[Sherri Barnes]

I became involved with OA books when I was the Coordinator of the Humanities Collection Group (Huma) at the UC Santa Barbara Library. Open access publishing and scholarly communication librarianship were just beginning to trend in academic libraries.  It was 2009, and it was mostly about journal publishing in STEM fields.  I asked Huma members (the humanities librarians) how do schol comm and open access issues impact the humanities? We convened a study group to explore scholarly communication and open access issues related to the humanities. Targeted themes included, open access monographs, economic models, intellectual property issues, author rights, and advocacy.  We uncovered a lot about the “crisis in scholarly publishing,” and how serials inflation jeopardized the library’s ability to purchase books, and adequately support humanities research and teaching on campus.

The study group ultimately grew into the Library’s Scholarly Communication Program, an education, outreach, and advocacy program to help faculty and students navigate the rapidly changing scholarly communication system.  As OA book publishers began to emerge, I was both the scholarly communication librarian and Huma coordinator, which enabled me to promote OA book initiatives amongst librarians, faculty, and students; as well as advocate for library support of small independent OA presses that shared library values, created great content, and offered authors a more fulfilling mission-driven publishing experience.

Books, open access and others, have been central to my personal and professional life.  I read widely and often.  Professionally, I’ve avoided administrative positions so that I could continue to work directly with the content – books and other information resources.  OA books are important because readers do not have to pay for them; authors retain the rights to their work; they can be shared easily, traveling far and wide, enriching people’s lives; and they provide a means for humanists to take part in the OA revolution.  Open access books are labors of love.

[Sherri Barnes]

This is a huge question, and there are so many complex issues. Much has been achieved, but there is still so much to do. In my world –  I say this because awareness, adoption and advocacy is uneven across libraries and other stakeholders – open access is a new normal, but it took a long time and a lot of education, outreach, and advocacy work to get the word out and change hearts and minds.  Active engagement is still not as widespread as I’d like, but at least OA is no longer unheard of or simply the predatory publishing boogey man. Now faculty members come to the Library for assistance with publisher copyright agreements, OA Policy compliance, starting a new OA journal, finding an OA publisher for their book, and the big perennial ask, where do I get funding for APCs, BPCs, and to start a new journal?

Infrastructure issues around funding, discovery, dissemination and preservation are still critical, especially in the humanities and social sciences.  However, with regard to discovery, my institution catalogs all the contents of DOAB, so that helps immensely with discovery for our users.  Also, as you know, there are currently numerous projects of multi-stakeholder groups giving these issues a lot of thought, and I’m highly optimistic that after decades of dominance and control by commercial publishers that mission driven small and medium scale independent presses, and authors fed-up with the plantation capitalism of commercial publishers, will be a significant part of the future of OA book publishing.

University presses (UPs) and the academic award system are the next major hurdles; I would like to think the last, but change is a constant in scholarly communication.  One trend that I see that will help UPs, which have become more and more market-driven, to return to their mission-driven roots is the trend toward presses reporting to university libraries, collaborating with libraries, or merging with libraries.  Charles Watkinson has a good article about this – https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1044 – from the North American perspective.

With regard to the academic award system, that’s on scholars to pressure administrators to recognize, even encourage, open access publications in the review process, and to require research to be evaluated based on its contents, rather than who published it, essentially outsourcing the review process to publishers.  Of course, librarians are willing to assist where appropriate. With libraries battling commercial publishers, having them act as evaluation proxies sends a double message. When UC recently cancelled our contract with Elsevier, some editors of Elsevier journals were left wondering why should I continue to edit for this journal if my own library isn’t a subscriber?I only touched on a couple issues, I’d love to hear what others think about how much progress has been made, what their experiences are, and where more work needs to be done.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Sherri Barnes.

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