marketing services, ‘freemium’ publishing and licensing. And, as he confirms, in many cases content is made available by the aid of a hybrid model, in which revenue streams from the different categories mentioned above get mixed up in various forms and models. In a later post entitled The Membership Business Model for Scholarly Communications, Esposito discusses another business model, one which I want to explore more deeply here, namely the one in which ‘a group of people working in the same area (the area does not have to be academic research) might decide that they have a shared interest in publishing some of their material. They thus pool their resources, appoint individuals to oversee the publications, establish policies, and make the material available to fellow members of the community.’
As Esposito states, this membership model is a good example of the above mentioned hybrid model, as it is a mixture of different economic models:
‘At first glance, the membership model appears to be a form of user-pays publishing, as access to content requires a fee. But this model differs from the traditional one in its reciprocal nature: One fee provides access to both content (like the user-pays model) and to the publishing process itself (like the author-pays model). It’s thus very much a community model of publishing, where membership has its privileges.’
It’s the later two aspects described by Esposito that I am most interested in here, namely the concept of community and the idea of member privileges. For the model I want to focus on here, the crowd-funding model—well known from popular platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—can be seen as a combination of the membership model and the Maecenas model I have written about before, but now targeted to the web. In this model the traditional ‘community model of publishing’ is being exported to the web and tried out in new forms and with a new, potentially global, community. At the moment this model is mainly being used in or experimented with in artistic and creative projects, but it has already been tried out extensively in other fields, media and formats too. The idea behind this model is that a community of people with an interest in (the funding of) a certain project, donate a small sum to support the project or to pledge for the project, in return for which they get ‘access’ to the project or gain certain ‘privileges’ (such as special previews, a copy of the final book/record/movie, a dedication in said media, or in some cases even a chance to go out for lunch with the artist).
My current aim is to explore in what way this model might work for academic book publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, in specific in combination with an effort towards increasing accessibility and stimulating (Gold) Open Access publishing. However, before I go on to explore the different possibilities such a system might offer, note that I see the current proposal or set of ideas as an urgent necessity, a necessity to look for and experiment with new revenue streams and business models to help the specialized monograph survive, to make its creation and dissemination possible and to safeguard its existence. At the same time I see the ideas and possibilities explained and examined here as the nadir of what academic publishing has become, as an exemplar of the strains academic authors, publishers and their institutions have to go through to get their projects funded and their work published. Projects that society should deem important enough to fund from the outset, work that should be made accessible by default and not only when it is able to make a profit. The idea of crowd-funding a project or a publication in many ways reveals what the modern academic has become, spending increasing amounts of her/his/their ‘research time’ on securing internal or external funding, and on managing the paperwork that comes with that. The crowd-funding model, at least the one that is made popular by platforms like Kickstarter, might push the scholar to an even further extreme, were she/he/they will have to become a performer, playing out an act, juggling expertise, expected research outcomes, and promised deliverables in a snappy marketing video. All in order to persuade an already over-commercialized public to spend money on this specific, unique, and important project—instead of on one of the other hundreds of endangered publications—in a race for the competition of who can make the best promo clip.
An example of how this can become a bit ridiculous, or better said, ‘problematic’, is sketched out by this recent article from The New York Times, that shows how, in order to obtain funding, two biologists ventured into selling t-shirts and trading cards in an effort dubbed by The Times similar to an ‘online bake sale’. The question is, are we headed towards a world in which scholars will increasingly have to become performers to obtain funding, for example by giving talks before paying audiences—which seems to be a growing trend—mimicking super-star scholarly authors such as Žižek? This trend is also visible in the increasingly popular format of the TED talks for instance (although TED does not pay its speakers, it is definitely a marketing device for authors). Will scholars be forced to go the same path literary authors have already gone, making money to finance their projects, publications and livelihoods by giving readings, signing books and selling merchandise? Increasingly it seems that in the present climate, with a lack of commercial interest for profit making, a lack of institutional backing, and a lack of (alternative) patronage systems in place in many of the countries hit by budget cuts, scholars, educators, authors and artists will have to go to drastic measures. Will this be the consequence of a society in which culture and scholarship are no longer seen as a necessity or as a public good? And aren’t we with that, as Žižek noted in a recent talk in London, killing of exactly those ‘traditional western standards and norms and values’ that the current right-wing European governments are at the same time craving to restore and maintain?
On the other hand, although the crowd-funding model showcases the extremes scholars have to go to nowadays to get money, it also offers many real possibilities. Against the gloomy vision sketched above, we should not underestimate the power of the community, and the self-organizing skills of the public sphere, when the commercial powers and the institutions that govern us increasingly abandon the Humanities and Social Sciences. Let’s get together with both our peers and with the wider community out there to discuss what we deem worthy research. Research that merits publication, research that deserves to be spread more widely.
So what is new about this crowd-funding model? As I stated before, it combines a membership model with a sponsorship model. In this way the statement made by Esposito that ‘a society that makes its content available through open access may experience declining interest among its members to continue paying membership dues’, underestimates the ideologies that trigger people, like for instance doing things for a common good, to support a certain charity or a certain goal—like increasing accessibility to scholarly publications. Furthermore the crowd-funding model finds a solution for another problem in the membership model Esposito notices, namely, as he states, ‘what, after all, is the point of being in a community unless it serves to define those who are outside it?’ The crowd-funding model no longer defines a community by giving it privileged access to the outcomes of the project—to the final publication—but to the process itself. It makes the community part of the process in a way. Crowd-funders thus become both member and part of a specific project (whilst attaining certain benefits at the same time). And this can very well go hand in hand with financing an openly available outcome at the same time. As the NYT article states ‘generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue.’
One of the problems noted in the NYT article however is the lack of a review system with crowd-funded projects. With this they mean a lack of a peer review system by experts of course, as a crowd selection system is already part of the crowd-funding process. As the article states, ‘most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process.’ However, peer review can of course take place at several stages during a project (for instance on acquiring funding, during the process of the project, during the publication phase and after the publication). These selection and quality assessment processes can be build into a crowd-funding model. Crowd-funding is just another revenue stream and needs not be without peer review or branding. A journal, publisher or a group of peer scientists can still endorse a project after or even before it has attained crowd-sourced funding. I think the problem these kind of new revenue models target has to do with the fact that projects that do measure up to quality and peer review standards, do not necessary have the funding to carry out these projects or to make the outcomes (openly) available. Competition has become harsh, and as Jean-Claude Guédon has showed us, the present system is mostly catering to let the best of scientific outcomes prevail. However, as Guédon also argues, the issue of excellence should not come to substitute quality thresholds.
