Aaup Statement On Open Access

The Association of American University Presses
71 W 23rd Street, Suite 901, New York, NY 10010
www.aaupnet.org 212-989-1010 fax 212-989-0275
aaup statement on
open access
SUMMARY
The core mission of university presses has always been to disseminate knowledge to the widest
possible audience. Members of the AAUP have eagerly developed new ways of fulﬁlling
that mission by making the best use of modern technology to cut costs and achieve even
wider distribution of their publications than has been possible in the world of print, often
in collaboration with libraries and scholarly societies. Prominent examples include Project
MUSE, the History Cooperative, Cambridge Companions Online, Columbia’s International
Affairs Online, MIT’s CogNet, Michigan’s digitalculturebooks, Oxford Scholarship Online, and
Virginia’s Rotunda.
The increasing enthusiasm for open access as a model for scholarly communication, which grew
out of pressure to relieve the ﬁnancial burden on libraries of maintaining subscriptions to STM
journals, presents new challenges and new opportunities for university presses. In its pure form,
open access calls for an entirely new funding model, in which the costs of publishing research
articles in journals are paid for by authors or by a funding agency, and readers can have access to
these publications for free.
However, open access need not be limited to journals and can also be achieved through other
models, such as those that combine some form of market-based cost-recovery with free access
for users a certain length of time after initial publication, or that offer free access to one form
of publication and paid access to others. These and other models are currently being tested
and reﬁned by the members of AAUP in partnership with the academic community. Bypassing
this laboratory stage of experimentation and development and plunging straight into pure open
access, as attractive as it may sound in theory, runs the serious risk of destabilizing scholarly
communications in ways that would disrupt the progress of scholarship and the advancement
of knowledge.
The members of AAUP will continue to collaborate with all their partners in the university
community to design, test, and deploy new, sustainable methods of publishing that will provide
increased access to the fruits of scholarship, while maintaining the rigor and high standards of
peer review, editorial selection, manuscript development, visual presentation, and international
marketing and distribution for which they are known throughout the world.
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STATEMENT
From the founding of the ﬁrst American university presses in the late 19th century, the purpose
of the university press has always been to assist the university in fulﬁlling its noble mission
“to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily
lectures—but far and wide,” in the famous words of President Daniel Coit Gilman of the Johns
Hopkins University.1 Universities acknowledged then that for most scholarly works there was
insufﬁcient commercial demand to sustain a publishing operation on sales alone, and recognized
an obligation to establish and subsidize their own presses in order to serve the mission of
universities to share the knowledge they generate.
Knowledge is expensive to produce, and requires—in addition to the scholar’s own work—
knowledgeable editorial selection and careful vetting as well as a high level of quality in
copyediting, design, production, marketing, and distribution in order to achieve the excellence
for which American universities have come to be widely praised.2 Universities have made
substantial investments in their presses, and the staffs who run them are expert at what they do.
The system of scholarly communication that these presses support has played a vital role in the
spread of knowledge worldwide. Calls for changing this system need to take careful account of
the costs of doing so, not just for individual presses but for their parent universities, and for the
scholarly societies that also contribute in major ways to the current system.
And, indeed, while proud of their achievements, university presses and scholarly societies have
never been averse to change. Rather, being embedded in the culture of higher education that
values experimentation and advances in knowledge, presses have themselves been open to new
ways of facilitating scholarly communication and have been active participants in the process.
Prominent examples from the last decade include Project MUSE, the History E-Book Project,
the History Cooperative, California’s AnthroSource and eScholarship Editions, Cambridge
Companions Online, Chicago’s online edition of The Founders’ Constitution, Columbia’s
International Affairs Online (CIAO) and Gutenberg-e, The New Georgia Encyclopedia, MIT
CogNet, Oxford Scholarship Online and Oxford’s recent experiments with open access journals,
Virginia’s Rotunda, and Michigan’s new press and library collaboration digitalculturebooks.
The phrase “open access” has come to symbolize the pressure for change in the system, largely
in response to the ﬁnancial burden on academic libraries of maintaining subscriptions to
commercially published journals in science, technology, and medicine (STM). Without reform to
this system many fear that the results of new research will increasingly be accessible to an ever-
shrinking number of the wealthiest universities. Hence the call has arisen for a new publishing
model of open access that will ensure the continued ability of universities to disseminate
knowledge “far and wide.”
