1 00:00:01,530 --> 00:00:03,630 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Hello and thank you for having me here today. 2 00:00:04,290 --> 00:00:10,500 My name is Martin Paul Eve and I'm the technical lead for Knowledge Commons, in MESH research at Michigan State University. 3 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:15,090 And I'm also professor of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. 4 00:00:16,640 --> 00:00:21,680 I'm going to talk this morning about collective funding models for open access books. 5 00:00:22,250 --> 00:00:25,969 So while other speakers, I think, in this area of book publishing, 6 00:00:25,970 --> 00:00:31,100 might talk about radical new forms of publishing that are enabled by digital openness, 7 00:00:31,520 --> 00:00:40,940 or they might talk about ways in which we can conduct novel methods of research using digital artefacts, for instance, text and data mining. 8 00:00:41,360 --> 00:00:50,479 What I want to talk about today, very simply, is how do we get the economics to work so that book length forms can be professionally edited, 9 00:00:50,480 --> 00:00:56,000 professionally acquired, professionally published, but nonetheless be open access. 10 00:00:56,610 --> 00:01:01,700 Because it's my continuing belief that the economics are the greatest driver 11 00:01:01,700 --> 00:01:05,900 of the problems that we've faced in getting open access books to work so far. 12 00:01:10,560 --> 00:01:16,590 I think it's worth backing up a little bit and beginning with the question of why we want to do open access books. 13 00:01:16,920 --> 00:01:20,840 For many people, the system looks as though it's absolutely fine as it is. 14 00:01:20,850 --> 00:01:23,730 Why are we trying to break something that works well already? 15 00:01:24,610 --> 00:01:32,140 But the fact is that many or most in fact scholarly monographs on a single research topic are completely unaffordable for individuals. 16 00:01:33,010 --> 00:01:36,280 Libraries can afford them, but not everybody can get to a library. 17 00:01:36,310 --> 00:01:41,680 Not everybody has a deposit library on their doorstep, like the British Library or the Bodleian, for example. 18 00:01:42,310 --> 00:01:46,270 It's also true that many disabled people struggle to get access to libraries, 19 00:01:46,270 --> 00:01:50,830 and digital access from the comfort of their homes would actually be something that they could do. 20 00:01:52,680 --> 00:01:57,680 I also think that the humanities disciplines where these are common formats, you know, 21 00:01:57,690 --> 00:02:02,940 is it fair to call humanities discipline one thing, need visibility at this time? 22 00:02:03,330 --> 00:02:08,399 We know that the economic environment of higher education is extremely harsh at the moment, 23 00:02:08,400 --> 00:02:12,360 and we continue to make the case that the humanities have this role to play in society. 24 00:02:13,050 --> 00:02:19,260 At the same time, it's extremely hard for people to get hold of humanities research in book length formats. 25 00:02:19,590 --> 00:02:24,570 Your average person on the street who's interested in casually knowing about something is not going to read a 26 00:02:24,900 --> 00:02:28,440 £90 volume of history, for example. 27 00:02:28,890 --> 00:02:35,160 So it seems very important that we show up both sides, show what we do, show the research and the humanities. 28 00:02:35,550 --> 00:02:38,070 And open access books are one part of that. 29 00:02:39,910 --> 00:02:46,120 I also think that sharing knowledge to all should be in line with the epistemology of disciplines that study human culture. 30 00:02:46,780 --> 00:02:50,349 It seems very strange to me that we study something that is completely universal. 31 00:02:50,350 --> 00:02:56,890 You know, the human cultures over time - every society that has ever existed has had some form of culture. 32 00:02:57,280 --> 00:03:00,820 And the humanities disciplines are those disciplines that study those cultures. 33 00:03:01,060 --> 00:03:06,010 So why do we make this something that is very hard to get hold of, that people have to pay for? 34 00:03:06,500 --> 00:03:11,170 Would it not be better that anybody can have access to the study of human culture? 35 00:03:12,860 --> 00:03:15,319 And finally, although I thought I wasn't going to dwell on this, 36 00:03:15,320 --> 00:03:21,560 there are a range of scholarly activities that are facilitated by open access books and particularly Creative Commons licenses. 