Question: What is “open access” book publishing? What impact will it have on the book publishing industry?
Expert: Albert Greco, Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration, Professor of Marketing (see above). Author of The Book Publishing Industry, coauthor of The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century
Answer: “When librarians and academics complained about sharp increases in the subscription prices for serials (i.e., magazines and journals) and stagnant or declining library budgets, the book industry responded with concern. Libraries were considered a pivotal linchpin in American society, encouraging children to read and providing much needed literacy services to their communities. So when librarians, academics, and engineers became active in the Open Access serials movement, encouraging the creation of the Public Library of Science, Pub Med Central, and other Web repositories, their efforts were often applauded by the book community. Yet the eclectic book publishing community did not anticipate that librarians, academics, and engineers would broaden Open Access to include books.
Open Access (OA) refers to copyrighted intellectual property that is available on the Web at no cost. In its original phase, Open Access publications included highly specialized scholarly journals with exceptionally small circulations (e.g., Advances in Opto Electronics).
In its second phase, Open Access was broadened to include serials and books, aided by the financial and technological support of research libraries and major foundations. By 2007, it became a direct threat to paid publications (called ‘Toll Access’ or ‘TA’ in the OA movement).
As of August 2008, Open Access publications include more than 3,503 scholarly journals, tens of thousands of teaching materials (often PowerPoint slides) and conference proceedings, and several thousand books. While it is unlikely that John Grisham or Mary Higgins Clark will lose sales to Principles and Practices of Chromatography or the vast majority of OA books, three book sectors are vulnerable to the burgeoning OA book movement. They include professional and scholarly publishers, college textbook publishers, and university presses.
In February 2008, the European Commission announced it would support an Open Access Publishing in European Networks to ‘develop and implement an Open Access publication model for peer reviewed academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences . . . to improve the spread of European research results.’ In addition to the creation of hundreds of web repositories, several major university libraries (Michigan, Toronto, etc.) launched successful Open Access book series, competing directly with professional publishers and their own university presses.
Academics and OA supporters convened in South Africa in September 2007 to initiate an OA college textbook movement, supported by several major foundations. This enabled the Public Interest Research Group in the U.S. to leverage its earlier studies about college textbook prices (‘Ripoff 101’ and their ‘Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign’) and create an ‘Open Educational Resources’ (‘OER’) network. They hope to ‘promote government investigation and action’ as well as ‘engage textbook industry shareholders’ to curb ‘the rising cost of textbooks.’ Their immediate goal is to have about 1,000 college faculty members using OA textbooks in the 2008–2009 academic year, potentially cutting into sales by Prentice-Hall, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, etc., as well as university presses active in textbook publishing.
In the last few months, faculties at Harvard and Stanford voted to post all of their research articles on their universities’ Web repositories, actions that pose a threat to various university press operations.
Although still in its nascent stage, the OA movement has grown significantly in just a few years. Clearly, this movement bears continued scrutiny as it morphs into a more dynamic professional-scholarly and textbook publishing movement, systematically challenging commercial and scholarly book operations.”
