Open access monographs

[Sigi Jöttkandt <sigij AT openhumanitiespress.org>]

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