37 00:03:22,070 --> 00:03:27,520 For example, translations. I've had several people write to me asking if they can do a translation of my open access book. 38 00:03:27,530 --> 00:03:30,530 And the answer, of course, is yes. The license allows you to do that. 39 00:03:31,120 --> 00:03:36,320 Do we fear there might be bad translations or problematic aspects therein? 40 00:03:36,680 --> 00:03:38,770 It's possible, but that can happen anyway. 41 00:03:38,780 --> 00:03:45,290 I've never been able to actually vet the languages that I've been translated into because, for example, I don't speak Korean. 42 00:03:45,680 --> 00:03:49,880 So I'm always going on faith in the first place that the translation is good. 43 00:03:53,630 --> 00:03:56,959 However, there's a lot of naysaying about open access books. 44 00:03:56,960 --> 00:04:00,850 A lot of people saying, we can't do this. And why is that the case? 45 00:04:00,860 --> 00:04:04,520 Given the reasons that I've just outlined, that might seem perfectly reasonable. 46 00:04:05,420 --> 00:04:09,200 Well, the first is costs and particularly pricing charges. 47 00:04:09,830 --> 00:04:16,130 But pricing charges are the primary system through which most academics have encountered open access for books, 48 00:04:16,400 --> 00:04:19,790 and they've been asked to pay upwards of £10,000 per book. 49 00:04:20,030 --> 00:04:26,329 You know, let's cover the publishing costs. Now, that's not an unreasonable amount of money for the work that goes into a book. 50 00:04:26,330 --> 00:04:31,340 When you think of the editing, the peer review, the copywriting, the typesetting, the proofreading, 51 00:04:31,340 --> 00:04:37,200 the digital preservation, the platform availability, the printing costs and so on. 52 00:04:37,220 --> 00:04:42,560 You know, there are costs in making books, and they are much higher than we see in the journal world. 53 00:04:43,710 --> 00:04:48,600 However, it's not the only way of funding open access book because I'll go on to talk about shortly, 54 00:04:49,260 --> 00:04:55,200 but it is a problem for people who think that is the only way we can do it, and that's what they've been confronted with. 55 00:04:55,320 --> 00:04:59,040 They've gone to their Dean and said, can I have £10,000 to publish an open access book? 56 00:04:59,370 --> 00:05:03,490 And the answer is obviously, of course, no. 57 00:05:03,590 --> 00:05:09,830 There are third party re-use issues, Creative Commons objections, for example, that are valid sometimes. 58 00:05:10,490 --> 00:05:14,120 So one of the most problematic spaces is art history, 59 00:05:14,120 --> 00:05:20,659 where it is obvious that it is vital that the copies of the works in question be included within the books that we're talking about. 60 00:05:20,660 --> 00:05:26,479 So if you're doing a critical analysis of a painting, that painting has to be used because it's the evidence, 61 00:05:26,480 --> 00:05:35,690 it's a quotation, if you like, for that disciplinary space. It becomes very problematic to reuse that material under a Creative Commons license. 62 00:05:36,350 --> 00:05:42,320 Now, of course, we could just say, well, the open access book will have to omit that image and people will have to look it up somewhere else. 63 00:05:42,830 --> 00:05:44,629 That could work in some cases. 64 00:05:44,630 --> 00:05:52,040 In other cases, it will really diminish the book and reduce its appeal and ability to make a scholarly argument. 65 00:05:52,460 --> 00:06:00,470 So there are there's some edge cases here where we have to be cautious and where open licensing creates some, some challenges for us. 66 00:06:01,070 --> 00:06:06,290 Also, it's the case that many museums, many of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums that, 67 00:06:06,770 --> 00:06:11,090 have the licensing rights to these third party images that we want to reuse, 68 00:06:11,630 --> 00:06:19,880 often don't understand the concept of open access, which is very surprising to me in this day and age, but they still depend on a print run. 69 00:06:20,150 --> 00:06:22,430 It's very difficult to get them to contribute 70 00:06:22,550 --> 00:06:29,660 work to your your book without telling them what the print run will be, how many copies that will be available. 