Open access, books and the royalty argument: a research proposal

The original focus of the open access movement has been the scholarly journal article, which authors have traditionally given away, while books were at first set aside, in part because authors do receive royalties from publishing books. It may be timely to reconsider this argument; for further detail, see below. Here are two potential research methods for exploring the reality behind the perception that academics earn royalties from book publishing, developed for the Research Questions section of the Open Access Directory.

Method 1: author return on investment of time

Hypothesis: the vast majority of academic authors would advance their financial situations faster by moonlighting at a second job, even at minimum wage, than by writing academic books.

• estimate or calculate author time spent on writing academic books
• estimate or add royalties over years book is likely to continue selling
• divide royalties by author hours
  
• compare with local minimum wage

Method 2: publisher royalties to academic authors

• collect publisher records for royalties on a per-author / per-book basis
• calculate range, average and mode
• paint a qualitative picture of likely financial rewards for academic authors for book publishing

Note: I do not have time to conduct this research at present, but would be interested in participating in a research team or acting as a consultant if someone else would like to take this on.

Anecdotal evidence (and inspiration) from an expert

Sandy Thatcher, formerly publisher at Penn State University Press and former President of the American Association of University Presses, points out today on the scholcomm list: the fact that a significant number of authors published by university presses earn no royalties at all, it is also true that the number of authors who earn really significant royalties on academic books is very small. For them, the greatest incentive to publish a book by far lies in the indirect rewards to come in the form of tenure and promotion, whose pecuniary benefits usually far outweigh any monies actually received from book royalties. I therefore think a much stronger case for OA book publishing can be made than Peter seems ready to admit yet. And it is important to press on this point because the longer book publishing remains TA while journal publishing goes OA, the wider the "digital divide" will grow between book and journal content, which is intellectually indefensible.

Slowing down to protect the incumbents - or speeding up to protect the earth?

In this February's issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber discusses some analogies between open access and clean energy.

One of Peter's discussion points is the issue of whether to slow down to protect the incumbents; in the case of clean energy, this would mean continuing to support environmentally harmful energy industries when clean ones are available, just because the incumbents are there; in the case of open access, this means slowing down to protect the interests of the existing publishing industry - interests which are not synonymous with the interests of scholarship, or of the public at large.

Peter raises some interesting points. My own take on the relationship between open access and clean energy: we need breakthrough research to move to clean energy, on several fronts - the hard science, economics, and social sciences research as change requires changes in attitudes and behavior. This is an urgent matter - we are running out of the old energy resources, and in trouble if we do not address global warming - and because it is an urgent matter, we need innovation in scholarship. We need our scholars to focus on innovating towards the breakthroughs - this means sharing results as early and as widely as possible. The kind of rapid transformation that led to mapping of the human genome in such a short time involved open sharing of information and a collaborative approach. This is exactly what we need to move to clean, renewal energy resources. This means that we need to rethink things like academic tenure and promotion processes; while academic traditions, in my opinion, have a great deal of merit, we cannot currently afford the luxury of taking significant time to consider change. We need to figure out how scholars can be supported to advance our knowledge in these areas in the ways that will lead to the most rapid possible change - not holding back knowledge to publish in the most prestigious journal possible.

The benefits of open collaboration from the start!

About a year ago, I posted about works-in-progress, including a research study Don Taylor & I were planning, a research study on supports for open access among Canadian libraries. The post was spotted by our UBC colleague Devon Greyson, who contacted us about similar interests at UBC. Since then, the study grew to a pan-Canadian survey on research supports by Canadian university libraries and research administration offices, by a team consisting of UBC's Dr. Charlyn Black (health policy expert and member of the committee that developed the CIHR policy), and Devon Greyson, myself & Don Taylor, and Concordia University's open access coordinator Kumiko Vezina, with lots of help from many people at several institutions. Preliminary results were presented at the 2nd International PKP Conference in Vancouver last month; see the blogpost. The team has just submitted the paper for peer-review; watch for more details on results in formal publication and further presentations. This post will not address the results of this study pe se, but rather is a recommendation: if you are planning a research study, let people know! You just might find yourself part of a larger study, with more people to share the work so that a larger study can be done with reasonable efforts by all. Many thanks to everyone on the team for this experience.

One way to share your research-in-progress, if it is about open access, is to post to the Open Access Directory's Research in Progress page. There are some interesting studies already underway listed there!