And today we have a contribution from guest blogger Ronald Snijder. He is Project Manager Digital Publications at Amsterdam University Press and will ocassionally blog on interesting projects he’s working on.
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Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine your desk, completely empty except only one sheet of paper and your laptop, tablet or e-book reader. Pick up the paper, stand up and let it drop. It seesaws gently to your desk. Now pick up your device. What would happen if you drop that?
Contrary to what this little experiment may have shown, paper is heavy. A 300-page monograph doesn’t gently float down. And this obvious fact has an effect on academic publishing. In the OAPEN-NL pilot, we have asked the publishers to share their costs with us. We received the results from several Dutch publishers; about 35 books.
Although it’s not the final result – there are more books to come – those numbers make interesting reading. In order to publish a monograph, publishers need to invest an average amount of about €16000. More than half of the costs are directly connected to paper; one third of all costs consist of printing and distributing paper books.
So, paper weighs heavy on the investment costs. This would not be a problem, if the book was a guaranteed bestseller. But a lot of scientific monographs can only be published if the costs are backed by subsidies; and print runs tend to go down – to approximately 300 copies.
This is the rationale behind book publishing in Open Access: make the monograph available online, without any restrictions. The information is better used in this way, and not restricted to 300 libraries. Of course, the costs are less high. Good news for funders, good news for scientists and maybe even good news for publishers: a new business model that will allow them to keep on publishing monographs.
Further Readings:
- OAPEN.nl
- The profits of free books: an experiment to measure the impact of open access publishing
- Scholarly Kitchen: Open Access books