71 00:06:29,660 --> 00:06:34,129 And so and when you say, I want to make this openly available for everyone forever, 72 00:06:34,130 --> 00:06:37,490 by the way, I also want them to be able to reuse it and recirculate it, 73 00:06:37,940 --> 00:06:44,030 they are not very happy in the slightest and have no idea how to do a licensing agreement for that work. 74 00:06:46,500 --> 00:06:51,200 There's a fear of the loss of print or a fear of going digital only. 75 00:06:51,990 --> 00:06:59,910 This fear is misplaced. Every open access book that I've published, I've published, uh, ten of them now, uh, has had a print copy with it as well. 76 00:07:00,330 --> 00:07:07,260 Print does not vanish just because we do things digitally, but people fear that it might and that there might be a two tier system emerging 77 00:07:07,470 --> 00:07:11,010 where some books are just made available digitally because it's cheaper. 78 00:07:11,010 --> 00:07:18,540 They think the "real" ones will be put out in print, and they want to make sure they are in the "real" camp because so much prestige, 79 00:07:18,540 --> 00:07:27,480 so much of the hiring process rests upon the ability to look as though you are in a top tier bracket for evaluation. 80 00:07:29,490 --> 00:07:32,010 There are also ongoing misconceptions about peer review, 81 00:07:32,010 --> 00:07:39,030 i.e. the open access books are less well peer reviewed than their print, traditional sales counterparts. 82 00:07:39,830 --> 00:07:45,719 Again, that's not the case. I published open access books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 83 00:07:45,720 --> 00:07:50,280 Stanford University Press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books. 84 00:07:50,280 --> 00:07:54,900 And I can assure you they were all peer reviewed and they all have been peer reviewed to the same high standard. 85 00:07:55,080 --> 00:07:57,330 Sometimes with up to 3 or 4 reviewers. 86 00:07:57,720 --> 00:08:05,670 So there are these misconceptions about peer review, but they nonetheless form a barrier to researchers wanting to take it on. 87 00:08:06,880 --> 00:08:10,130 And last but not least, we have this category of trade crossover titles. 88 00:08:10,150 --> 00:08:14,770 We have types of book that are expected to be found in Waterstones for sale. 89 00:08:15,190 --> 00:08:17,229 And 90 00:08:17,230 --> 00:08:24,220 the publishers of those books feel they would be a substantial economic loss to them if they made a copy available openly online. 91 00:08:25,210 --> 00:08:28,600 That's never really actually been tested 92 00:08:28,780 --> 00:08:33,700 to see whether that causes an economic loss to publishers and whether they could actually still sell, 93 00:08:34,120 --> 00:08:38,290 uh, a trade book that has got an open copy online. But the fear is there. 94 00:08:38,560 --> 00:08:44,560 And when people want to reach the widest audience, they want to go through Penguin, for example, they want to be in Waterstones. 95 00:08:44,560 --> 00:08:50,530 So they're found by the general public, who may not know how to find open access books in the current discovery climate. 96 00:08:57,180 --> 00:09:01,170 Now. I think the biggest barrier is the first one that I mentioned. 97 00:09:01,320 --> 00:09:09,960 Book processing charges for open access books. Why don't book pricing charges work for OA books? 98 00:09:11,640 --> 00:09:16,770 So imagine 100 people in a room. Also, I note that I've got "BCP" in my title there. 99 00:09:16,770 --> 00:09:20,370 I apologise for that typo in the slides - it should be BPC: book processing charge. 100 00:09:20,970 --> 00:09:29,820 If you imagine there are 100 people in a room and what you want to do is to fund a book that you've got at the front. 101 00:09:30,600 --> 00:09:40,919 Now, one way you could do that is to ask all 100 people to pay you, uh, £10 each to cover the cost you need to produce this book. 102 00:09:40,920 --> 00:09:44,940 Now it's quite a cheap book, actually, but nonetheless, it works for this example. 103 00:09:46,770 --> 00:09:50,710 That's what the traditional sales model looks like on an economics basis. 104 00:09:50,730 --> 00:09:58,710 It distributes the costs among many, many people, so they all pay a reasonable level and the object gets funded so it can be made openly available. 105 00:10:00,570 --> 00:10:05,640 Imagine a BPC as going up to someone on the front row and saying, 106 00:10:06,030 --> 00:10:12,000 "you have got to pay the entire cost yourself, and then I will make it openly available to everybody else". 