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 Finally, and perhaps most usefully at present, the OAPEN-UK project conducted two case studies of learned societies (the Royal Historical Society [RHS] and the Regional Studies Association [RSA]), as groups who have, in some instances, objected to the new business models proposed for gold open access. While OAPEN-UK is a project examining monographs, this particular part of their qualitative research situated its work on learned societies within the broader journal landscape, hence there may be some slippage in the below section between the formats. In the case of the eminent RHS, business models were clearly a concern, despite ‘all interviewees. . . stating their ﬁrm support for the principle of open access’. However, interestingly, at the point of this case study, ‘the ﬁnancial issues were not the main concern for most interviewees’ when considering OA. Instead, it was ‘the effect on volunteer networks, and the academic freedom of Society members’ that were deemed the most problematic. As the latter issue of academic freedom has already been covered above, I will not reiterate those arguments here. The former argument is more difﬁcult to place, however. One interviewee ‘suggested that removing proﬁts from publishing would also remove the “fun”’, by which it was meant that part of the reward to society volunteers (upon whom much depends for their labour) was in ‘seeing their effort and passion turned into book sales, especially when the book performs unexpectedly well’, an aspect that was intensiﬁed when the proﬁts went back into supporting the discipline. Conversely, though, ‘another interviewee suggested that explicitly putting a price on the work done to publish a book, through an APC or similar, would anger academics who give their time for free to undertake peer review’.40 This is a curious statement because, while it has been estimated that the unpaid non-cash costs of peer review undertaken worldwide by academics is £1.9 billion per year, many book publishers do pay reviewers for their time, given the proportionately larger degree of labour involved.41

The OAPEN-UK case study of the Regional Studies Association took a slightly different tack, with the primary concerns being ‘the effect upon scholarship for their members, and the effect upon the Association’s business models’. The former of these points was linked both to ‘ensuring trusted brands [and especially the Society’s brand] are not undermined’ and to an emphasis on maintaining high