The idea of crowd-sourcing funding for academic endeavors has already led to a few experimental platforms, of which the most promising might be the Italian Open Genius project, set up by Andrea Gaggioli. Open Genius, in adopting crowd-funding to scholarship, specifically focuses on the quality evaluation element. As Gaggioli and his colleague Riva write in a Science article here, ‘to assist (non-specialist) investors in deciding the awarding of contributions (and to audit thereafter), a peer-review procedure could be used. (…) Fraud could be prevented by implementing a reputation system (…) and by indicating the scientific track record of the proponent.’ As it states on its website, Open Genius is a not-for-profit initiative set up by the scientific community. It also lists it motives for using crowd-funding on its website and states it wants ‘to increase the resources for research, to reduce the gap between science and the public, to enhance transparency in funding allocation and use, and to inform donors about the results of their investments.’ The idea behind Open Genius is again that crowd-funding is seen as an additional revenue stream, where it looks to partner with similar academic, philanthropic or government funding initiatives. Their ideological background is also clear from their choice for open-source software and platforms. Ironically however, although the thinking behind this project seems solid, it hasn’t actually commenced yet, as it lacks the funds needed to start accepting proposals.
Where Open Genius is mostly focusing on funding whole (academic) projects, there are already some crowd-sourcing experiments up-and-running that focus more specifically on the funding of (literary) book publications. One of them is the Unbound Books platform, which works similar to Kickstarter but at the same time takes on a more traditional publishers role, as Unbound’s cofounder John Mitchinson states in an interview with Fast Company here: ‘we’re managing the back end in a way that Kickstarter doesn’t,” (…) “They’re a pure fundraising platform” (…)”We’re printing and distributing and finding the market for the books”. This publisher’s involvement has however led to forms of critique, as it is not a ‘pure’ crowd-sourcing project. Also, as is stated in this article by Bobbie Johnson, the problem with the Unbound Books model is that they got the underlying idea of ‘community’ wrong that seems to be essential when it comes to crowd-funding: the idea of ‘by the community and for the community’. As Johnson states: ‘It’s really about communities choosing their own destinies. As with crowdsourcing before it, there needs to be a real sense of involvement and authenticity if projects are to be about more than just doing things inexpensively.’
This idea of keeping traditional publishing functions alive whilst at the same time focusing more on the idea of community seems to be much better implemented in the Cursor platform set up by Richard Nash especially for book communities. The first community set up with Cursor is Red Lemonade. In an interview with Richard Nash by Digital Book World’s Rich Fahle, Nash states that Cursor is set up as a platform for publisher to also become membership organizations. Getting fans, writers and other interested parties to become members and comment upon each other’s work is the basis of the platform. The community then becomes the sole source of books to publish. In this way Nash’s project is more about ‘social publishing’, about the relationships between writers and readers. As Nash further states in this article in Publishers Weekly, ‘Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities’, a kind of ecosystem offering different publishing services.
These are all valuable insights and lessons to learn when thinking about applying a crowd-funding model to academic book publishing. One benefit of applying this model to academia is that the academic world already has a strong communal background in the form of disciplines and networks and formal and informal ties between publishers, authors, libraries, and journals (amongst others). And perhaps even more than in literary publishing, the writers of scholarly works are also the readers of these scholarly works. Furthermore, an elaborate communication and marketing network to keep up and strengthen the bonds between these communities is already in place in the form of mailing lists, blogs, (social) research platforms etc. And many of these digital platforms are from the outset already integrally connected to the rest of the web and the wider community of interest. Finally, as already mentioned above, the community ideology and the idea of sustaining and making accessible publications and research outcomes for the wider community fits in very well with Open Access principles and open source ideologies as they are at play within scholarly communication.
So, what could such a crowd-funding model for academic books look like? Underneath a very initial draft model.
First of all, as mentioned before, peer review and branding can very much be part of this model, as publishers or (groups of) authors can pre-select projects, endorse projects, or can conduct various forms of open and/or closed peer review as part of the project or publication process at different stages of its development. Also, crowd-funding can apply to already (traditionally) published and peer reviewed books, for instance to assist in making them openly accessible. A few different scenarios:
– A book can be funded from its initial idea (more of a project fund in a way). Scholars can submit a proposal (a draft chapter, a promo video) plus a reward scheme for those who pledge a certain amount of money. For instance, funders could pledge 15 euro and receive a free paperback of the book (where students could get the same for only 10 euro). There could also be schemes for libraries, where they receive a print copy after pledging a certain sum.
– Secondly, there could be an option to fund an Open Access edition of an already existing print book or of a book that will soon be available in print. At the moment projects like OAPEN.nl are looking into getting Open Access editions funded by government or funding institutions, by separating the costs of the Open Access edition from the costs of the printed edition. Another option, next to or instead of this institutional funding, could be to get the Open Access edition funded via crowd-sourcing.
– Thirdly, the publication of a dissertation could be funded via crowd-sourcing platforms. Dissertations, although in most cases highly peer reviewed, are hard to get published at the moment due to their often highly specialized nature and the lack of build-up prestige of their authors (early-career scholars).
– Fourth, if you fund a book you can get access to the way it develops. Following the idea of increased transparency or openness, crowd-funding could mean gaining access (for the funder or for the wider community) to the notes, updates, initial findings etc of the research project as it develops. This will draw the community closer towards a project and will also make them the initial pool of commentators (or even reviewers) of the document-in-development. Both authors and readers gain to profit from such a model, close to the ideas surrounding ‘social publishing’ as promoted by Nash.
A motion towards Open Access can be part of all these models, as an online version can be made available free for all—under a CC-license for instance—as a first requirement or outcome of all of these models. The community on which these models can be based, will first of all be made up of scholars in a certain field, but can be extended to students, libraries, other scholars in adjacent fields, the general public, companies (supporting publications as a charity cause for instance) etc. And again, different communities, and different projects, can exist on one platform.
