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?