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ohp - Re: [OA-monographs] call for participation

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Subject: Open access monographs

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  • From: Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>
  • To: Birgit Schmidt <bschmid1 AT gwdg.de>
  • Cc: "ohp AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ohp AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [OA-monographs] call for participation
  • Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:07:40 +0200

Dear Birgit,

Thanks for this. I'm very happy to tell you where we are at - (I'm also posting this to the list as a quick round-up for the other new members, Elliott Shore from CLIR and Renze Brandsma from University of Amsterdam library who are very warmly welcomed into our discussion!).

We're conceiving of OHP as a virtual international "press", whose chief contribution to the publishing process is an editorial one. In this first phase, our monographic series will focus on critical and cultural theory and will be edited by high-profile members of OHP's board. This reflects our strategy for getting the still very lethargic humanities academic community to sit up and start paying attention to OA. :)

Our grant proposal is intended to explore the feasibility of partnering each of these OHP-edited series with a library publisher who would ideally contribute labour in the form of a part-time managing and production editor. For the technical side of things, we intend to use PKP's Open Monograph Press software, and are hoping this grant proposal will also enable us to contribute (financially and from a user perspective) to its development. There are still lots of open questions at this point about how these library partnerships might actually work, what kinds of support the participating libraries are able to offer, etc.

But our chief aim in this project is a cultural one: to help effect a change in humanities scholars' negative attitudes towards OA publishing, which is contributing to the slow take-up of OA in our fields. My hope is that by setting up an infrastructure of supporting library publishers, and by demonstrating the leadership of top scholars in one field of humanities scholarship, more scholars will start to embrace OA publishing and set up other, similar self-organizing editorial boards for OA monographs in other fields. In fact, the OHP imprint is conceived as a community academic brand - one that any scholar can edit a series for (once approved by OHP's editorial board).

To answer your question, our contacts so far have mostly been with the library community (UMichigan's Scholarly Publishing Office, and a number of the UC libraries and the Council for Library and Information Resources). We have not connected yet with any of the American UPs, although as you say, several of them already starting to do some very interesting things in this area. (By the way, we don't in any way see OHP in competition with these other projects - our driving aim throughout all OHP activities is to encourage the adoption of OA in humanities.)

I was very interested to learn about the Arbeitsgemeinschaft www.ag-univerlage.de) - can you tell me a little more about the role that libraries play in this? What practical support in the publishing process do they offer?

Best wishes,
Sigi






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