It’s hard to say whether such a model might actually work, as much depends on, as said before, the willingness of a specific community to support projects and on the right model or platform. And again, although this might be just another revenue stream in that increasingly popular ‘hybrid model’ used to get publications funded, as long as it is working towards getting important and valuable research results out there, it is a shot worth taking.
After a previous guest post where he developed an interesting forecast related to academic publishing, Ronald Snijder is back with his thoughts on Open Access monographs. You can reach him at r.snijder@aup.nl
Full circle with Open Access Monographs
When I look at publishing academic books in Open Access, the story surrounding it tends to go a full circle, starting and ending with technology.
Technology is disrupting. Publishing in Open Access could only become an option because information technology enabled us to create files in a format – PDF – that could be used for printing and also be widely read on a screen. And the Web made it possible to publish those files without a lot of hassle. It made it possible to think about books that are free as in beer.
Of course, technology did not stop there. Apart from the ‘traditional’ web channel, we can access content from a mobile device. The number of available channels is not just increasing for the readers; those who make OA monographs available can now use several platforms such as repositories, the Google Books or other platforms like OAPEN[1]. Using the right channels also influences the availability: will my precious books be found in all the search engines?
Technology may also be changing our definition of what a monograph actually is. When you add moving pictures, sounds, complete databases, is it still a book? When it is updated regularly, possibly as a result of an online collaboration, can we still speak of a monograph? Some may also question the academic status of a monograph, compared to articles. Books are too long to read, too slow to write. Or maybe not. Personally I do believe that monographs have merit, and that making them freely available is beneficial.
But how beneficial are they, and for who? This is something that I would like to explore a little further in the future. Open Access monographs may have a scientific impact, as barriers are removed. Pricing barriers may be important for scholars in developing countries. Full access may enhance research, by making the contents fully searchable. Making monographs accessible may help to carry their ideas to places beyond the academic circles. All this may happen right now, but on what scale? Open Access should not be just a believe system, it must be backed up with facts.
This leads to another question that is much easier to answer. How can Open Access be sustained? That is simple: through money and power. Funders of research can also fund Open Access publishing of the results. Libraries and publishers could adjust the way they operate; universities could mandate that all research must be made freely available. Sustainability also means that the digital monographs must be preserved, which is a technical issue. So this story ends where it started: technology.
If you like, you can look at a more visual representation underneath or here.
[1] Disclosure: I am employed by Amsterdam University Press, an academic publisher with a large portfolio of books. Furthermore I am deeply involved in OAPEN, aimed at Open Access publishing of monographs.
Last week I attended the International Conference – Digital publishing and its governance: between knowledge and power, which was held from April 28th-30th in Paris. The conference was organized by Sens Public with support from INHA-Invisu, tge-ADONIS, CNRS and DARIAH. The conference focused on how digitally induced practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences are transforming the knowledge ecosystem and the governance structures underlying this system. As the conference was mainly in French – although an excellent simultaneous translation to English was available – I only made notes during the workshops and lectures which were conducted in English. The conference is accompanied by a wiki and I presume the recordings that were made during the sessions will eventually be published there too.
In the workshop entitled The Governance of Digital Research Infrastructures, the focus was on the way in which the digital offers new opportunities (and challenges) for the governance of information and knowledge commons and more specifically for the basic infrastructures of which these are comprised. As moderator Philippe Aigrain pointed out, the digital, the commons statute and the non-rivality of information now offer the possibility to separate governance from use rights, as for instance with open source software where no one suffers in terms of use rights and very diverse governance models are possible. In the digital system several commons models can create synergy; they can work together or compete to enrich content. The roles of individuals also diversified, as roles are now based on people’s capabilities, on what they have done (do-ocracies). However, this does not mean everything is easy now, as there is still an asymmetry of power between layers, for instance in the constitution of free software: how do you build a governance process that everyone can be happy with if you have such an asymmetry of power? There are still things that remain scarce and fragile, Aigrain points out, for instance the neutrality of the Internet.
Yannick Maignien kicked off the workshop by discussing governance issues concerning a digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities as they came to the front in the DARIAH project. What are the good rules in this respect? There are not only technical constraints: in the construction phase the project also has to discuss rights, power of communities, which business model to integrate all this etc. As Maignien explained, the discussion is not only about how they will govern themselves within this infrastructure but also how this relates to society as a whole and to the users of the infrastructure: what is the ecosystem upon which we build? Are we talking about a real (new) repository or only about technical integration? Maignien points out how in DARIAH they want to create so-called integrated Virtual Competency Centers, which are open for everyone without one having the overall responsibility: each VCC is a distributed center, integration and cross-linking takes place insides the VCC’s. This is important as they are a European project and have to do with the governances of different national infrastructures
At the present there is only a non-European network for users, resources and services. DARIAH’s aim is to connect these infrastructures in order to create a European network of VCC services. It is not about reinventing or destroying these systems, it is still about knowledge communities, about peer review in the digital era, about scientific institutions etc. DARIAH is more about creating a sort of meta-layer. The question remains however: who is governing what (or whom)? According to Maignien, in such a distributed network as DARIAH the governance principles need to focus amongst others on subsidiarity (localized governance), mutualism and interoperability (standardization).
Johanna Niesyto took a critical look at the governance structures underlying the DARIAH project from the viewpoint of Wikipedia-critique. This critical assessment of Wikipedia was discussed thoroughly during the conference Critical Point of View, which was held the month before in Amsterdam and was organized by the Institute of Network Cultures. Niesyto explored what we can learn from Wikipedia (critique). What is the relationship between science, infrasctructure and Wikipedia? Niesyto goes beyond the well-known critique that Wikipedia is ‘anti-academic’ as she looks at the actual medium and the infrastructure by which it is governed. As Niesyto points out, Wikipedia adheres to the NPOV-principle (Neutral Point of View (verifiability, reliable sources). She calls this ‘a forced marriage between Wikipedia and science’. This means governance policies are already built in into Wikipedia, its policies are full of signifiers. Another principle is the NOR-principle (No Original Research). Wikipedia does not want to be about new research but wants to represent it. Furthermore Wikipedia sees itself as a research infrastructure where it actively asks academics to add to Wikipedia to enhance its quality.
