Company Monograph output OA monographs
listed in DOAB
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Sales representation has on the whole been split between those sales agents (internal to large
companies and external to smaller ones) who follow the old school of selling print books to the trade and to institutions around the world and those who specialise in e-book selling (globally).
The latter are mainly aggregators, though larger publishers have their own e-content sales forces and mid-sized companies are increasingly investing in direct selling to institutions and to individual customers (mainly through their websites and Amazon). For monographs this remains an unresolved issue as libraries do not, on the whole, wish to deal with large numbers of individual publishers. OUP and CUP have their own platforms (UPSO and Cambridge Core) that offer digital sales and distribution packages to other publishers.
As mentioned above the UK is distinctive because of its global reach. It is estimated that well over 50% and in many case 80% of print monograph sales come from exports. However, global reach does not mean large sales per title or greater readership. The average number of copies sold is now under 200. At this point that means that about 20-100 copies of monographs are sold within the UK. This is in the context of having 186 universities and over two million students.
According to Nielson Bookscan and cited in the Academic Book of the Future report sales of HSS monographs through retail channels – another incomplete way of measuring sales - is between 60-100 books in the main English language markets.
Although the split between print and digital for monographs is plateauing out at about an 80/20% split the different e-book sale models to libraries (such as PDA, DDA, EBA, STL etc) is making “sales” difficult to track.
There is less standardisation of marketing practices than before, especially given the pressures to
experiment with social media. The marketing budgets for monographs vary from as low as 4% of sales for closed books of a traditional press and by extension to any BPC income plus additional sales of other formats – to a number expressed as 25% of total income to cover costs not covered by a supporting institution.
This makes it very difficult to establish like for like comparisons. In addition many of the intermediaries that sell for UK publishers undertake marketing efforts that are covered by the discount they receive from the publisher. Suffice to say that costs of marketing may now be lower than before since it is about clever use of digital opportunities rather than printing leaflets and taking out advertising space in print media.
6.5.3 OA policy landscape in the UK
The UK introduced its policy and mandate on OA journal articles following on from the Finch Report Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications68 published in 2012. The funding and enforcement of the mandate fell to both Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) which is responsible for administering the REF for all of the UK. Together RCUK and HEFCE (along with smaller funding bodies for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) have been responsible for most of the UK public funding available for research. These research councils will (mostly) be consolidated (subject to legislation) under one body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2018, though HEFCE will keep some of its non-funding responsibilities.
The REF is the review of research that takes place every six or seven years upon which state block grant funding for research is then based going forward for the next six or seven years. HEFCE implemented its policy to accept only OA articles for the next REF (2021) through either green or gold methods for all articles published
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after April 2016. HEFCE has been more cautious with monographs following on from the findings of the Crossick Report. However, for the time being it encourages monographs and edited collections to be published as OA through extra carrots rather than sticks. HEFCE has stated its intention to bring books in line with journal articles in the next but one REF, though uncertainties around Brexit etc. are a challenge.
A consultation document issued this year on the next REF includes a section on OA monographs.69 The report concluded that:
` Open access offers both short and long-term advantages for monograph publication and use;
many of these are bound up with a transition to digital publishing that has not been at the same speed as that for journals
` There is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting open access publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as dominant
` Printed books will continue to be preferred for extensive reading and may form a part of many future business models; they will therefore continue to a considerable extent to be available alongside their open access versions
The aim at this point is to set out a direction of travel and to reassure the community that a nuanced approach will be taken with regards to monographs given the complexities, for instance, with third party rights permission, sensitivities around licensing and a multitude of business models.
The UUK Open Access Coordination Group has recently established an OA monographs working group (chaired by Professor Shearer West (Deputy Vice
Chancellor, University of Sheffield and from October 2017 Vice Chancellor of the University of Nottingham).
The group brings together a range of stakeholders such as publishers (traditional, new and academic-led), research librarians, funders, and representatives from learned societies. This group aims to address the obstacles and barriers (publisher requirements, licensing and copyright issues) in order to move forward with OA monograph policy. The group is also addressing what needs to be done to bring about a cultural shift within the academic community.
Administration of the RCUK funds is mostly carried out by libraries, though in some cases it flows through faculties. Block grants from HEFCE are only secured through to 2018; there is as yet no decision on what will follow thereafter (pending the mergers as a result of UKRI). It is likely that there will be a preference for gold OA for books, but it is too early to be sure.
Wellcome, based in the UK, has been a big and early player in promoting OA in the field of medicine – primarily in journals where most medical research is published. It has a lesser-known fund and strategy for monograph publishing of books in the area of medical history and these funds are available to authors with Wellcome grants around the world. As with journal articles Wellcome has been a pioneer in setting standards for OA monograph publishing.