107 00:10:12,630 --> 00:10:16,530 Suddenly those costs are concentrated on a single point in the system, 108 00:10:16,800 --> 00:10:21,360 and it's not clear that everybody in the room has the funding available to do that. 109 00:10:21,540 --> 00:10:25,640 Certainly some people do. Others don't. Imagine these are actually universities. 110 00:10:25,650 --> 00:10:27,920 That's the metaphor that I'm using here. 111 00:10:27,930 --> 00:10:35,850 People = universities. So poor universities are not able to fund that concentration of costs, whereas, 112 00:10:36,180 --> 00:10:44,070 wealthier institutions might be able to do it, but the money is not distributed evenly across the whole sector. 113 00:10:45,540 --> 00:10:52,140 The funding situation in book heavy disciplines. The humanities is also much worse than in the sciences, and it's different. 114 00:10:52,710 --> 00:10:55,890 We've got this situation where 115 00:10:58,010 --> 00:11:05,240 we have a set of very poorly funded disciplines being asked to bear heavier publication costs than their scientific counterparts, 116 00:11:05,450 --> 00:11:11,240 and the scientific disciplines also operate mostly on the basis of grant funded projects for research. 117 00:11:11,570 --> 00:11:17,200 So it's easier to bundle something like an article processing charge for a journal into a grant 118 00:11:17,210 --> 00:11:22,730 when you go to the Wellcome Trust, although they just recently changed their rules on what's allowed. 119 00:11:22,730 --> 00:11:27,500 But that doesn't really happen so much in the humanities. 120 00:11:27,500 --> 00:11:31,490 Only a small portion is directly grant funded through bodies like UKRI 121 00:11:31,910 --> 00:11:37,550 where you could get some kind of book processing charge, whereas most people are funded by QR. 122 00:11:37,760 --> 00:11:42,590 And institutions cannot necessarily slice enough off the QR funding to 123 00:11:43,660 --> 00:11:52,500 give the funding for an open access book. There's also, as I said, this third party content reuse is different in different disciplines. 124 00:11:52,500 --> 00:11:57,389 And there are already some extremely high reuse costs in some disciplines. 125 00:11:57,390 --> 00:11:59,730 Let's go back to art history again for an example. 126 00:12:00,120 --> 00:12:05,970 It turns out that they have to pay enormous amounts already just to get their books in traditional format published. 127 00:12:06,210 --> 00:12:09,330 Let alone having an open access book pricing charge on top of that. 128 00:12:10,050 --> 00:12:12,150 And last but not least, trade markets, as I said, 129 00:12:12,150 --> 00:12:20,700 have no way of understanding how an open access book will economically interact with their conventional sales profile. 130 00:12:24,300 --> 00:12:31,650 So what else could we do? Okay, collective funding mechanisms is the thing that I want to talk about in the last part of this talk, 131 00:12:31,950 --> 00:12:36,600 but I'm just going to go through a set of other ways that we could do open access books that get funded. 132 00:12:37,510 --> 00:12:40,900 So first of all, we could look to the state funding councils in the UK. 133 00:12:40,930 --> 00:12:50,410 So we did a study on this a few years ago, and we found that in the UK we'd need about £100 million over the course of a REF cycle. 134 00:12:50,980 --> 00:12:57,910 That might be higher now due to inflation. But basically it's not a huge amount of money from the Research Councils. 135 00:12:57,910 --> 00:13:01,150 Just a fraction of what is offered for QR funding. 136 00:13:02,170 --> 00:13:05,880 But the problem is it's not hypothecated at the moment. 137 00:13:05,890 --> 00:13:11,230 It's given to vice chancellors who do not want to hand it over for open access books. 138 00:13:12,930 --> 00:13:18,690 We can look to private philanthropy for help with this, but generally speaking, that's going to be per title funding. 139 00:13:19,050 --> 00:13:22,850 There isn't going to be enough to go around. It's going to be very hard to get hold of. 140 00:13:22,860 --> 00:13:26,160 I don't think that's a viable way for us to do this in the long term. 141 00:13:26,370 --> 00:13:32,940 Although a few books will be funded by that route. We can always look at print sale subsidy. 