So what can we (and DARIAH) learn from this? The (hidden) normativity in the NPOV (instead of for instance a CPOV – Critical Point Of View) points out that in determining what are the good rules for governance we must be aware of the normativity of the work or infrastructure. Where it concerns the goal of DARIAH for instance to create new research questions, this does not adhere to Wikipedia’s NPOV-criteria. In a culture of linking and searching and researching, ‘deep search’ is very important: a critical researcher needs to delve deep, she or he needs to know the algorithm beneath the work/infrastructure: why are things the way they are? We need to understand the infrastructure; it needs to be transparent in order for us to understand the mechanisms behind it. Another good governance rule according to Wikipedia focuses on how research needs to be exchanged in order to create knowledge: we need talk, debate and access to further research. DARIAH’s goal of linking distributed data and exchanging knowledge is in this respect akin to Wikipedia’s aim. However, to create digital democracies, the terms of access need to be clear. Transparency thus remains a must.
Prodromos Tsiavos tried to link the two previous presentations in his talk which focused on the governance of cultural and educational infrastructures. He focused in more detail on how research is conducted and exchanged within a decentralized environment. As he stated, the most important governance takes place somewhere in the middle, there where the organizational procedures, contracts and funding agreements are established. These agreements in specific contexts define the way the governance is actually taking place.
Tsiavos also mentioned how it is hard to identify and contextualize information online. If we would trace flows of value, content and permissions concerning licensing, we can facilitate content flows and see what governance systems are in place. You start with the value(s) underlying your project: what do you want to achieve? Then you adjust the governance to that. But people comment, link, annotate and change content. In terms of governance it is thus very important not to focus on a particular model but on what people actually do, and then you adapt to that. We need to mark the work as it is being amended. We need to make these regulations of governance transparent, so that we are able to intervene and represent governance of things that exist or of things that are in development: even the communities that proclaim to be value/governance free are not: they have cultural/practical governances. This is why we need to look at the middle layer where this governance is being formed by groups. In this way we should try to understand the legal layer of licensing and the way it is constructed, Tsiavos concluded.
Soenke Zehle focused on the term constitution and on the constitutive role of media: what role do media have in constituting new rules of representation? Zoehle tried to sketch out in his talk the tension or conflict that exist between political constitutions on the one hand and cultural constitutions on the other. This debate has taken on a new prominence and is increasingly taking a cultural turn. It focuses also on the practices of constitution and way networks organize themselves: from below for instance. As Zehle stated, we are now going beyond the idea of a free information public sphere in the Habermesian sense, to a form of geopolitical transnationalism. If we look for instance at the digital in analogy with the political, we see the emergence of politics of the gesture, of a new recombinant culture. Zehle asks whether the notion of governance has exhausted itself in this respect. This is a very important discussion where it comes to governance in the Humanities, where the fact that the actors already presume there is an inability of governance is decisive.
The workshop ended with a nice discussion on the difference between more open networks like social networks and p2p and crowd sourcing communities and more closed networks like for instance academia. Different models of authority exist here, and there are different models of governance for closed vs. open networks. The speakers concluded that whether formal or informal, the real game of scientific production is extra-institutional. Activism mostly plays a role at the fringes of scientific research and this is where the real research innovation is taking place. And this perhaps answers the main question: How to enable new research questions within established institutions? It is all about boundary works.
During the second day of the conference Carl Henrik Fredriksson discussed the challenges and opportunities that have shaped Eurozine, a network of European cultural journals, throughout its history. Eurozine, Fedriksson explained, goes back to 1983 when a group of European editors met in Switzerland for the first time to discuss common issues and themes. From then on this became a yearly meeting. The main idea of Eurozine is the need to establish an exchange between the different media in different countries. As the network grew, Fredriksson elaborated, it became harder to organize these meetings. At the same time the Internet came up and the group felt the potential of the network was not being realized. Then the idea was born to create a real and virtual centre for this network. And this centre from then on has been a network. Today Eurozine consists of 80 full-fledged partners with a printed magazine. Their concept of European is very broad, much broader than the European Union itself, where it also includes Turkey and Israel for instance. Eurozine wants to trigger the exchange between different media in different countries by means of translation. By making a translation the potential readership of a text has multiplied. Languages broaden the reach of a text and Eurozine offers a platform for a text to be translated into more and more languages: in this way a text travels in a paper format from a small language community via the digital environment to another other small language community to end up again in a paper format. Thus the possibility of a common European public sphere, the Habermesian concept of offentlichkei /the public sphere, is evoked.
What are the challenges to such a platform? As Fredriksson explains the main concern is and has been funding. The problem is that Eurozine is a transnational idea, not based in a specific national context. This means they have a mixed funding model where they ask both European and national institutions for money. Their experience is that it is extremely difficult to get something funded that does not have a national focus. This shows how many governance structures are still stuck in the 19th century and based on national boundaries. Another challenge is to mediate between partners, countries, traditions, concepts and cultures. This is a major challenge. You want to prevent the creation of a certain kind of ‘Euro-text’, where you write for an international audience and thus strip a text from its local interestingness. This is exactly what Eurozine does not want to do. The challenge is to try to keep some of the diversity but at the same time still cater to an audience that is extremely heterogeneous.
During the conference I also gave a short presentation on Open Access business models for books and the OAPEN project during the workshop on The business models of digital publishing. If you are interested in Open Access and books, you can find my presentation Open Access, Books and Business Models on Prezi
The first publication of the OAPEN project has recently come to light, a collection of essays by Johan Huizinga entitled De hand van Huizinga, collected and with an introduction by Willem Otterspeer; the essays are in Dutch, via Amsterdam University Press, but will also be translated into several other languages via the other OAPEN partners, in French by Presses Universitaires de Lyon and in English by Manchester University Press.
