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

Sarah McKee

1

Associate Director for Publishing, Emory University

Sarah McKee, Emory University, Assoc. Director for Publishing; Sarah McKee is the senior associate director for publishing at Emory University's Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, where she implements the Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to her arrival at Emory in 2017, she worked for fifteen years at the University of Georgia Press, first as an assistant production editor, and then as electronic editor and managing editor for the New Georgia Encyclopedia, an open access digital humanities reference work.