Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/139

 differences in scale. The people who perform the labour of publishing, however, move about between jobs and set up new companies, as in any other ﬁeld. That the same individuals, with the same skillsets, could have different reputational appeal to scholars based upon brand illustrates, once more, the idiosyncrasies of prestige as it currently stands.

The differences between books and journals, in these respects, are often over-stated. There is a nonetheless pressing need to ensure that the transition to an open-access model preserves those aspects of the monograph that are of use to scholars. On this front, even if hardliners believe the differences between books and journals to be overstated (because they are ‘merely’ differences of scale), they should nonetheless see the commensurately larger responsibility to ensure that the work of scholars during a transition period does not become collateral damage. Monographs may merely take longer, or they may never come to open-access fruition. This is not to say, though, that experiments are not under way and it is to an examination of current projects that I will now turn.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of open-access monograph project currently in existence. The ﬁrst of these consists of social scientiﬁc research projects investigating economic and academico-structural changes engendered by open-access monographs. The second grouping is a band of publishers and business model intermediaries, who are either already publishing open-access books, or facilitating such action. In this portion of the chapter I will detail the ﬁrst group of these projects and the contribution that they make to the ﬁeld. The second group will be explored under the section ‘Economic models for monographs’ below. As a preliminary and crude observation: the ﬁeld is changing incredibly quickly and some of these projects have had the ground shift beneath them even as they proceed. As with all social science, this is the risk; social environments are incredibly complex phenomena and academic publishing is no exception. Finally, for this section’s introduction, it is important to note that, while I have tried to include as many as possible, the list of projects below is not comprehensive. Instead, it is hoped that