Thanks Paul and David, for getting things off the ground like this.
I'll do another quick round of introductions, since we've added a few
more people to the conversation in the meantime.
Welcome Tom Cohen and Kyoo Lee, from OHP's Editorial Advisory Board,
Larisa Castillo, a friend and associate of Barbara Cohen's who has a
special interest in copyright law,
and Sean Cubitt who, among many other activities, edits the Leonardo
books series at MIT.
Two things jump out at me from Paul's summary,
1. what should OHP's goals be if we were to move into OA monograph
production?
I'm curious to hear what others think - for me, given our resources, I'm
thinking any monographs effort might best aim to be a "demonstration
project" for OA publishing in the humanities, rather than OHP trying to
become a fully fledged publishing "house" with all that would entail. I
personally like the idea of OHP remaining nimble and able to make
different interventions as the scholarly communications environment
mutates.
What this might imply is a number of carefully considered, high-profile
interventions that would ideally support, complement and seed other open
access projects in the humanities as people's resistance to digital
publishing decreases, hopefully in part through OHP's activities. In
fact we originally conceived OHP as an OA advocacy group or movement
(rather than a "press," which was simply the tactic we chose as best
suited for the humanities community).
2. Regarding "sustainability" (or as J-C I think rightly prefers,
"viability"): my hunch is that our best chance for funding is for
specific actions that have wider, long-term implications for scholarly
communications. So our project(s) would contribute to a wider OA
publishing platform that can be used by anyone (e.g. PKP's Open
Monograph Press).
There's a strong need to remain current about other activities so that
we position OHP's efforts in complementary rather than overlapping ways.
Right now, there seems a fair amount of activity in digital publishing
at the individual university level, (e.g. ANU ePress and Sydney UP,
Karlsruhe UP, Rice UP). With the exception of Rice, the missions appear
to be faculty publications and it's not immediately clear to me if they
are being conceived specifically as OA efforts.
The OAPEN project (http://www.oapen.com/) is a group of European
university presses who are working on developing a shared infrastructure
for OA publishing. We're in contact with them, and I imagine there will
be opportunities to share experiences and expertise.
In their 2007 report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, (available
here http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br252-253.shtml )the Ithaka
group seemed to imply that JSTOR might get involved in creating "a
powerful technology, service and marketing platform that would serve as
a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in
university-based publishing" - I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows
whether anything is being concretely planned around this (or other) efforts.
Finally, there's a very interesting report by Diane Harley in the JEP on
a meeting at UC Berkeley where different roles for the academy as a
publisher are explored. See in particular Mark Rose's suggestion of a
distributed publication network among Humanities centers which I've
extracted below:
Mark Rose, Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara and Director Emeritus,
UC Humanities Research Institute
"One interesting development in the humanities is the appearance of
research units such as campus humanities centers. Centers have also
developed from the activities of individual departments—the Center for
Early Modern Studies in the UCSB English Department is an example—and
various multi-campus research groups have developed to bring scholars
together from across campuses.
I think that there is an opportunity to build on these distributed
research centers to create a new publishing model for specialized
monographs based on print-on-demand technology and short-run technology.
Faculty associated with such a research unit could develop a specialized
monograph series with the quality secured by an editorial board and peer
evaluation accomplished in much the same fashion as it is done at a
university press. Publications would bear the joint imprint of the
research center and a university press and both would accrue prestige.
The monographs could be distributed by digital subscription with
printing on demand. Individual scholars could access a copy through
their libraries, download a PDF, or buy print-on-demand version."
Could there be a role for OHP in such a model?
Best,
Sigi
(and apologies for the double posting for some of you - it was the most
efficient way I could think of to convey who is part of the discussion
to the new list members)