2014 Charleston Library Conference

2013 was a remarkable year for open access in the UK, Europe, Australia, South America, the States and beyond. With green (and gold) deposit mandates coming into force on an unprecedented scale, the fabled tipping point looked as though it had been reached. However, scholars in the humanities remain extremely concerned about proposed Article and Book Processing Charge models, which they argue will create an unequal system of publication and incur additional managerial oversight.

In this talk, I will outline the plans and business model that I am implementing for the academic-led, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded, not-for-profit Open Library of Humanities project. Beginning with a description of the megajournal system, the multi-journal/overlay setup and the books side of the initiative, I will then move to argue that a collaborative and cooperative model of funding gold open access makes more sense in the humanities disciplines. Under this scheme, which we have termed Library Partnership Subsidies, and building on the successes of arXiv and Knowledge Unlatched, we need only a relatively small number of libraries to all pay ~$1000 for us to be able to publish 250 articles and 12 books a year.

Initiatives such as these, I will argue, enable us to think beyond the emerging default models and to re-empower librarians in the handling of their acquisition budgets. It no longer seems enough to simply hope that a fair market will emerge for open access payments and the time is ripe to re-think this through a community approach. Of course, this relies on goodwill and cooperation; an up-front earnestness that can be hard to foster. If we do not, however, broach this now, the only foreseeable future will prioritise the importance of being profitable.