Open access in the humanities needs a different publication model

Few academics dispute the case for open access. Since much research is publicly funded (or built upon publicly funded work), of course the resulting papers and books should not be locked behind publishers’ paywalls. The advancement of knowledge, after all, is a university’s primary purpose.

The key question is who should pay the publisher’s costs to make the texts available. Some grant funders, particularly in the sciences, have taken on the burden. However, this limits open access to those with the standing and luck to win research funding in an increasingly tight market.

The stated aim of some funders and government agencies to make books as well as papers freely available presents a particular problem for the humanities, where books are common but grants are much less so. The cost of publishing an open access book with a major international press is between about £10,000 and £15,000. The way things are going, there will soon be an elite of well-funded humanities scholars publishing open access – and enjoying a much larger readership as a result – with everybody else obscured behind a paywall.

It is clear that open access in the humanities needs a different publication model. But what? Mission-driven university presses face their own problems. The obvious big guns aside, many lack the kind of name recognition that readers and librarians often take as an indicator of quality. In any case, a perilous intersection of declining university budgets and diminishing book sales has led many presses to compromise their core academic mandate in pursuit of elusive sales of non-scholarly books.

A better option is to reorient scholarly publishing away from a business model geared towards income maximisation towards a service model focused on how best to disseminate the results of scholarship to the most readers.

BSPSOpen was born out of a consideration of how these problems – for researchers in the humanities, for funders and for mission-driven university presses – might be solved. In collaboration with the University of Calgary Press, the British Society for the Philosophy of Science has launched an open access monograph series at no cost for authors: so-called diamond OA. Calgary will fund 10 volumes over the next five years, while the BSPS guarantees the excellence of the review process. We hope that this will establish a paradigm whereby the leading societies in every field of the humanities partner with mission-driven university presses to make certifiably high-quality work available to the whole world.

Our first monograph, John Norton’s A Material Theory of Induction, is a fine book, we think, but not the kind one would expect to sell by the bucket-load. Nevertheless, it has already had nearly 5,000 full downloads since it was published last November. That is a lot of readers.

It is also a lot of visibility for the press. And it’s not just a matter of visibility. Many readers still want a print copy of a book they have downloaded, and sampling book content for free spurs more purposeful and informed purchasing decisions for university libraries and researchers with constricted acquisitions budgets.

This kind of partnership between university presses and scholarly societies could also be subsidised by those who have an interest in promoting open access. Examples include public research funding bodies, as well as universities themselves, whose researchers and library budgets benefit from the publication of diamond OA monographs. In a world where predatory publication schemes are rampant, taxpayers’ money is surely best invested in non-profit initiatives where only scholarly criteria rule.

Now that every author can post manuscripts on repositories and personal websites, it is time to concentrate public budgets on promoting the best research in every field of the humanities. It is too early to tell exactly how the finances will pan out for BSPSOpen, of course, but if scholarly societies invest in partnerships promoting excellence with mission-driven university presses, we have a chance to harness open access to keep the humanities thriving into the future.

Helen Beebee is professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Leeds. David Teira is professor of philosophy at Sorbonne University. Brian Scrivener is director of University of Calgary Press.