Who would have known that the works of such a, as some characterize him, posh and studious historian, would be at the forefront of these kind of digital experiments? For as I wrote before, one of Huizinga’s other great works, Homo Ludens, was part of an AUP/Athenaeum Bookstore POD series which is doing very well in the Netherlands at the moment (strange thing being that I have been seeing these editions pop up everywhere now – makes you wonder whether a secret small print run hasn’t replaced the ‘handicraft’ disguise of the ‘genuine POD edition’). Next to that Huizinga’s works can also be found on the Project Gutenberg Website, amongst others The Waning of the Middle ages (in Dutch), his most famous work, and Erasmus and the Age of Reformation
Of course Huizinga’s international renownedness, the accessibility of his work, covering a wide range of topics, and the beautiful and playful character of his language will be appealing to both an academic public as well as a more broader public interested in general cultural topics and literature. These considerations must have been influential when it comes to the choice of such an author and scholar for these kinds of new projects; not only to give the projects themselves a little more flair and esteem, but foremost to revive interest in one of Holland’s most gifted scholarly writers.
On a more personal level I am also very proud and glad this selection of essays has been picked to be the first OAPEN publication, as I am originally a (cultural) historian by education and Huizinga has always been my favorite historical thinker – well to be honest it is a tie between him and Walter Benjamin, although the latter can’t technically be called a historian as he is such an inherent cross- and interdisciplinary thinker.
But Huizinga can’t be called an ‘ordinary’ historian either! His orations, books and essays cover a huge array of subjects and his style is –although of course a little outdated- very lively, fresh and passionate. I absolutely love the little review Carel Peeters wrote about the essay collection for the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland. Here is an excerpt (my translation):
“Although he [Huizinga] developed from an esthete who believed art to be far superior to the natural sciences, into a moralistic cultural critic, Otterspeer sees the ‘larger unity’ of his work in the logical ‘metamorphoses’ he went through. Out of the philologist developed the historian, out of the historian came the cultural critic and from there developed the cultural-anthropologist. The connection between everything being the Burckhardtian idea that history is ‘poetry in its highest sense’. For Huizinga it eventually all comes down to literature.”
This excerpt is a direct reference to Otterspeer’s introduction to the essay collection, where Otterspeer furthermore states that ‘according to Huizinga language originated like poetry originated: from a lyrical merging of sensory impressions. Synesthesia was the cradle of language’ (my translation). Otterspeer’s introduction tries to give an insight in the development of both Huizinga’s character and his work and is a must-read if you are interested in Huizinga’s works and thoughts. You can read or download De hand van Huizinga here in Dutch or wait a little longer for the French and English translations.
Another thing I would like to draw your attention to is an excellent speech given by Michael Jensen at the Association of American University Presses’ (AAUP) annual meeting last June. Michael Jensen is the Director of Strategic Web Communications at the National Academies Press, one of the oldest Open Access publishers. As Wikipedia states: ‘The National Academy Press (as it was known in 1993) was the first self-sustaining publisher to make its material available on the Web, for free, in an open access model’. Jensen combined in his plenary presentation the urge for an Open Access business model with the need for environmental changes in publishing. I met Michael Jensen last June as part of the external stakeholder group meeting of the OAPEN project, for which I am doing research, and found him a very passionate Open Access believer though at the same time a very pragmatic person, where he stated, amongst others, that our project should not try to solve all the problems facing Open Access at once but should rather focus on its main goal, on what it set out to achieve in the beginning and work from there. And this shows in my opinion how Jensen is at the same time a man who is not afraid to be both a practical problem solving guy as well as a man who reflects on broad strategic future visions, as set out for instance in his AAUP presentation. The Open Access movement should be proud to have him on its side. I also like the way he says in his presentation that he is not an Open Access zealot but a firm believer in Open Access as the only sustainable publishing model for academic publishing in the years to come:
“I believe that we must shift our business models — publicly, transparently, intentionally, thoughtfully, but radically — to a digital one, with open access as the backbone of scholarly publishing. We must do this to survive a tremendously turbulent next decade, and to ensure that our mission, and its survival, continues to be fulfilled.”
His plea goes out to a model in which print is no longer the main course but rather a side-product of publishing, reducing the environmental strain that comes with the physical dissemination of books and journals:
“Scholarly publishing is a vital part of a larger scholarly communications system, and must be preserved. University Presses also recognize that we have a societal responsibility. We recognize that the lifecycle energy and CO2 costs of printing, shipping, storing, and distributing physical books must be radically curtailed. […]Scholarly publishing’s role in the world must be de-linked from print publication. The print book must become the exception, not the rule, as soon as possible.”
Underneath you will find his speech as given. You can find the full text here. Underneath the You Tube movies you can find some more inspiring lines from Jensen’s speech.
“To retain the qualities of scholarly communication, we’ll radically shift, if you’ll step up to the plate.
Does that mean giving up some control? Yes.
Does that mean collaborating more? Yes.
Does that mean innovating our way out of a failed system? Yes.
Does that mean embracing various forms of open access in exchange for institutional support? Yes.
Does that mean rethinking the economics, and the cost recovery systems, and the sustainability models of scholarly publishing, based on a collapsing physical world? Yes.
Within the context of a world in crisis, we *must* demonstrate that we’re radically rethinking our relationship to the future. We must demonstrate that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We must seize initiative now, and start making changes as fast as we can.
Open access + digital publishing will help get us to a sustainable world, and keep us in the mix.”
Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery. Her latest book Scholarship in the Digital Age, was an indispensable resource for me when writing my Master’s thesis on the Scholarly Communication System and Open Access.
So I was really glad I found this lecture (which I can’t embed, sorry) by Christine Borgman online, in which she discusses most of her main topics: cyberinfrastructure and e-science, Open Access, the data deluge, collaborations and intellectual property and the scholarly communication value chain. The lecture is entitled Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, and was delivered at Columbia University.
I also found, via Open Access News, this podcast with Alma Swan, Key Perspectives main consultant on Open Access, Scholarly Communication and Academic Publishing. In this podcast, conducted by Sara Bartlett from Talis, she discusses amongst others the current state and difficulties concerning e-books or digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the main subject of my current research for the OAPEN project. I especially like the way she recommends in the end that we need to stop the ‘pillarization’ in the Open Access focus, as OA journals, OA books and OA data are mainly targeted as separate issues by separate initiatives, whilst they need to be combined to create a truly interconnected collaborative scholarship.
Alma Swan also maintains a weblog, Optimal Scholarship and has been interviewed before by Richard Poynder. You can find that interview here.
