Monograph Publishing

Posted on Jul 4, 2013 in Publishing, Talks | 0 comments

I was recently invited to give a talk as part of a panel on "Promising Business Models" at the Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences conference, with my colleague and Co-Director of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) Dr Martin Paul Eve. The OLH is currently developing a scholarly monograph publishing pilot scheme alongside its megajournal platform. Martin and I are working with established university presses as well as born-digital publishers to publish monographs and, in the process, conduct a transparent costings study into the costs to publishers for producing high-quality open access monographs and the benefit that freely available PDF, XML and HTML forms can offer to hard copy revenues of scholarly works.

We spoke on a panel with Frances Pinter, Founder & Executive Director of Knowledge Unlatched, and Carrie Calder from Palgrave Macmillan. The panel was chaired by Brian Hole, Founder of Ubiquity Press. Organised by JISC Collections and the OAPEN / OAPEN UK Foundations, this two-day event was intended to raise awareness of open access, increase understanding of key challenges, and identify where international common policies and frameworks could support the adoption of open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). 

The event was sponsored by AHRC and ESRC and hosted by The British Library. You can view the conference programme here. For blog posts about the event, check out Ellen Collins' excellent summary "In Praise of Diversity" and Hybrid Publishing's "On the Status of Open Access Monographs."

This post has been adapted from the Open Library of Humanities website.

Image by Conrad Bakker under a CC BY-NC-SA license.