Re: Publication, Access Provision, and Fair Use

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Sandy, I do not claim to have any special expertise on the 
question of scholarly monographs or their future in the online 
age. My hunch that many will eventually go the way of Gold OA 
publishing is just a hunch, and deserves no more weight than any 
other hunch.

Where I think I have some genuine understanding and expertise is 
on the future of scholarly journal articles, and in that case 
there is no doubt whatsoever that Green OA self-archiving is 
optimal and inevitable. (I don't especially care about Gold OA, 
though I think it is likely too, eventually.)

It is in this vein that I will reply to your comments below:

On Sat, 9 Jun 2007 sgt3@psu.edu wrote:

> Stevan: Just to clarify, I am NOT "director" of the AAUP (which 
> stands for Association of American University Presses, not 
> American Association...); that would be Peter Givler. I am 
> incoming AAUP President, that's all.

My apologies, Sandy; I have corrected this in the Hypermail AmSci 
Archive. 
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

> I appreciate the further clarification about the function of 
> your scheme for journal Green OA, Stevan, which is indeed 
> clever.

Not, I hope, clever, but natural, and soon adopted!

> With regard to books, however, I find this a stunning 
> overgeneralization, at least as far as academic books are 
> concerned: "At the present time, most book authors are not 
> motivated only or mostly by the desire to maximise impact, and 
> hence they are not giveaway authors, whereas all journal 
> article authors are."

As I said, I am not an expert on monographs, monograph authors, 
or their motivations. But the point I was making is exactly the 
same if you substitute "many" or even "some" for "only" and 
"most" above: The point is that in the case of journal article 
authors, the quantifier is *all*: the population is completely 
exception-free, all give-away authors, and hence the case for OA 
is an open and shut one, whereas with monograph authors the 
population is not all just give-way authors, seeking impact only, 
and hence the case for OA is not open and shut there (yet). First 
things -- and clearcut, exception-free things -- first.

> Where you qualify the claim by restricting it to trade books, I 
> agree. (But even there exceptions exist like Lessig and 
> Benkler, who clearly are happy to trade some possible lost 
> print sales for much wider impact possibilities.) Trade books, 
> however, constitute a very small proportion of the book 
> literature that contributes seriously to academic advancement; 
> if I were to hazard a guess, I would put the figure at less 
> than 10% in terms of numbers of titles. By far academic authors 
> of books are more motivated by concerns about impact than 
> income, partly because the income directly from sales of 
> academic books is so small, but also because the indirect 
> effect on income from wider impact, through career advancement 
> and promotion, vastly exceeds any royalty income for the vast 
> majority of such authors. For more on this, see John Thompson, 
> Books in the Digital Age (Polity Press, 2005).

I don't doubt any of that. But until and unless *all* authors 
seek *only* impact and not income, the case of books is simply 
not a straightforward one for OA, as the case of (refereed 
research) journal articles is.

> I therefore do take very seriously the possible threat that 
> ideas of fair use might post to undercutting monograph 
> publishing.

Can I remind you again, Sandy, that the Fair Use Button is only 
designed for the 38% of journal articles whose publishers still 
seek to block or embargo the immediate provision of OA? It is not 
designed for monograph authors. Monograph authors do not have a 
half century of tradition of sending free reprints to all those 
who ask for them, whereas journal article authors do. Hence it is 
only journal article authors -- the 38% of them that publish in 
journals that are not yet Green -- that are inclined to make use 
of the Fair Use Button. (The other 62% of journal article authors 
can immediately make their postprints OA without need of the 
Button.)

I can't say that if the Fair Use Button should give some 
monograph authors some ideas I would find that an altogether a 
bad thing! But that is not the intention, and I doubt that that 
will be a significant outcome of the creation and promotion of 
the Button. Institutional and Funder deposit mandates do not 
apply to monographs. And the reason the mandates are needed at 
all is because only about 15% of (article) authors are depositing 
spontaneously. (And those are the "exception-free, 
impact-seeking, give-away" authors, remember!) So I would not 
think unmandated monograph authors represent much of a risk of 
either spontaneous self-archiving or emailing free e-books to 
e-requesters at this time. (But I am inexpert in that, and who 
knows?)

