LIBER 39TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE - Statsbiblioteket

PaRaLLEL sEssIons 1.2 to 4.2
29 JunE 2010
sEssIon 3.2
maRIannE aLEnIus, nIELs stERn
(musEum tuscuLanum PREss,
dEnmaRk):
oPEn accEss monogRaPhs
The scholarly monograph is under
increasing pressure these days. The
crisis is clearly reflected throughout the
research community and especially within
the Humanities. This presentation will
stipulate the crisis from the viewpoint of a
scholarly press and suggest ways to keep
monograph publishing a viable business
for scholarly publishers. One of these
ways could be open access publishing
and therefore the presentation will look
more closely at the ongoing EU-funded
OAPEN project (Open Access Publishing
in European Networks, www.oapen.
org) which is devoted to open access
monographs and of which the presenter is
a consortium partner.
In the field of the Humanities (and the
Social Sciences and Theology) the
monograph is still the most preferred
form of research dissemination among
the scholars. However, the scholars
are under great pressure due to the
implementation of bibliometric systems
that relatively measure journal articles
above/higher than the traditional 500+
pages monograph. This puts pressure on
the monograph as genre. But humanists
often do basic research in completely new
fields where material has to be described,
explained and documented for the very
first time. This cannot be done in an
8-pages article.
The small and medium sized (SME)
scholarly publishers are under pressure as
well since they mainly publish hardcopy
monographs. The so-called serial crisis
has seriously affected the publishers since
the library acquisitions have dropped
dramatically over the last 2-3 decades
making it an increasingly unhealthy business
for the scholarly publisher. Will this
be the end of the scholarly monograph?
Will it be the end of scholarly publishers?
Or will we see new ways of monograph
publishing emerge?
An increasingly - still relatively insignificant
- number of scholarly publishers are
experimenting with alternative ways of
publishing monographs. Of these initiatives
e-book publishing and open access
publishing are the most significant.
Museum Tusculanum Press (MTP) at the
University of Copenhagen has - as one of
the first scholarly publishers in the Nordic
Countries - experimented with both of
these alternative publishing forms. Having
published e-books since 2004 the main
business conclusion today is that e-books
don not generate sufficient revenue to be
economically viable. This of course might
change with the up-coming and possible
consolidation of new e-book readers.
So far e-books are mainly sold via
aggregators which are not a financially
viable sales channel for the publishers.
And libraries tend still not to buy single
e-books from the scholarly publishers.
Through participation in two international
open access projects MTP has gained
tremendous insight into open access publishing.
As the only traditional scholarly
publisher MTP was partner in the Nordic
project on scientific journals and open
access (NOAP led by Lund University
Library from 2007-2009 www.ub.uit.
no/wiki/noap) and now as a consortium
partner of the OAPEN project. OAPEN is
the first project where scholarly publishers
across Europe work together in an attempt
to evolve new ways of monograph
publishing in open access and to find
new business models for this. OAPEN is
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