The well-known Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), in promoting a solution to the high
price of STM journals, deﬁnes open access as “permitting any users to read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass
them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without ﬁnancial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.”3 In
principle, this deﬁnition of open access could be applied to all types of scholarly publishing,
and calls for widespread use of institutional repositories and for self-archiving by individual
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scholars in order to promote such open access are by no means limited to just STM journal
literature. Although the debate over open access has centered almost exclusively on one sector
of publishing, STM journals, there is no reason to limit the discussion to that sector and indeed,
given the interconnectedness of knowledge, it is unwise not to explore the implications of open
access for all ﬁelds of knowledge lest an unfortunate new “digital divide” should arise between
ﬁelds and between different types of publishing. The recently proposed legislation known as the
Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) would affect a wide range of research
that receives funding from 11 federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the
Environmental Protection Agency, and the Departments of Energy, Education, and Defense.
The American Council of Learned Societies, in its 2006 report on “Cyberinfrastructure for the
Humanities and Social Sciences,” has advocated such open access for all social science and
humanities scholarship. However, there is a wide range of models that can be subsumed under
the generic term “open access,” with both risks and beneﬁts to the entire system of scholarly
communications that are as yet not fully understood.
The member presses of AAUP, which include scholarly societies, recognize that they have an
obligation to confront the many challenges—economic, legal, and technological—to the existing
system and to participate with all willing partners, both within and outside the university, to
strengthen and expand scholarly communications. Many of them, often in collaboration with
research libraries, are already experimenting with new approaches, including varieties of open
access that seek to balance the mission of scholarly communication with its costs.
Those costs today are covered by a combination of institutional subsidies and sales in the
marketplace. On average, AAUP university-based members receive about 10% of their revenue
as subsidies from their parent institution, 85% from sales, and 5% from other sources. Therefore
the AAUP believes it is important to keep an open mind about what constitutes open access,
since some kinds of open access are compatible with a market-based model. The National
Academies Press, for instance, makes all of its books available online for free full-text browsing
worldwide while offering both downloadable PDFs and print copies for sale.
For the more radical approaches that abandon the market as a viable basis for the recovery of
costs in scholarly publishing and instead try to implement a model that has come to be known as
the “gift economy” or the “subsidy economy,”4 the AAUP urges that the following points be kept
in mind:
1) BOAI-type open access will require large contributions from either the authors or
other sources (including foundations and libraries, which pay “member” fees instead
of paying for subscriptions). Scholars at less wealthy institutions or those with no
institutional afﬁliations may experience greater difﬁculty in publishing unless fees
are waived or reduced (a process that will increase the burden on other authors, who
will have to pay higher fees to offset the waivers). This will be especially true for
monographs, the publishing cost for which now runs around $25,000 to $30,000 (for
an average monograph of 250 pages with no illustrations) and would still be close to
$20,000 to $25,000 if no printing were done or inventory maintained by the publisher.5
While inequities among users may be resolved by open-access publishing, they may
resurface as inequities among authors.
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2) Costs for scholarly communication overall will not change radically, but merely be
shifted from one sector of the university to another.6 For university presses and scholarly
societies currently, only 17% to 20% of the publishing costs of monographs are spent
on manufacturing, so most of their other expenses will still need to be covered.7 Even
so, many end users will prefer to print out what they want to read, especially longer
articles and books, using printing devices that are less economical than dedicated printing
presses. Moreover, since traditional print publishing will not disappear overnight, there
will be the continuing costs of maintaining that part of the system in addition to the new
costs of supporting online publishing ventures. Finally, if faculty are asked themselves to
become publishers, they will spend more of their time performing tasks for which they
are not trained and less on the teaching and research for which they are, resulting in an
overall loss in economic efﬁciency for the university as a whole.
3) Requirements for fully free-to-user open access publishing of journal articles, whether
through the journals themselves or by way of open institutional repositories or authors’
self-archiving, will undermine existing well-regarded services like Project MUSE (the
electronic database of more than 300 journals in the humanities and social sciences
jointly operated by the library and press at Johns Hopkins) that rely on institutional site
licensing to be sustained. BOAI-style open access is inherently incompatible with site
licensing as a model for journal publishing and archiving.
4) In 2005, university presses recovered 90% of their operating costs, roughly $500
million, from sales. Of that $500 million, sales to libraries account for 15% to 20%, or
$75 to $100 million. The rest comes from sales to general and college bookstores, to
online retailers, and directly to individual scholars.8 Under free-to-user open access,
universities that operate presses would need to be prepared to decide how much of the
cost of maintaining the system they would want to continue bearing and how much they
would expect other universities to absorb by providing full or partial faculty subsidies
for publication of both journal articles and monographs. Any university opting for full
support could expect its costs to rise dramatically. Conversely, if any parent university
decided to maintain only its current support, other universities not now supporting the
system, or doing so only through small and occasional subsidies for faculty publication,
would also see their costs increase. Offsetting these costs would be whatever amounts
their libraries would save in journal subscriptions and monograph purchases, but since
commercial publishers (and many society publishers) would not have the option of
converting to a full “subsidy economy,” those amounts would be equivalent to only what
libraries currently spend on university press publications.
