Monographs, Open Access, and the Persistence of Print

By Erich van Rijn (Director, University of California Press, Oakland, CA 94607) https://www.ucpress.edu ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1197-2887

This special feature of Against the Grain focuses on a Charleston Conference session that explored some of the ramifications of a study conducted by the Association of University Presses in partnership with ITHAKA Strategy and Research. The study was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it explored the impact on sales of print editions of open access monographs. Print sales of monographs — to both individual consumers and to libraries — have been central to university press publishing for well over a century. During that time, the sales model has come to underpin most university presses’ sustainability strategies. With few exceptions, nearly all university presses today are operated to a greater or lesser extent on a cost recovery basis within their host institutions. In other words, their activities are expected to generate revenue that helps underwrite their costs of operation. Sales of monographs have been and continue to be central to most presses’ revenue generating efforts. Yet, even in the digital age, those sales have continued to be fueled by an ongoing reader predilection for print, which makes up the vast majority of university press sales revenue.1 This fact has meant that, unlike our cousins in the journals business, the university press book publishing business continues to have a strong tie to print products.

Emerging open access (OA) publishing models that include the distribution of an electronic version of a book that is free to download and read is forcing university presses to question whether print sales can continue to meaningfully contribute in the way that they have historically to the sustainability proposition for monograph publishing. If an electronic version of a book is freely available, will print continue to sell? This is a question that we sought to answer through our study. My colleague, John Sherer, Director of the University of North Carolina Press, and I led this study in partnership with Brenna McLaughlin, Research and Communications Director of the Association of University Presses. We collaborated with Laura Brown, Senior Advisor, and Roger Schonfeld, Vice President, Organizational Strategy and Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums, both at ITHAKA S+R, who analyzed the data collected in our study and synthesized it into a report including recommendations. Laura Brown, John Sherer, and I presented our findings at the 2023 Charleston Conference, and we invited Miranda Bennett, the Director of Shared Collections at the California Digital Library, to present the library perspective on our findings.

The hallmark of a good piece of research is that it leads to further questions, and this research project is no exception. A year has passed since the publication of our study, and my co-presenters and I still have unanswered questions that are worthy of further research. In the first piece, in this special collection, Bennett tackles the question of why, if a freely downloadable eBook version is available, would a library wish to purchase print at all? Our study focused largely on aggregate ongoing sales of print, but we thought less about the various channels through which those print books are sold. While many of us know why consumers might favor print, Bennett addresses why a library would continue to favor purchasing print in at least some cases. Her conclusions are valuable, and also address some larger issues that inform libraries’ collection and preservation strategies. While we do live in an increasingly digital age, the technological and licensing complexities involved in collecting and lending eBooks forces libraries to continue to consider purchasing print when they wish to see a book be part of their ongoing collections.

If libraries and individuals have reasons for continuing to purchase print, then publishers need to think through their strategies for continuing to publish print even when an OA eBook is available. In our study, Laura Brown presented fairly concrete recommendations for how publishers should continue to approach managing print editions and maximizing the revenue they derive from them. But in her contribution to this special feature, Brown also reflects on her co-authored study with Kevin Guthrie and others, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,”2 and thinks through some of the unanswered questions in our study. Importantly, print sales are but one element of a university press’s title-level cost recovery strategies. What are the other components, and how do they contribute to a more comprehensive picture of what financial contributions are really necessary to sustainably publish open access monographs? What other models exist that can help enhance a press’s global impact through open access publishing? These are important questions to answer.

But, do we know that removing barriers to access enhances a press’s, and indeed a university’s, global impact? Yes, argues John Sherer, and he shares data that supports this claim. However, unlike the studies of global impact of OA book publication, previous conversations about the sustainability of OA monograph publishing have tended to rely too much on anecdotal evidence rather than hard data. Thus, when Sherer first conceived of the idea for this study, it was to bring a more data-driven approach to presses’ collective decision-making about open access publishing. Sherer emphasizes that the data show us that open access titles are exposing scholarship to historically marginalized communities in ways that our traditional monographs were not. How can we use the data that we now have in hand about how print sales contribute to the sustainability of the open access monograph publishing proposition, and what questions do we still need to answer in order to create a more data-driven approach to transforming our distribution models?

For me, the appeal of this study is that it was among the first to ask questions about the revenue side of the publishing equation. There have been numerous studies on the costs of publishing a monograph, but if presses are being run as cost recovery operations, then we have to address the revenue side of the equation. Is there an opportunity cost to publishing a monograph in an open access model that increases equitable access and impact, but that could have been published in a paid access model that generates more revenue to support our operations? Can we quantify what the delta is between revenue generated by a monograph published in a paid access model and one published in an open access model? It has been well documented that most presses are not profitable, so forgoing any amount of revenue at all will be harmful to presses’ bottom lines. Most presses achieve sustainability not just through earned revenue, but also through university subsidy, philanthropy, fundraising, profitable side businesses, or some combination of all of these. In order to migrate increasing numbers of titles into open access models and thereby enhance the impact of the scholarship we publish, we will need more data on what revenues a typical non-open access monograph actually generates because this will be the starting point for many university presses to think about transformation. This study has now demonstrated that the sales model can make a contribution to reaching that number. What the remainder is and how to get there is what we are still exploring and collectively trying to figure out as we navigate a path to greater amounts of open scholarship.

Endnotes

1. ______. 2024b. “AAP StatShot Annual Report: Publishing Revenues Totaled $29.9 Billion for 2023 - AAP.” AAP – the Voice of American Publishing. August 22, 2024. https://publishers.org/news/aap-statshot-annual-reportpublishing-revenues-totaled-29-9-billion-for-2023

2. Griffiths, Rebecca J., Matthew Rascoff, Laura Brown, and Kevin M. Guthrie. “University Publishing In A Digital Age.” Ithaka S+R. Last Modified 26 July 2007. https:// doi.org/10.18665/sr.22345.