142 00:13:33,520 --> 00:13:39,800 There have been many attempts to study the effects of open access on print sales over the past 143 00:13:39,990 --> 00:13:47,910 decade or so basically saying if you have an open access book, can you still sell enough print copies to cover your costs 144 00:13:48,300 --> 00:13:53,460 to make the open access edition viable and to get to the break even point? 145 00:13:54,640 --> 00:13:58,190 The simple answer is: we don't know. Some studies have shown that yes, 146 00:13:58,190 --> 00:14:05,110 actually you can you can sell enough copies and actually sell more copies of open access books because more people find them in print. 147 00:14:05,120 --> 00:14:08,509 But most people want to read in print. 148 00:14:08,510 --> 00:14:11,720 Other studies have shown no effect or some have shown 149 00:14:12,110 --> 00:14:16,370 that actually this gets worse when you have an open access copy. 150 00:14:18,110 --> 00:14:21,920 We can think about institutional subsidies. Now, there's multiple ways that can work. 151 00:14:21,950 --> 00:14:26,010 One of those could be institutions paying for processing charges. 152 00:14:26,030 --> 00:14:30,290 As I hinted earlier, though, not every institution can afford to do that. 153 00:14:31,250 --> 00:14:36,530 Another form of institutional subsidy is the press option, like UCL press at UCL, 154 00:14:36,530 --> 00:14:43,310 where actually it's free for anybody at UCL to publish their book, open access, with their own press, but they charge other people. 155 00:14:43,730 --> 00:14:47,140 Now I think that introduces an asymmetry that is quite dangerous. 156 00:14:47,150 --> 00:14:51,260 I think the economics of scholarly publishing need to be universal. 157 00:14:51,260 --> 00:14:55,430 The same for everybody who comes to a particular press or otherwise 158 00:14:55,430 --> 00:15:02,660 you're creating a situation that seems deeply unfair and is basically based on whether or not you can pay. 159 00:15:03,170 --> 00:15:09,080 We don't want to foster that perception of open access: that it is a pay to play game 160 00:15:09,380 --> 00:15:15,470 and anybody who can pay can play without any quality control, even if there is quality control in those presses. 161 00:15:15,470 --> 00:15:19,580 I'm just saying that it looks bad if you don't fully understand the situation. 162 00:15:21,080 --> 00:15:24,170 And last but not least, we could have green open access for books. 163 00:15:24,510 --> 00:15:29,750 There isn't much green OA for books at the moment. I think I'll say a bit more about that in a in a few minutes. 164 00:15:30,170 --> 00:15:34,430 It's quite curious that that option hasn't emerged, but there are reasons for it. 165 00:15:36,380 --> 00:15:43,100 So why is there so little green OA for books is the first thing I want to address. Authors want their final version of that 166 00:15:43,100 --> 00:15:47,000 manuscript to be available in the same version that people would get in the print. 167 00:15:47,450 --> 00:15:54,169 They want there to be a kind of fungibility between the print version and the digital open access version. 168 00:15:54,170 --> 00:15:56,480 These things should be interchangeable with one another. 169 00:15:57,050 --> 00:16:01,550 That's because that process it goes through adds substantial value to the final manuscript. 170 00:16:02,950 --> 00:16:11,920 But again, this is about unknown economic consequences for publishers with initial higher costs and therefore financial risk. 171 00:16:12,460 --> 00:16:16,780 They don't want to have the pre version of the manuscript outfit necessarily. 172 00:16:17,260 --> 00:16:22,600 That could serve as a substitute for the thing they're selling for somebody who might have otherwise bought a copy. 173 00:16:22,630 --> 00:16:27,610 They need all their sales. There's also the market dynamics of individual sales unit. 174 00:16:27,640 --> 00:16:35,320 So it's not like in the journal world where if 1 or 2 papers from a journalist you available open access, 175 00:16:35,650 --> 00:16:43,210 it doesn't substitute for the whole journal issue, whereas a book obviously substitutes for the entire book. 176 00:16:44,400 --> 00:16:46,640 There's those complex rights management questions. 177 00:16:46,660 --> 00:16:52,230 Again, what does it mean to put someone's third party image over using into an institutional repository? 178 00:16:53,180 --> 00:17:00,649 And there are royalties sometimes. This is not always the case, but some historians, for example, 179 00:17:00,650 --> 00:17:07,370 make a huge amount of money out of selling that their books, and they fear that open access will negate that revenue stream. 