OA publicering på frammarsch inom humaniora-internationella initiativ och trender

Caroline Sutton Publisher

Mötesplats Open Access 200926.-27. november, Uppsala

A bit about Co-Action Publishing

Established as Swedish AB in 2007

Jan. 2008 began publishing first journal in our portfolio

Sept. 2008 Founding Member Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA

April 2009 Launched OpenAccessSolutions.com together with Datapage and T-marketing

Sept. 2009 Elected President of OASPA

Currently staffed by founding partners, soon to add to staff in 2010

www.oaspa.org

Portfolio2008Ethics & Global PoliticsFood & Nutrition ResearchGlobal Health Action2009Journal of Oral MicrobiologyJournal of Aesthetics & Culture2010Journal of Organic AgricultureLibyan Journal of MedicineMedical Education OnlineNano ReviewsVulnerable Groups & Inclusion

Books

Drug Acceptor Interactions

From Seascapes of Extinction to Seascapes of Confidence

...and possibly a few others

A few figuresPer 14 Nov. 2009, DOAJ lists 311 Humanities titles (of a total of 4420 titles)

7% of the DOAJ titles

PKP Study conducted by John Willinsky and colleagues gives 9% (92:980 responding).

What do we know? (or think we know)

Humanities reseachers tend to know much less about OA than STM researchers.

Humanities researchers tend to be more skeptical to OA.

Humanities researchers are more concerned about copyright.

Professional OA publishers have shown little interest in Humanities titles to date.

Why is OA moving so slowly in the Humanities?

Suber, Peter ”Promoting Open Access in the Humanities”http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htmAccessed 12.11.2009

Why SHOULD OA be moving QUICKLY in the Humanities?

1. Journal prices are much higher in science, technology, and medicine than in humanities....affordable journals defuse the urgency of reducing prices or turning to open access as part of the solution.

1. Journal prices are much higher in STM. Publishers and societies have much more to lose than have Humanities journals. With less to lose, Humanities are more free to experiment.

2. Much more STM research is funded than humanities research. There is more money in STM fields to pay for processing fees charged by open access journals.

2. STM funders state that OA fees account for less than 1% of their overall spending. HUM research costs less than STM research, 1% of these funds will be much less than for STM. And even if this figure climbs to 2%, it will still be less.

3. At least in the US, the government funds far more STM research than Humanities research. Hence the taxpayer argument for open access...is stronger in the STM fields.

3. Taxpayers are more skeptical to spending tax money on investigating Greek grammar (than on e.g. cancer research). Taxpayers should want more insight into what ”those humanities people are doing!”(and for humanities researchers, it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate that some of this stuff is pretty darned interesting and useful!)

4. On average, humanities journals have higher rejection rates (70-90%) than STM journals (20-40%). This means the cost of peer review per accepted article is higher in the humanities, lower in STM fields.

4. Humanities editors must process more manuscripts than STM editors. They have a greater incentive to move to an online system to improve efficiency and to experiment with open forms of review, etc. to make the review process easier....and besides, is this not what the Lancet and others in STM also argue?

5. There is more public demand for open access to research on (say) genomics than Greek grammar...Funding agencies perceive STM research as ”more useful”.

5. Based on the Long Tail principle, OA to Humanities research will increase its discoverability and theoretically could lead to greater interest from niche communities that together form useful masses. OA could make Humanities research look ”more useful” to funders.

6. Preprint exchanges meet more needs in the STM fields than in humanities. STM researchers need to know quickly what is happening in their microspecialization...urgency of timely notification of other work is greater in the STM fields than in the humanities.

6. Humanities researchers must be aware of and read not only about their own microspecialization, but also broader concepts covered in large bodies of literature. OA will make it easier and quicker to discover necessary literature. Moreover, the speed of discovery that is possible with OA may well fuel a healthy competition to publish more quickly in the Humanities.

*Reproduced from Wikemedia under the conditions of the GNU General Public License Exquisite‐network.png

7. Demand for journal articles in the humanities drops off more slowly after publication than demand for articles in the STM fields....humanities journals will worry more than STM journals that offering open access to articles after some embargo period, such as six months after publication, will jeopardize their revenue and survival.

7. Peter raises this argument: ”The revenue from selling access to old issues is miniscule, and losing that revenue will not harm a healthy journal...”

8. Humanities journals often want to reprint poems or illustrations that require permission from a copyright holder. It’s much harder to get reprint permission for open access distribution than for a limited circulation, priced and printed journal. And when permission is granted, for either kind of distribution, it usually costs money. This is why open access will come last to art history.

8. hmmmm......you got me there.

8. Journal articles are the primary literature in the STM fields. But in the humanities, journal articles tend to report on the history and interpretation of the primary literature, which is books....The logic of open access applies better to articles, which authors give away, than to books, which have the potential to earn royalties.

P.S. At least in the Nordic region humanities research are able to attain fairly good sums of money to publish their books. Why couldn’t a small portion of that be transitioned to pay for article fees?

8. Rather than regarding articles as a replacement for books, humanities researchers should regard articles as an opportunity to market themselves, making themselves more discoverable to books publishers. Publishing ’teasers’ of their work OA means wide dissemination to a greater number of potential publishers.

So what’s trendy and what’s not?Books = quite trendy (trendsetting?)

OAPENOpen Humanities PressMany university presses

Publishing Support and Platforms = getting quite trendy

Mandates = growing trendierFrance’s Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR)Swiss Academy of Humanities & Social SciencesUK AHRCSome piggy-backing on general mandates, e.g. Swedish Res Council

So what’s trendy and what’s not?Repositories = growing trendier

Nordbib- HprintsJSTOR

Self-archiving = about as trendy as anywhere else

Experimentation = hopefully getting more trendyAnthropology, e.g. UK ITC project within AHRC

Open Data = not very trendy, but exists

Professional publisher interest in OA Humanities Journals = not trendy

So maybe things are going more quickly

”...if we step back and compare the current situation with the situation a decade ago, we may instead find the changes in the arts and humanities research landscape astonishing. At the very least, we perceive a bridgehead: new concepts and resources have become firmly established; it is possible that developments will accelerate from this point.”

- Malcom Heath, Michael Jubb & David Robey (2008) E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK. In Ariadne, Issue 54, January 2008.

What will help speed up OA in Humanities?

More experimentation (such as the examples on the previous slide)

The creation of central funds at institutional level

OA mandating also in the Humanities

Dialogue between members of the humanities community to share experiences and set best practices

THANK YOU!

Caroline.Sutton@co-action.net