Open access monographs

[Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

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