Open access monographs

[Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

Dear friends,

Here's the call for participation in our OHP/PKP grant proposal which is 
now ready to be sent out. Please feel free to publicize it widely - 
we're hoping to create a genuinely international alliance with this effort.

With thanks and best wishes to all,
Sigi
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Call for Participants in an Open Access Faculty-Library Publishing 
Partnership Development Grant
Open Humanities Press/Public Knowledge Project

September 23, 2008

Open Humanities Press and the Public Knowledge Project invite interested 
libraries to join us in developing a grant proposal to form an 
international faculty-library publishing partnership. Ideally this will 
serve as a model for other scholar-led, open access (OA) monograph 
publishing in humanities and social sciences disciplines.

Open access distribution is increasingly recognized as a viable solution 
to today’s crisis in scholarly communications. Libraries have been one 
of the most vocal and effective advocacy groups in promoting OA to 
faculty. In addition to establishing institutional repositories in 
support of the “Green Road” to OA (i.e. author-deposited pre- and 
post-prints of scholarly materials), libraries are also beginning to 
explore possible new roles as academic publishers through OA journal 
hosting and digital book publishing (the “Gold Road” to OA).

Our proposed Open Humanities Alliance aims to build on these 
developments by defining an innovative role for libraries as joint 
providers of an open administrative and production infrastructure for 
international, self-organizing, scholar-led open access publishing 
projects. This project thus envisions a role for libraries not simply as 
custodians of content but as active participants in the global market 
for ideas, partnering with faculty in the publishing process and 
facilitating the actual practices by which scholarly materials in the 
humanities are typically created: scholars in specialized areas of 
interest from different national and international institutions 
collaborating to oversee the editing of peer-reviewed monographic series.

As part of a grassroots effort to effect a cultural shift in faculty 
attitudes in favor of open access, this project is envisaged as a 
demonstration aimed at fostering other scholar-led OA initiatives in the 
humanities and social sciences through 1) the development of 
sustainable, open source software that reduces publishing and 
infrastructure costs, and 2) the leadership provided by OHP’s advisory 
board (which includes some of the most influential names in the field) 
whose members will oversee the selection and editing of a number of 
high-profile monographic series. This initiative is a response, in part, 
to what is currently the restricted market for scholarly monographs, 
which severely limits the number of quality titles university presses 
are able to take on, as well as the sales of those that are published by 
traditional means. There is a decided need for new ways for authors in 
the humanities and social sciences to work on book-length scholarly 
projects, rather than see this important form continue to lose out to 
the growing economic dominance of journal publishing.

We invite libraries to explore with us the roles the library community 
might play as publishing partners in such an enterprise. Among others, 
we are interested in finding innovative ways to cover copy-editing and 
production costs, collaboratively developing production work-flows and 
processes that can be shared across a number of OA publishing 
initiatives, and forming an international alliance of institutions 
supporting the publication of high-quality monographic series in the 
humanities.

We envision the outcome of this project as an extensible and 
transferable model for how libraries and faculty might collaborate to 
spearhead and streamline a shift to open access in disciplines where the 
book-length argument is likely to remain the preferred form of scholarly 
communication.

The public archives of our planning discussion to date can be read at 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/ohp. Please contact Sigi Jöttkandt 
(sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org), Marta Brunner (martab AT library.ucla.edu) 
or John Willinsky (john.willinsky AT stanford.edu) for more information.

---

Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing 
collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. Launched in 
2008, OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in 
scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic 
rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s 
independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are 
peer-reviewed, published under Open Access licenses, and freely and 
immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/

The Public Knowledge Project is a research and development initiative 
directed toward improving the scholarly and public quality of academic 
research through the development of innovative online publishing and 
knowledge-sharing environments. Begun in 1998, PKP has developed Open 
Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems, free software for the 
management, publishing, and indexing of journals and conferences, as 
well as Open Archives Harvester and Lemon8-XML to facilitate the 
indexing, formatting, and archiving of research and scholarship. This 
open source software is being used around the world to increase access 
to knowledge and improve its scholarly management, while considerably 
reducing publishing costs.

Located at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, 
and Stanford University, PKP also sustains an active research program on 
the impact of increased access to knowledge, with the resulting 
publications, dating back to 1998, available from 
http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/1410

Attachment: OHP-PKP-library-call-23-09-08.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document