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  • From: Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>
  • To: "ohp AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ohp AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [OA-monographs] thoughts on library participation
  • Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:56:25 +0200

Hi everyone,

The list has been quiet over the summer but there have been some interesting developments and discussions off-list among some of us. The most important development is Shana's generous offer to publish a pilot series for OHP through SPO - I've now begun putting out feelers to some of our editorial advisory board members to see if anyone would be interested in running a series for us.

But talking with Shana about SPO's operations has got me thinking about the possible 'business' models we are exploring here, and one idea might be to see if other libraries would entertain the SPO model. For me, what makes SPO so fundamentally innovative is that it offers its services to any faculty member, not just to those from UMichigan, so this has the potential to scale, representing a major break-through.
I'm wondering what people think of the feasibility of forming an entity similar in structure to Open Content Alliance. In our case, we would need donations of labor from partner libraries - part-time (or maybe eventually full-time) Scholarly Publishing positions within the libraries that are supporting OHP. Such jobs would be similar in nature to managing editors who, ideally, would combine administrative work with production (using OHP-developed processes and templates). My hope is that once Open Monograph Press is released, a lot of the grunt office work would be automated, but there will always be a need for some people dedicated to administrative responsibilities. However, if this was shared out, say, one per series, it might not be such a huge burden for any one person or job description. (In some cases, faculty themselves might be willing to assume this role for their series.)

For its part, OHP would offer editorial oversight, providing the participating libraries with high-profile series editors and editorially-vetted content - in fact, one idea is to conceive OHP as an elite but not exclusive community-owned "brand" under which any number of independently-run series could publish once their project has been approved by OHP's main board. Each series would then have its own internal editorial boards, much like OHP's journals do. As for copy-editing - if the OHP libraries were unable or unwilling to provide this, perhaps a central subvention fund provided by those libraries who want to support OHP but do not have the human resources to do so might be established, or there may be subvention options for authors at their own departmental or institutional levels.

In short, the idea would be to achieve economies not through centralization and scale but by distributing the work (and the OHP brand) across a much larger number of institutions and people than is typical, - with PKP's Open Monograph Press software maintaining a central "electronic office" where all the files, templates, correspondence etc. are kept.

What I like about this is that it pushes back the immediately pressing question of how to get money to fund our projects, and how to sell the OA product once its published, while giving participating libraries greater control over how their contribution gets used.

Does it seem practical? Would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Sigi





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