180 00:17:07,730 --> 00:17:13,550 Now, whether or not that revenue stream should be there in the first place when you already have a university salary is a different question. 181 00:17:13,910 --> 00:17:18,290 When you're paid to do research as part of your job. But that is nonetheless a problem 182 00:17:18,860 --> 00:17:28,629 and therefore publisher policies are not in place. So collective funding mechanisms for OA books. 183 00:17:28,630 --> 00:17:34,300 This really started with an organisation called Knowledge Unlatched, which was founded by Frances Pinter out of her own money. 184 00:17:34,330 --> 00:17:41,110 She ran that herself for many years, and the idea of Knowledge Unlatched is relatively simple. 185 00:17:41,620 --> 00:17:48,130 It's one where many libraries come together and put money into a central pot. 186 00:17:48,760 --> 00:17:56,020 That pot is distributed to publishers, and used to publish books, open access, that then come back to the original libraries. 187 00:17:56,950 --> 00:18:00,519 The key argument against Knowledge Unlatched and its mechanism was 188 00:18:00,520 --> 00:18:04,630 "Yes, but anybody who doesn't participate also gets access to the open access books". 189 00:18:05,290 --> 00:18:10,449 But the logic here is that actually, if you pool funding in that way, 190 00:18:10,450 --> 00:18:18,999 it doesn't matter that there's nothing individually for institutions on a one off basis because everybody gets the result of it. 191 00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:24,880 And those books were made open, and available for those libraries who paid in as well. 192 00:18:25,450 --> 00:18:31,090 So libraries want open access. So the logic goes, libraries need to pay for open access. 193 00:18:31,600 --> 00:18:34,810 And they need to ignore the free rider problem. 194 00:18:35,230 --> 00:18:40,629 Knowledge Unlatched is now also owned by Wiley, which may be problematic depending on your politics, 195 00:18:40,630 --> 00:18:44,110 But it's now in the hands of a very big publisher indeed. 196 00:18:46,450 --> 00:18:51,670 We developed a slightly different model, when I worked at COPIM, called Opening the Future. 197 00:18:52,700 --> 00:18:57,500 The idea here was that libraries subscribe to a backlist which is not open access, 198 00:18:57,860 --> 00:19:04,640 and the revenue is used to fund new front list titles which are open access without using book processing charges. 199 00:19:05,990 --> 00:19:10,070 So what this does is it balances the need for a unique local benefit. 200 00:19:10,130 --> 00:19:17,810 You get a subscription to these books that are subscription only, for sale, not open access. 201 00:19:18,500 --> 00:19:22,280 And we use the money from that to fund new front list titles. 202 00:19:22,820 --> 00:19:27,230 And that works because basically the backlist is already exhausted economically. 203 00:19:27,410 --> 00:19:32,300 There isn't a huge market in backlist books selling and funding publishers. 204 00:19:32,600 --> 00:19:35,180 So these books are sitting around. They get the occasional sale. 205 00:19:35,330 --> 00:19:42,560 Well, why don't we have a commitment from publishers, we thought to put that into open access books. 206 00:19:43,250 --> 00:19:49,970 This scheme is still running. Several presses are involved at the moment, and you can email t.grady@bbk.ac.uk. 207 00:19:50,300 --> 00:19:59,070 if you want to learn more about that collective funding model. And finally, we need a social acceptance of open access. 208 00:19:59,100 --> 00:20:04,860 A lot of things I've talked about today have been economic, but there are also social issues that we still need to overcome. 209 00:20:05,360 --> 00:20:13,530 and that's what my work on the Knowledge Commons research at Michigan State does, is it wraps a social layer of presentation and, 210 00:20:13,860 --> 00:20:21,180 profile building around your publications and access to those publications. 211 00:20:21,600 --> 00:20:26,639 Showing that open access knowledge can actually be part of an academic profile and 212 00:20:26,640 --> 00:20:32,340 can be part of the discourse that makes things work in the humanities disciplines. 213 00:20:34,660 --> 00:20:38,649 So thank you very much. That's where I'm going to stop today. I hope that's of interest. 214 00:20:38,650 --> 00:20:42,280 And any questions would be welcome. Thank you very much.