Advancing Open Access through Community Collaboration

At UNC Press, the broad dissemination of scholarship is core to our mission, so we enthusiastically share the vision of many Open Access (OA) advocates. Despite the opportunities afforded by digital formats, most traditional academic publishing models reinforce networks of privilege where scholars and students at well-resourced universities can read our books and journals but anyone outside that network must overcome significant financial obstacles to access our publications. Expanding access must be a primary goal for any organization that claims to espouse progressive views of social justice and equity. 

In the past year, we’ve made significant progress in expanding our OA programs with both our journals and our books. But progress remains incremental. Until there is a significant new investment in publishing resources for campus-based publishers, we will be relying on gradual steps toward a more inclusive and high-impact OA model.

Journals

We are participating in two OA programs designed for journals. The first is the Subscribe to Open (S2O) program developed by our long-valued partners at ProjectMUSE. The program is helping two of our legacy journals explore a low-risk OA model. S2O sells library subscriptions, and when commitments meet a certain threshold each year, we “flip” that year’s issues open. We’re guaranteed an income level that matches historical amounts, and while this doesn’t lead to income growth, it will dramatically enhance the usage of the scholarship. This willingness to accept flat revenues for OA is an example of the difference between university presses and commercial publishers. We’re grateful to the S2O participating libraries and to our partners at ProjectMUSE. We’ve all taken some risk here, but the hypothesis is that when we see dramatic increases in scholarship usage, we should pour more funding into the program.

In addition to S2O, we’ve launched a set of open-source publishing tools called Partnership for Open Publishing (POP) that’ is designed to support OA journal publishing that originates in the statewide UNC System. One of the tools, Janeway, is a digital platform for publishing scholarly articles online, from submission and review to editing and production. The second tool, Meru, was an outcome of the Arcadia-funded Next Generation Library Publishing project. Meru allows individual campuses to have a bespoke user interface nested within a common back end that is supported by the Press. Three campus libraries in the statewide UNC System are participating, and we plan to do outreach to all the campuses in the coming year. POP can handle journals from across the disciplinary spectrum, allowing us for the first time to provide an alternative publishing option for scholars in the state who want to work with a university-based, not-for-profit journals partner.

Monographs

Our primary means for making monographs open has been the Path to Open (P2O) program, which UNC Press helped design.  The program is being brought to the marketplace by JSTOR, and community management is being hosted at the American Council of Learned Societies. P2O is a compromise model where eBooks are sold as an exclusive collection by JSTOR to subscribing libraries whose patrons have access to these titles for the first three years after publication. At the end of that period, the books become OA. The downsides of this program are the embargo period and the exclusivity provided to JSTOR. But the upside is that this program has scaled successfully, with the goal of making one thousand monographs from fifty university presses OA in a three-year pilot. This is by far the most ambitious university press OA program yet and it’s designed to grow even larger. It’s also a completely market-based program, meaning no outside grant funds or author payments are required. It allows university presses to do traditional cost-recovery for three years, reducing the financial risk to presses for making a title OA.

In addition to Path to Open, we continue to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program. Although this is another embargo/OA program, it provides stipends from the NEH to support the work presses did to publish these titles. We remain grateful to the NEH for their vision and support.

Usage and Impact

Most of the scholarly landscape is operating in environments where usage, impact, and accountability are expected of institutions that receive public support. While public support covers only 7 percent of UNC Press’s expenses, we want to demonstrate the impact of the scholarship we publish and, in this way, make the case for future support.

For journals, the new Meru platform provides real-time usage analytics. We’ll be enhancing these analytics as we build out POP. Project MUSE will be providing us with usage reports for the Subscribe to Open journals.

For books, we are purchasing an instance of the Books Analytics Dashboard—a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that collects and displays the usage of OA monographs. We also purchased an instance of the dashboard for our recently completed Mellon-funded Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. While it’s impossible to completely track open usage, we can track views and downloads from some of our key hosting partners. Authors and staff can now see monthly reports of how often, and where, our eBooks are being viewed and downloaded. Our Longleaf Services division is a beta partner for the burgeoning OA eBook Data Trust, which is building out the infrastructure to support the distribution of this usage data.

Goals for the Coming Year

We are in a phase of incremental steps toward making as much of our scholarship as accessible as possible—while maintaining our financial sustainability.

We believe that demonstrating impact through usage data is the key to securing future funding to support the opening of scholarship. We’ll continue to make significant investments in the tools needed to measure usage and impact.

We want to continue to be a leader in exploring OA with a particular focus on advancing models that support the broad community of university presses and not just ourselves.

We also want to make the case for expanding sources of funding OA. Most new initiatives still rely on libraries to provide the needed revenue. This isn’t fair to libraries and probably isn’t sustainable going forward. The host institutions of the authors of our books and journals are experiencing a significant free ride as they benefit significantly from the work the Press does to support their faculty’s work. While we must avoid pay-to-publish models, we must also find a way to make sure that universities—whose faculty and reputations are burnished by university presses—are supporting those presses every chance they can. And as we demonstrate high-impact usage and reduce the financial burdens on libraries, we expect more institutions to engage with and sustain presses to ensure that those who benefit the most from this work are supporting that labor.

John Sherer

Spangler Family Director