Re: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I'm not sure what "evidence" we are supposed to see at this site, 
which lists several links, most in German. The post by R.J. 
Keller titled "Why Free Pays" shows at most that OA is a good 
marketing tool for an unknown author (just as free posting of 
songs is good advertising for new bands). Please note that Keller 
admits that most of the over 2,000 e-book downloads of his novel 
brought him no revenue at all, and that his plan for his next 
novel is only to post some of the chapters free as a lure to get 
people to purchase the book. I see no proof in this example, 
anyway, that "OA increases sales."

Most of the stories we've heard making this claim concern one-off 
publications of books by very well-known authors like Larry 
Lessig, but how one "proves" from such isolated experiments that 
OA "increases" sales baffles me. How would one know what these 
books would have sold if published just in print but with a 
sample chapter or two posted online, say, as a teaser in the way 
that Amazon.com uses "Search Inside the Book."

Our own experiment in publishing monographs in Romance Studies 
(http://www.romancestudies.psu.edu), where they are available to 
read online in their entirety but can only be printed out in 
part, is more of a true test because we have over ten years of 
experience with books in this series offered for sale in print 
only with which to compare sales of the POD versions, and so far 
at least there is no evidence at all that "OA increases sales," 
though I am happy to say that sales have not declined much 
either.  This is about as close to a "controlled experiment" as 
one is likely to be able to undertake since the books are all 
monographs on specialized topics in the same general field by 
authors not known outside academe and their subjects are quite 
comparable to the subjects of the books published in the series 
earlier when the books were available only in print form.

The benefit of OA here is not to "increase sales," but simply to 
make these monographs much more widely accessible than they ever 
were in print form alone. That seems to me a sufficiently 
important benefit to make the experiment well worthwhile 
undertaking, and we hope we can eventually extend it to other 
fields, too.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

>There is enough evidence that OA increases sales:
>http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/monograph_open_access
>
>Klaus Graf
>
>2009/5/1 Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>:
>
>>  How does one even begin to measure the "economic value" of OA
>>  for, say, a work of literary criticism or a monograph on Hume's
>>  philosophy? We scholarly publishers would dearly like to believe
>>  that spreading our specialized content freely worldwide would be
>>  a benefit to civilization, but this is an article of faith for
>>  us, not something we have any easy way of quantifying
>>  economically.