The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.
The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the role of the University Press within the university, took on the role of an observer who is working on media change, but not necessarily within the university press.
Schmidt argues that we need to stress for formalized criteria when it comes to Internet standards concerning academia, being an inaugural act of science where deliberation is a pivotal point. This approach has two problems however. The first problem is concerned with the publish or perish paradigm, which is especially urgent amongst young scholars. Schmidt calls this a structural problem of the university system, where oral presentations, discussions, comments, blog entries etc. do not pay off career wise, where much time is actually invested in them. What does pay off is the writing of an article or a book. The question is however if these are still the preferred formats of communication for (young) scholars.
In this respect the university press could play a role in establishing a relationship with the university to facilitate these kind of more discursive, non ‘academic’ (non peer reviewed) academic discourses. Schmidt argues that we need an epistemological shift out of this intramural space to break the publish or perish spiral. We need a new ecology of scientific publications. This shift to editorial models needs to be accompanied in a good manner however, and in this aspect European university presses could play a big role in new ways of knowledge production and experimentation. They could form experimental labs for the future of academic publishing.
Schmidt mentions 3 aspects of a possible relationship between an university press and an university:
- Quality management and specialization: university presses could focus on the formation of thematic research hubs, replacing the university in the Humboldian sense. Specialization could in this sense both lead to economies of scale and to quality labels, by means of cooperation and combination (Schmidt mentions the OAPEN project in this context). Another interesting initiative connected to this that Schmidt mentions is ADONIS in France, an overall portal of research in the HSS field.
- Training of university staff. According to Schmidt training and mentoring is a much neglected area of media change. How should we train (scientific) content producers? The prosumer paradigm does not make this distinction obsolete he argues. For good stilistic and qualitative high scientific writing the university press is still needed. And this is a role that is especially well suited for university presses and less for publishers. This training is an investment in human resources, preparing them for a variety of editorial roles. Schmidt mentions for instance the website Hypothèses, which hand picks quality scientific blogs. He argues that these kind of initiatives are excellent platforms for learning to write smaller pieces as a natural evolution to learning to write a monograph.
- International credibility and translation. University presses are not only facing a problem of scale but also of international visibility of their titles. This is closely connected to the problem of European multilingualism. Schmidt quotes Umberto Eco: translation is the language of Europe. Scale and cooperation could assist: university presses could get funding for translations as a consortium. Schmidt mentions the journal Eurozine as a good example of this policy. One could also adopt this model to monographs. As Schmidt says, these kind of initiatives correspond very well to the post national constellation, following Rimbaud’s adagio to create a new medium, il faut être absolument moderne.
Gonzalo Cappellàn from the University of Cantabria Press, talked about the situation of the Spanish university presses (consisting of at the moment 60 public university and research centers), their strenghts and weaknesses and the need for quality assesment. The Spanish universities differ very much when it comes to size, specialisation and the way they rule their presses. Initiatives have arisen for Spanish publishers to join together, in 2007 UNE (Spanish university publishers association/ Unión de Editoriales Universitarias) and, more recently, the G9 group of universities.
These cooperations offer the presses greater presence on a national level as a collectivity, a strategic alliance which can present joint measures which are almost impossible to achieve for small publishers. The collaborations also function on an international level: international catalogues, media, newsletters, promotion lobbying on an higher level for their authors etc.
Another benefit has to do with the fact that, as Cappellàn states, Spanish university presses are very much focused on their own institution, which has lead to the feeling that their quality check is not that great. Editorial boards are becoming increasingly important however, as is formalized peer review.
The G9 group consists of public universities in autonomous communities. They develop joint electronic projects. Editorial cooperation takes place on two levels: first step is to create a distinctive label, which is growing further with joint publishing. This is also a quality label, it consists of an editiorial board with representatives of the 9 universities, so no editoiral board consisting of the staff of one university. A scientific board can be set up with expertise in a certain field, functioning as referees to evaluate the scientific quality. In this way the combined group of 9 can be a distinctive pressence in the Spanish publication landscape. On another level the group could focus on interesting publications that are not published by the 9 but that are interesting because of their quality. This is a totally new experience in Spanish publishing. The G9 will start up in April and experiment. It will be open spirited, inter-university and internationally focused, concludes Cappellàn.
Werner Mark Linz from the American University in Cairo Press (AUC) talked about the differences of academic publishing in the Arab world and the cooperation between mediteranean and Arab publishing. The main goal of AUC is the dissemination of ideas and knowledge about the arab world to the english reading public. They mainly publish books in the Humanities in 6-7 areas, mainly arabic literature in translation, but also on archaeology in ancient Egypt, Islamic art and architecture. Linz states that in the Arab market not much is being published and their exists not much of an infrastrucute (bookstores etc.). Linz recalls how AUC needed to develop a booktrade in order to function. In Egypt for instance the printer/publisher/bookseller is still one trade, there is not so much differentiation. The focus is also mainly on religious books (Koran and Koran related books). Next to that one can also see much translations: a lot of energy is spend in translating books into Arabic (instead of the other way around). Arab countries are financing these translations, which thus form a big market for publishers.
Saskia de Vries from Amsterdam University Press (AUP) gave a presentation on the OAPEN project, in which OAPEN functions as an EU presses cooperative publishing network. She sees the public function of the press as a mission, to experiment with new modes of book publication, as for example Open Access.
De Vries, quoting the American Association of University Presses (www.aaupnet.org), states the value of university presses as follows:
- University Presses add value to scholarly work through rigorous editorial development; professional copyediting and design; and worldwide dissemination.
- University Presses, through the peer review process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship and thus maintain high standards for academic publication.
- University Presses sponsor work in specialized and emerging areas of scholarship that do not have the broad levels of readership needed to attract commercial publishers.
- University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.
University presses have always been a service provider for the academic world, mostly in the HSS. In this respect Open Access publications are a very important new way of disseminating research, argues De Vries. It gives academics new possibilities to publish their research. De Vries mentions the Ithaka report. University presses need to look to the dissemination side, they need to make a renewed commitment to publishing. De Vries also refers to Robert Darnton’s pyramid model as set out in his article The new age of the book (from The New York Review of Books). The OAPEN project is a direct result of these two developments. De Vries also mentions the possibility to create an European University Press Association and plans that are being made in this respect.
