Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/137

 those locked within a disciplinary discussion often cannot give the same perspective as a voice with expertise in publishing and argument, but less immanently placed with respect to the subject.

In the realm of technical production, there are differences between monographs and journals, but these are predominantly now the result of legacy systems. There is no reason why books should not feature the same XML-ﬁrst workﬂow that is widely used in journal production. After all, the technology behaves in the same way when dealing with 8,000 words or 80,000 words. There are, however, as I have implied, some differences. Most notably, monographs are distributed through aggregation channels with comparatively long lead times and this explains the ways in which the same marketing copy arrives at all the various different outlets (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones etc. all get their data from the same sources). Likewise, this digital-ﬁrst23 format now gives an easy route to print; print on demand (POD). This advance in technology has enabled the total uniﬁcation of technological processes for print and digital.

If, then, production differences between monographs and journals are primarily of scale, rather than of kind, there are nonetheless difﬁculties that come with such a scaling, predominantly in the legal realm. Within a monograph there is a far greater scope for copyright infringement as more space is granted and a greater number of sources are deployed. While open licensing of scholarly works could help in this regard (as seen earlier in Chapter 3), obtaining permission to reproduce images and texts that are under copyright can be an incredibly expensive process. This cost is massively increased within a gratis open-access environment since, basing their calculations off a legacy model of ‘print runs’, an openly accessible, digital reproduction is often treated as though it were an inﬁnite run. The logic behind this is that if something is distributed gratis on the internet, the ability to exchange it at a ﬁnancial price point is lost, which again ties in well with this work’s previous analysis of the tension between the open-access work and the commodity form. As will be seen below in my discussion of business models, new ways of thinking about this are needed if open access for monographs is to succeed.