Sustainable and Equitable Scholarly Publishing: A New Vision for Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Open Access monograph initiatives in the humanities and social sciences have shown great promise, demonstrating significant usage around the world. At the same time, creating a scalable funding model that prioritizes equity and bibliodiversity remains a formidable challenge. A group of university press directors, academic librarians, and not-for-profit partners have worked together on an initiative to produce a large-scale shift in monograph publishing. In a proposed new model, libraries could license new university press ebooks at an affordable cost; three years after publication, each title would be released openly to the world, increasing equity of access to valuable scholarly content. Our shared goal: a sustainable and equitable Open Access model that will meet the needs of authors, readers, libraries, and university presses. In this session, the presenter will share their perspectives on the Open Access landscape and lead a conversation eliciting feedback on the challenges and opportunities of this new model.

Publication Date

2023 | Jun 01

45th Annual Meeting (2023)

29

"Transformation, Trust, and Transparency" The pace of change in our industry continues unabated, with seismic shifts in areas such as the dissemination of research, business models, and the nature of the workplace. And yet, while pressure for change has become the new normal, fundamental change has proved more elusive. We invite you to join us in highlighting the Trust and Transparency issues that underlie many of the challenges we face and exploring what it takes to create more meaningful Transformation in scholarly publishing.

Beth Fuget

1

Grants and Digital Projects, University of Washington Press

Beth Fuget manages grants and digital projects at the University of Washington Press, including the press’s first open access and complex digital books. She also worked as an acquisitions editor at Washington and before that, as a writer, editor, translator, and teacher.

Holly Mercer

1

John Lenahan

1

VP, Published Content, Dimensions

John is the Vice President of Published Content on JSTOR and was responsible for global participation on JSTOR prior to moving into this position in 2019. Before working at JSTOR, John worked at ProQuest in various roles for 10 years after being acquired by Softline Information in 2001. Prior to Softline Information, John was an instructor in the field of psychology, developer for online learning programs and a data analyst. Having seen first hand the importance and impact having access to digital content can bring to students, he has worked to provide access to as much scholarly content as possible to researchers over the last 20 years.

Sarah McKee

1

Project Manager, Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship, American Council of Learned Societies

Sarah McKee is the Project Manager for Publishing Initiatives at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works to support a healthy ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of humanistic scholarship across disciplines and institutions. Prior to her arrival at ACLS she administered Digital Publishing in the Humanities, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and based at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and served as managing editor of the born-digital New Georgia Encyclopedia at the University of Georgia Press. She is an advisory board member for the Next Generation Library Project and coauthor of Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community.