> You seem to suggest that it will dry up in print anyway. 
> Perhaps so, but then we need to find a way of publishing this 
> literature electronically that makes economic sense.

Makes economic sense for whom? Because if the objective is to 
generate scholarly monographs that are online-only, then all 
that's at issue is covering the essential costs. I don't know 
what those are, but I am mightily doubtful that they are as high 
as your estimate, below:

> You suggest a Gold OA approach. That's easy to say, but much 
> harder to implement for monograph than for journal publishing 
> because the size of potential fees up front are substantially 
> greater, on the order of $20,000 at a minimum.

For an online-only monograph that the author deposits in his IR? 
Does the reviewing and editing really cost that much? 
(Text-generation and mark-up can be offloaded onto the authors, 
and distribution and preservation can be offloaded onto the IRs, 
just as with Gold journal articles.)

> One reason I encouraged the AAUP to issue its statement on open 
> access was precisely to point out the greater difficulties that 
> might face Gold OA proponents of book than of journal 
> publishing.

Yes, but the statement should not be a blanket statement, 
conflating both cases. The case of journal articles is a 
straightforward one, with a logic of its own -- and independent 
of Gold OA, since the target is Green OA (self-archiving).

> Yet, at least for humanities and social sciences, this is an 
> imperative that can't be ignored or evaded. Too much of the 
> most important scholarship in these fields is done in the form 
> of books to be casual about accepting the demise of book 
> publishing in these areas.

Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? I was talking about Green 
OA self-archiving mandates for journal articles, and the Fair Use 
Button for the embargoed ones. You seem to have leapt to the 
demise of book publishing...

> (Only some subsectors, like Anglo-American analytic philosophy, 
> might survive a retreat to journal publication only.) And the 
> already yawning "digital divide" between the book and journal 
> literature is a matter of increasing concern to all of us in 
> scholarly publishing. It makes no sense, in terms of knowledge 
> dissemination, to have what appears in books so much less 
> widely available than most of the journal literature now is, 
> even if it isn't in Green or Gold OA form.

You'll have to forgive me for being less enthusiastic about how 
available the journal literature is when it is not made OA...

But if there is a corresponding need for access to monographs, 
let the chips fall where they may. You have a respite, though, 
because it is not monographs but articles that are the targets of 
the OA movement. We have our hands full with those...

> Most monographs these days exist in the form of 400 or 500 
> copies located in just the top academic libraries. By contrast, 
> an article in a Project Muse journal, with some 1300 
> institutional subscriptions worldwide (multiplied by the number 
> of users each of those institutions serves), has a vastly 
> greater exposure and use than monographs do.

I am not impressed! My constituency is journal articles, and 
toll-access means a lot of access-denial and impact-loss. The 
fact that monographs fare even worse is irrelevant.

> Happily, university presses are not alone in being worried 
> about this "digital divide." It is a major theme of a new 
> report from the Ithaka Group, titled "University Publishing in 
> the Digital Age," recently released in draft form for comment 
> by the university press community on the eve of our annual 
> meeting in Minneapolis, where it will be a topic of discussion 
> at a plenary session where the report's chief author, Laura 
> Brown (former President of Oxford U.P. in America) and this 
> list's frequent commentator Joe Esposito will be fielding 
> questions from the audience after their initial presentations. 
> We all look forward to a lively discussion and to the official 
> release of this report to a wider audience soon. It is 
> addressed as much to administrators and librarians, by the way, 
> as it is to university press personnel, and the choice of the 
> word "university publishing" in the title is deliberately broad 
> to cover all the publishing that universities do, not just by 
> their presses but also increasingly by librarians, departments, 
> institutes, etc. It is an excellent report well worth reading 
> by everyone concerned about the future of scholarly 
> communication. (End of promo!)

I have to confess I don't quite know what the "digital divide" 
is: I used to think it was the divide between the Haves and the 
Have-Nots insofar as access to digital texts was concerned. But 
that also includes a goodly chunk of internet-access problems for 
poorer countries, an important problem, but different from that 
of OA, and likewise not to be conflated with it.

Stevan Harnad