Open access monographs

["J H MILLER" <jhmiller AT uci.edu>]

Dear Sigi: What you suggest sounds like a great way to do it. Distributing the work that way would solve the cost problem, mostly. And most scholars are already more or less skilled copyeditors.

Best, Hillis

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org> wrote:

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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