Footnotes
68 https://acu.ac.uk/research-information-network/finch-report 69 hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2016/201636/
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A landscape study on open access and monographsThe AHRC funded study on The Academic Book of the Future70 published its findings in June 2017. Broad in scope, much of the project and its findings will feed into further debate on how to handle open access for monographs. It does not anticipate the speed of OA growth anticipated by the Simba Information study that suggests a 30% annual increase in open access books generally.71
One issue that remains unaddressed, however, is where sufficient funding for OA outputs will come from.
Some libraries have carved out small funds from their discretionary spending budgets. Some institutions have begun to set aside funds from central budgets for OA monograph support. There is interest in initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched, where funding is sourced from the global library community. To date, 13 UK presses have participated in the KU programme (over half of the 60 presses come from North America and the rest from Europe and other parts of the world).
Can such initiatives scale and will they be able to sit alongside larger block funds from the funding bodies as they move to mandating or at least seriously encouraging OA? The discussion on how to re-route current funds to support OA is going on in the UK now. Given the numbers involved (over 8,000 books submitted to the REF 2014) the sums needed will be considerable.
6.5.4 OA monograph publishing landscape in the UK Despite a great deal of discussion most publishers have not experimented extensively with OA. Of the 11 UK publishers responding to the Simba survey Bloomsbury Academic published the largest number of OA titles (137). The average amongst the remaining ten was 15 titles per company – though even this number is high as it includes the born digital OA presses Open Book Publishers and UCL Press. The numbers are much lower amongst the traditional presses as is evident in the DOAB.
Of the three large countries in the study, the UK lags behind with only 594 OA books listed in DOAB as compared with over 1,000 from both Germany and France.
As a comparative historical context, there is less of a tradition of asking authors for payment for publishing monographs in the UK as compared with the rest of Europe. However, authors are regularly asked to pay for extra charges such as third party rights permissions, colour plates etc. In the past this was often funded by a reduction of royalties. However, as sales of monographs are now so low (as are royalty rates) royalties do not always cover these costs. They now come out of departmental budgets or the pockets of authors themselves.
New university and academic-led presses
There is now an increasing number of new university presses that were either the initiative of a department of a university, a university library or led by the drive of a single or small group of academics. A comprehensive report is available from Jisc: Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape Study of New University Presses and Academic-led Publishing by Graham Stone and Janneke Adema. The study looks at 33 new institution and/or academic-led publishing initiatives, primarily in the UK. Stone estimates further growth. Two of the twelve libraries responding to our questionnaire have library-led new OA presses, and two were considering creating new university presses.
At this point all new institution-led university presses require institutional support and the question of scaling is not yet on the agenda. Nevertheless, they are experimenting not just with new business models but also with different publishing formats, multimedia publishing and new modes of marketing, sales and distribution. These new university presses are struggling to enter the traditional sales channels, often under pressure from authors who want to see their books sold as well as available in OA.
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In addition to new university presses there are also new academic-led presses some of which have institutional support.
These include; Counter Press, Electric Press, Goldsmiths Press, Mattering Press, MayFly Books, Media Commons Press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, Punctum books, Roving Eye Press and Ubiquity Press. A few focus on books only, but most publish a mix of books, journals and multimedia publications.
Business models and pricing of BPCs
Most publishers who offer open access do so on the basis of charging a Book Processing Charge.
There are a few exceptions where print sales are expected to cover the full publishing costs. However, as discoverability, visibility and greater willingness to read on screen grows the future of print sales remains unknown.
Costs of getting to first digital file vary from publisher to publisher. The range reported in our survey from traditional presses (whether university or commercial) was between 5,000 and 15,000 euros. Much depended
on how much overhead was included, while most of the core costs such as copy editing, typesetting, design had far less variation. The new university presses, whether in our survey or not, have different ways of accounting for overheads – much of which is absorbed by the institution, in particular the library budget. For more information on why BPC charges vary so much see Appendices, Part four, Chapter 10).
6.5.5 The future of OA monograph publishing in the UK Over the next few years the work of a number of committees will coalesce into a policy proposal for the UK. This is taking place at a time of flux as HEFCE itself is under reorganisation with parts of it merging with RCUK to form UKRI. While the framework for moving ahead was set by the Crossick Report72 and the HEFCE REF consultation document, the UUK OA Monograph Group is seen as taking the lead in the matter going forward. Jisc Futures is another body that is providing intellectual muscle in particular on platform issues and a wider OA group is envisaged at the time of writing.
It is probably fair to say that the research councils remain to be convinced that there is strong market (author) demand for open access though they believe it will come and they will react positively to it. Indeed, as was reported in our interviews, once authors understood the benefits of OA they were very
enthusiastic. Everyone is hoping that there will be less controversy over OA monographs than there has been over journal articles. The pressures on universities and HEFCE resulting from Brexit are another challenge.