5) If commercial publishers should decide to stop publishing research under the
constrained circumstances envisioned by advocates of free-to-user open access, what
happens to the journals abandoned by these publishers? How many of them could
universities afford to subsidize through faculty grants? How much could universities
with presses increase the output of their presses to accommodate the monographs now
published commercially? The answers to these questions could involve signiﬁcant new
capital investments. In addition, the case of scholarly societies under BOAI-style open
access is particularly worrying. As non-proﬁt organizations committed to supporting
effective scholarly communications and professional standards in their ﬁelds, these
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societies provide a wide range of services to scholars and scholarship, including annual
conferences, professional development opportunities, recognition of scholarly excellence,
and statistical information on such matters as enrollment and employment in their ﬁelds,
as well as respected publishing programs. Whether a given society’s publishing activities
underwrite other services or must be supported by other revenues, funding for essential
professional and scholarly activities would be jeopardized by a mandated shift to free-to-
user open access, increasing the ﬁnancial burdens on individual scholars as both authors
and professionals.
For university presses, unlike commercial and society publishers, open access does not
necessarily pose a threat to their operation and their pursuit of the mission to “advance
knowledge, and to diffuse it...far and wide.” Presses can exist in a gift economy for at least
the most scholarly of their publishing functions if costs are internally reallocated (from library
purchases to faculty grants and press subsidies). But presses have increasingly been required by
their parent universities to operate in the market economy, and the concern that presses have for
the erosion of copyright protection directly reﬂects this pressure.9 Any decision to switch from a
market to a gift economy requires very careful thought and planning. The AAUP and its member
presses welcome the opportunity to collaborate with university administrators, librarians, and
faculty in designing new publishing models, mindful that it is important to protect what is most
valuable about the existing system, which has served the scholarly community and the general
public so well for over a century, while undertaking reforms to make the system work better for
everyone in the future.
February 2007
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NOTES
1 Daniel Coit Gilman, “Fifth Annual Report of the Johns Hopkins University,” (Johns Hopkins University,
1880), 6.
2 For a description of how acquiring editors work to add value to monograph publishing, see Sanford G.
Thatcher, “The ‘Value Added’ in Editorial Acquisitions,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 30,
No. 2 (January 1999): http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/302/302_thatcher.html. For copyediting,
see Silvia Hunter, “Why Copy Editors Matter,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 36, No. 1 (October
2004) and David Henige, “Commas, Christians, and Editors,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 36, No.
2 (January 2005). For design, see Robert Tombs et al., “Why Design Is Important: Five Designers Speak to
Non-Designers,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 33, No. 1 (October 2001): http://www.utpjournals.
com/product/jsp/331/design4.html. For a more general statement about what university presses contribute
of value to the system of scholarly communication, see http://www.aaupnet.org/news/value.html.
3 As quoted by Peter Suber, “Open Access Overview,” http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
(last updated March 10, 2006).
4 Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the
Humanities and Social Sciences (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, July 18, 2006), 30.
5 For an analysis of the costs of publishing monographs, see Marlie Wasserman, “How Much Does It Cost
to Publish a Monograph and Why?” Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, No. 1 (September 1998).
The ﬁgures used here include some upward adjustment for inﬂation since 1998.
6 Some analysts believe that costs may even increase with open-access publishing: “It is proprietary
user-pays publishing that is keeping down the costs of scholarly communications by keeping those costs
within the conﬁnes of a strained library’s budget, costs that will rise with open access as authors are
stimulated to spend whatever they can to advance their careers, their professional reputations, and their
sense of themselves.” Joseph J. Esposito, “The Devil You Don’t Know: The Unexpected Future of Open
Access Publishing,” First Monday, Vol. 9, No. 8 (August 2004), 11: http://www.ﬁrstmonday.org/issues/
issue9_8/esposito/index.html. Certainly, it is true that publishing monographs that take full advantage of
the technology to provide extensive hyperlinking, ancillary materials, multilayered texts, etc. as in
Gutenberg-e or the History E-Book Project will be a good deal more costly than publishing standard
monographs in print editions. And so will books as they evolve from “the primal book” into “the
processed book.” See Esposito, “The Processed Book,” First Monday, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 2003, updated
October 2005): http://www.ﬁrstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/esposito/index.html
7 Operating Statistics 2005, Association of American University Presses.
8 Ibid.
9 See Sanford G. Thatcher, “Fair Use: A Double-Edged Sword,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 32,
No. 1 (October 2000): http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/321/fair1.html.
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