Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/138



Why should the monograph be seen differently?

In the contemporary technological landscape, several factors that differentiate the monograph from journals are destroyed. The core technological and labour differences that remain are larger scales of typesetting, copyediting and proofreading. That said, differences of distribution channel remain, at least for now. Instead, it is clear that the differentiating factors for the monograph are social: they involve publisher expertise and list gatekeeping. Many hard-line advocates of OA would disavow that even these functions are necessary and that they will be eroded over time. For now, however, regardless of such speculation, there are signiﬁcantly more barriers, both social and technological, to entry into book publication than into journals.

These barriers to entry are simultaneously a reﬂection of the differences in scale noted above and also a result of a lack of transition strategies for new start-up publishers. In the journal sector there has already been a small but growing degree of publisher disintermediation (in which academics adopt a do-it-yourself approach to publishing, removing the intermediary) through the development and use of freely available tools, such as the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems: the software that hosted almost 5,700 active journals at the end of 2013. Until very recently, no such alternative has been available for monographs, although this is now changing with the launch of Open Monograph Press. Because platform development – an effort replicated over and over by many presses who seek a unique online presence – requires a large degree of initial organisational capital investment, there is a greater monetary barrier to entry.24 At the same time, however, scholars are less willing to commit their monographs into unproven hands. Writing a monograph is a substantial commitment of a magnitude many times greater than that of producing a journal article. For this reason, scholars expect a commensurate return on their investment, largely in the form of reputational capital. This will not be provided by new presses until they have a signiﬁcant number of high-quality titles under their brand, regardless of how experienced the team members may be. It will, however, be harder for new presses to attract highquality submissions because they do not yet hold prestige; this is a chicken and egg situation. In both cases, these are, again, merely