In the afternoon session on the outreach of scholarly publishing, Stephen Barr from SAGE talked about SAGE’s experiments in Open Access publishing and their collaboration with Hindawi.
When it comes to Open Access Barr states that SAGEs mission is to be ‘the natural home for authors, editors and societies’. The journals landscape is changing however and we have to change with it. As Barr states, in order to maintain the high quality service they provide, SAGE has constantly embraced new technology and business models. And in the journal environment part of this is now Open Access. Barr talks about the different Open Access models and options, mentioning Open Archiving (Green OA, Mandates, Peer project), the hybrid option (SAGE Open) of which the take up so far has been limited and restricted to biomedical disciplines, funder policies such as the Wellcome Trust’s and many more funding agencies which are now allowing a portion of grants to be used for OA financing, and finally, gold Open Acces publishing: author side charges in the form of article processing charges. In this area PLoS and BioMed Central are of course the big players.
SAGE wanted to find a way to experiment with gold OA publishing that would not detract from its other priorities and would complement its existing operations. It decided, says Barr, to get into OA publishing through strategic partnerships, in this case with the Hindawi publishing agency.
Barr mentions some reasons why SAGE partnered with Hinawi: synergy in organisational philosophy, low risk experiment with new business model, minimum organisational risk, access to Hindawi’s technology and low cost base, complementary, the advantage to Hindawi is SAGE’s reputation, marketing abilities and editorial reach and experience. Barr’s conclusion is that SAGE is embracing new business models and that this is necessary in order to keep up with developments.
2009 has been declared Open Access year. Thus reports SURF, the collaborative organization for higher education institutions and research institutes in the Netherlands, aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. The involved parties are the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch higher education sector (together with other research institutions). SURF will act as the coordinator. From the announcement:
“The aim is to boost Open Access to the results of scientific/scholarly and practice-based research. Efforts will be made throughout the year to formulate and implement an Open Access policy, develop and improve the knowledge infrastructure, establish a clear legal framework, and create awareness with all stakeholders.”
SURF also published a short movie on Open Access, featuring amongst others Dr Sijbolt Noorda, (Chairman of the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) who is also chairing the OAPEN Scientific Board.
Great initiative of course and although certainly a movie that is blatantly promotional of Open Access and depicts mainly the stance from the side of the Dutch funding and research and university communities, the movie does also touch shortly on some problems or difficulties when it comes to implementing an Open Access system, especially concerning the relationship between the different actors in the scholarly communication value chain. As Sybolt Noorda states:
“There is one complication: we need to draw up new types of arrangements with publishers about the relation between the person publishing – the author-, the library and the publisher. But that can be done. Contracts can be drawn up differently, so that won’t be the problem.”
Two little criticisms though (sorry, can’t help myself). Wish they could have gotten someone like Jesse Dylan to make the movie (see here)… and what is the problem with the pronunciation of the words Open Access? I’m sorry, but it’s really not that hard…
On the second and final day of APE, Sebastian Mislej of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, talked about videolectures.net, a website streaming online video lectures that can be viewed for free. All the content on videolectures.net is scientifically approved (it has been peer reviewed) so in its entirety it forms a complete scientific repository of free top conferences’ content. The site is hosted and supported by well known academic institutions, where some of the content partners and contributors are for instance MIT Open Course Ware, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Cambridge. The site makes use of semantic web applications and additional functionalities like streaming video with synchronized slides. They also add links to other resources. As Mislej states, the website functions as a learning culture, the links that are necessary to understand the topic will and can be added. In this way videolectures.net can be seen as a kind of scientific YouTube, a portal to high quality scientific video content on the web.
As Mislej explains, 99% off all people giving the lecture are very interested in putting their video online; they really want to put their videos online. Publishers of conference proceedings are also positive, since it is good promotion for their content. In the future videolectures.net will improve the web portal (redesign, improve navigation, automatic knowledge object linking), it will be extracting semantic information (speech indexing, text mining, video mining, automatic ontology construction, user tracking and profiling) and it will focus on solving some important issues regarding intellectual property on content, and problems regarding video formats, mobile platforms and accessibility.
Hans Pfeiffenberger, from the Helmholtz Association, gave a lecture on publishing data, focusing specifically on “Earth System Science Data”, a data publishing journal. As Pfeiffenberger stated, in polar research the incentive is to preserve the data and their meaning for centuries in the future. This data preservation is best done by publishing them. The question is how publishing can help comply with the requirement of quality assurance for research data. As Pfeiffenberger remarks there are of course different kinds of data and this means we will also need different methods to take care of them. According to him review guidelines for data should focus on originality, significance and data quality. The peer reviewers will have to look into the data itself and look at its quality and the connection to the article. Articles can then be seen as interpretations of the data.
Pfeiffenberger states that it is also important to have incentives for researchers to publish data. We need to have rewards for data publication, it needs to be citable and it needs to be part of the impact factor. And, as stated before, it needs to be quality assured data. Preservation and (open) access to data are also critical issues. The aim should be to reuse and reproduce the data. The data will be provided by the scientists but who will provide the infrastructure? And what about licensing and long-term preservation? Pfeiffenberger concludes that these are issues that we will need to consider in the future.
During the afternoon panel on Open Books, three panellists from the publishing world, Eelco Ferwerda from Amsterdam University Press, Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic and Barbara Kalumenos from STM publishers, where asked to discuss two questions.
The first question focused on the Academic book in the digital age: What it is now and in 5 years – what will users expect?
Eelco Ferwerda first said a few introductory words about the OAPEN project and afterwards replied to the first question by stating that users will in the future expect to find, access and search within books online. He stated that it was Google that changed the whole idea of books for us. Because of Google, books have now become an integral part of the Internet and in this way have gained a new future. Now where is the book heading? Ferwerda recalls Robert Darnton’s pyramid model, in which the book is seen as a pyramid consisting of different layers: the book itself and comments, updates, e-learning, primary sources and datasets in other connected layers. Ferwerda gave the example of the Driver II project, focusing on enhanced publications, where research data, extra materials and post-publication data will be added to the primary publication. The moment scholars recognize the value of these types of additions, they will become the norm.
Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic went on to compare the old publishing model with a new future model, The old model is based on printed content, on publishers as gatekeepers who verify and brand the work, and on publishers as bankers. In this model costs can be a barrier to dissemination together with a limited range of formats. In the new model however, she states that there can be multiple versions and formats of content, on different locations and channels. In this new model here will be competition with free versions and it will be uncertain who will pay for the publishing process.
One existing online business model revolves around publishers charging for the premium content and putting free content around the premium content in order to generate the traffic. Pinter asks what would happen if you inverted that model? What if you would offer the free premium content online (with a CC license) and then would charge for the activities around it, like the print edition and a variety of other services and activities.
According to Pinter, this is what academic authors will want because they do not need publishers anymore. Publishers need to find some new models that sustain the user needs whilst still upholding the quality added value system and rewarding structure.
Barbara Kalumenos from STM Publishers, states that STM has focused mostly on journals. The problem, as she sees it, with future forecasts when it comes to digital books has to do with the fact that there is still way too little hard factual material available on digitized books. She also states that the term books is way to general, we need to differentiate between textbooks, monographs etc. and then focus on these categories specific. What Kalumenos especially regrets is the lack of numbers on the amount of books that are already digitized. As she states, we need to do some basic empirical research on what the status quo is at the moment. Only then can we speculate what will happen in five years. And it also depends heavily on the discipline. The users however are in the centre of this development. What does the user want? The user wants its content easy, directly and with very few clicks, as Kalemunos remarks, you loose users after more than three clicks as user interaction research has shown. This kind of research can also show how the users search and interact with the material. Kalemunos doubts that monographs in HSS will only be used in digital environments, which means that web 2.0 tools will be developed for books too, but maybe not for the full catalogue of books. So she concludes that we should look at user behavior and what they expect of electronic books in the digital age.
During the discussion that followed after the first question remarks where made about the book format, the development to more article use and production in HSS and the possibility of the emergence of a middle category in between the article and the book.
Next to that the funding possibilities of monographs were discussed. As Eelco Ferwerda remarked, the book is different in this respect: the economic model of distributing books is becoming impossible. Academic publishers suffer selling proper monographs. An Open Access motive for books might be to come up with a new business model to keep the book alive as a research format. Frances Pinter made the point that with books, whether they are expensive or not, we need to look at, what are the actual costs of reading a book in print and online.
The second question focused on Open Access publishing models for books: How will they work, change scholarly communication and change the market?
Eelco Ferwerda starts by talking about the IMISCOE series. The basic Open Access model for this kind of series, he remarks, is a hybrid model, where on both focuses on online and print. The basic online edition is free and the printed edition is sold, where the author retains the copyright. OAPEN wants to expand this model; they want to develop a common approach or model to fund the Open Access edition, in collaboration with research councils. In their view a network is needed and funders need to see this as a service. Funding model will revolve around a fee for direct costs and revenues from additional services.
As Frances Pinter remarks, the situation for Bloomsbury Academic is rather different. Bloomsbury Academic is a commercial company so needs to cover its costs completely. Printing editions appear simultaneously with the online edition. They are offering traditional publishers service along with free online access and added value services.
As Pinter mentions, this is also a start up: additional added value services to sell around the content still need to be developed on top of that. What about licensing contracts? Authors do no longer need the publishers, so we will no longer have exclusive licenses between author and readers in both ways. The big question is whether people will really pay for the added services. According to Pinter that is a risk for the publisher to take. But who is going to fund the added value services that the publisher provides? Pinter asks what would happen if we would not see publishers as people who take the risk? What if they become more like the service arm for scholarly work? Pinter imagines an independent party that tenders between different publishers for a service contract to put in that added functionality. It would be a more streamlined system in this way according to her.
Barbara Kalumenos however remarks that putting a layer between publishers as Pinter says, might not work well in a system made up of all kinds of different country policies and it will probably only lead to extra bureaucracy. Kalumenos thinks more in the lines of Open Access as part of the research costs. Open Access should be paid as part of this process. Afterwards remarks were made concerning the degrading of the publisher in these kinds of new models from the value adding / risk taker to a service offering party. Important in this respect is the second process of reviewing for the commercial sustainability of a monograph. This also has an added value for it helps to bring out the better publications. What will happen with this when publishers will be service providers: what about the needed commercial filter to see if this book is fit to be published? Finally Eelco Ferwerda remarks that publishers will always be in competition for content, based on their reputation.
One of the most heard objectives against eBooks (let alone against Open Access eBooks) is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, where long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the screen.
Reading attitudes are changing however. In Europe some interesting initiatives are taking place concerning eBooks and their usage. JISC, the UK based Joint Information Systems Committee, recently launched the JISC National eBooks Observatory Survey for which they placed e-textbooks into 120 UK universities. With over 20.000 responses to their survey, this makes it one of the largest eBook surveys ever undertaken. At a presentation about this project at the London Book Fair of this year, David Nicolas, a member of the eBooks Observatory research team, said that eBooks have reached the tipping point. The reading behavior of students is changing as they are much less reading the whole book online as they are viewing the book. This means that the whole book is no longer the unit of consumption in an online environment but rather chapters or even paragraphs.
As the preliminary research results of the eBook Observatory project show, people are reading books on their computers. For it shows that more than 53 per cent of eBook users only read from the screen, regardless of age group! Although, as Nicolas points out, much of the reading has a high ‘dipping in and out’ character, the question remains if this is such a big change from reading a print book. Are we still reading a whole (academic) book from cover to cover?
In order to find out if scholars and students in the Humanities will increasingly read monographs online, a lot more eBook content is needed in this field. This is one of the targets of the OAPEN project. OAPEN is a European project in Open Access publishing for Humanities monographs, led by a consortium of University-based academic publishers from all over Europe. Next to creating a sustainable Open Access model for monograph publishing, the project wants to collect a critical mass of Open Access content. This content will be presented for everyone to use in an online Open Access library. The OAPEN project might not only create critical mass for the advance of Open Access (business models) in the Humanities, but also for research about changing user needs, as the JISC survey has done. And as these two innovative projects show or will show, people are reading books from a screen and probably will do so increasingly. And with this one of the main objectives against Open Access eBooks is being more and more contested.
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