Open access page turners

Cambridge University Press announces an initiative to publish monographs OA, sort of

Titles in the project will be print and on-line published for a commercial price – until they reach a “set revenue threshold” from when they will go OA on-line and in an “affordable paperback edition”. “This is our way of asking our customers, mostly institutional libraries, to become actively involved in the funding to flip them to Open Access,” CUP states.

As a way of opening access to monographs it can’t hurt and it also brings OA to HASS disciplines, where researchers prefer to publish research in books not articles – (the examples CUP cites are all HASS).

As Geoffrey Crossick put it in a report for England’s Higher Education Funding Council in 2015, “I have been struck by the strength of feeling about monographs within much of the arts, humanities and social sciences … It is very apparent that this wide community is not opposed to the principle of open access for monographs, but is concerned that moves towards open access should be sensitive to the need to protect what is important about the monograph as it exists today and as it has developed over a century or more of research activity and writing,” (CMM January 23 2015).