Re: Should university presses adopt an OA model for all of theirscholarly books?

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Sorry, the URL for Colin Day's paper didn't get transmitted in the
earlier message. It is
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/specscholmono/day.shtml

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>Toby and Joe have provided some useful correctives. I composed
>the following reply before reading theirs, but agree with what
>they say. (Foreign sales for U.S. presses generall average in a
>range from 5% to 20%, depending on the composition of a press's
>list; some types of books travel overseas much better than
>others--e.g., the regional books that many state university
>presses publish have virtually no market overseas. By contrast,
>the foreign sales of British-based academic presses are often a
>least 40%, with a sizeable chunk of that being the U.S. market.)
>Here is my reply:
>
>The paper by Greco and Wharton is indeed interesting, but at
>least as much for what it gets wrong as what it gets right. The
>authors claim to have talked with "leaders at more than 50 U.S.
>university presses," but oddly they didn't approach me even
>though I was president of the AAUP during the time they must have
>been writing this paper.
>
>It will take more than a brief message on this list to point out
>all the ways in which their analysis is off the mark, but as I am
>always looking for topics to discuss in my column for Against the
>Grain, these authors have provided me with good material for a
>future article there.
>
[SNIP]
>
>For my money, the better information (even though somewhat dated)
>on what it costs to publish monographs in print and in electronic
>forms still can be found in two papers delivered by press
>directors Marlie Wasserman (Rutgers) and Colin Day (then at
>Michigan) at an ARL/AAUP/ACLS conference in 1997. Here are the
>URLs for those papers:
>http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/specscholmono/wasserman.shtml
>
>Sandy Thatcher
>Penn State University Press