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I interviewed Editor-in-Chief Evangelia Papoutsaki and Editorial Assistant Louise Saunders of ePress, an Open Access scholarly publishing house at UniTec.

How did your Open Access philosophy develop?

The global political economy is one of the key barriers to human social process. Information should be free like the air we breathe and not a market commodity with a profit attached to it.

At ePress we believe that knowledge should be accessible to all. Academics are paid by taxpayers to research and produce knowledge, and the idea that students and the general public must pay for that knowledge does not sit well with us. It should be available to anyone who has the desire to read and use it. Citizens have the right to learn; access to information and knowledge should not be through their wallets.

How did ePress come to be set up?

EPress is an online, quality-assured, in-house publisher for authors and researchers working at, or associated with, Unitec Institute of Technology. As well as there being research produced at Unitec that needed a publishing home, there were other outputs such as performances, mixed media, design and art installations that all had potential as non-traditional publications.

The idea of ePress emerged out of a desire to harness the publishing potential of all these outputs by providing a platform from which they could be shared. Launched in late 2011, ePress started off with the more traditional conference proceedings and reports, and quickly grew to embrace eMedia and books. In 2014 ePress really hit its stride with the publication of two books (Press, Politics and People in Papua New Guinea 1950-1975 by Philip Cass and Ngā Reanga Youth Development Māori Styles by Josie Keelan), an edited collection (Communication Issues in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Giles Dodson and Evangelia Papoutsaki), two wonderful eMedia (Rosebank: Cabbages, Horses and Science by Paul Woodruffe and The Moveable Feast Collective Teach Design by Susan Jowsey) as well publishing conference proceedings for the 31st Annual Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (Translation edited by Christoph Schnoor).

At the beginning of 2015 ePress unveiled new layouts and cover art for our regular series; launched a new series titled Perspectives in Biosecurity Research Series edited by Dan Blanchon and Mel Galbraith; and announced the production of a forthcoming collection titled Conceptual Works in Sports Studies and edited by Lesley Ferkins and Mieke Sieuw. It’s going to be a big year at ePress!

Have you noticed any changes over time in the academic perception of Open Access scholarly publishing?

Yes. The perception used to be very much one of scholarly snobbery. If you weren’t in the right journal, or published to certain standards, it was of no merit to academia. However, things are changing, and fast. The methods for producing knowledge are changing and so too should our method of dissemination. More and more scholars are accepting and embracing the idea that there are other ways to prepare, produce and disseminate information. EPress has a strong focus on eMedia publications and they are a great example of alternative ways to share that knowledge. With these methods have come new researchers, authors and producers who believe that Open Access is the way forward for them. This new way of thinking is producing some truly fun and unique publications that might not have found a home anywhere else. More traditional publishers would not have been able to control their distribution and make a profit.

What has been your experience of publishing with a Creative Commons licence?

When authors submit to ePress we explain our processes and the Creative Commons licensing system. We automatically assign new publications with the Attribution-NonCommercial licence and give the authors time to investigate the other licences, should they wish to change. The response to the licensing, and the one we auto-select for them, has been well received by all of our authors. For those who are new to Creative Commons, they have really embraced the goals of Open Access publishing – though they are publishing with ePress so to an extent they are probably Open Access supporters already!

So far at academic institutions, promoting Open Access has been seen primarily as a library concern, and reporting for the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) primarily as being in the realm of the research office. But by working together there are a number of ways that Open Access and PBRF reporting can benefit each other.

BENEFITS OF OPEN ACCESS TO THE PBRF

1.   The obvious benefit for the institution is the well-known citation advantage for papers available by either gold Open Access (“born” Open Access) or green Open Access (a version of the canonical toll-access paper is deposited in an OA repository). To the extent that PBRF scores depend on institutions being able to demonstrate the impact of their research, this citation advantage is worth money. Likewise, Open Access publications can raise the profile of early career researchers especially, opening up opportunities for national and international collaboration — another factor that can demonstrate peer esteem for the researcher as PBRF portfolios are assessed.

2.   A benefit to the PBRF process comes when considering the arduous tasks of output verification (within the institution) and auditing (at the national level). Verification is a painfully manual process of searching for each output to obtain evidence of its existence — an official pdf from the publisher’s website is preferred — and confirm citation details. A well-established history of indexing makes citations for most journal articles fairly trivial to locate. But for disciplines where books and chapters are more common, or for researchers whose portfolios rely on conference papers, even tracking down the citation details can be an involved process — or impossible, several years after a conference has removed them from its website. If these outputs were available Open Access, they would be far more quickly found, and untold hours of valuable staff time saved.

BENEFITS OF THE PBRF TO OPEN ACCESS

3.   With this vast investment of staff hours in mind, many institutions attempt to merge the processes of verifying outputs for the PBRF and filling the institutional repository (IR). This might be done by manually forwarding metadata with located pdf fulltext to IR staff, or by an integrated system gathering and sharing metadata and fulltext in common. Provided author permission can be obtained, publisher policies are amenable, and/or an institutional mandate applies, this can be very successful at increasing the amount of literature available Open Access.

There are limitations. Metadata requirements differ for the different purposes. Worse, PBRF verification typically requires the published version of a paper, which copyright generally precludes the institutional repository from reproducing; whereas the institutional repository will often need an author’s version, which is useless for verification purposes. One blunt solution can be to encourage researchers to submit all versions of their paper, and let support staff sort out which ones are needed where.

4.   Knowing all the benefits that Open Access provides for PBRF reporting and the resulting funding can make it easier to advocate for researcher and management support of Open Access initiatives. These might include advising researchers of high-impact Open Access journals in their fields that they could be publishing in; supporting the costs of Article Processing Charnges (APC) where other funding is unavailable; or even implementing an Open Access mandate across the institution.

Collaboration between the library and research office — and, if implementing a new system, IT services — isn’t trivial. Like a three-legged stool, all need to be equal partners, communicating and appreciating the quite different languages, cultures and priorities of each team. But then it opens up scope for future collaboration when we come to look at other mutually beneficial issues like research data and funding grants.

While academia is in the midst of a general funding crisis, multinational publishing houses are making vast profits from disseminating publicly funded research. New Open Access publishing models provide cost-efficient methods for disseminating research findings, eradicate excess profits by publishers and massively widen the readership of scholarly works. The government recognises this but their current reform agenda is nowhere near bold enough.

Academics as a rule do not write their books to make money—in fact most receive only token royalties for their work. They do it to satisfy research assessments, to get hired and promoted and, most of all, to inform readers, spark debate, and contribute to the intellectual richness of their discipline. Commercial publishers reap high profits while putting up several barriers to dissemination of research results. First by imposing restrictions on copyright; second by deciding which areas of research reach publication— a decision often based on marketing considerations which penalizes cutting-edge and niche subjects. Third by imposing high prices to readers and libraries in order to maintain high profits and an obsolete infrastructure. Moreover publishers increasingly bundle their numerous services into single large dissemination packages (so called ‘Big Deals’), thus extracting large profits from libraries and universities while further restricting access to research by readers outside the academic community. The average prices for an academic book is now around £50, with total sales running at around only 200 or 300 per title globally, predominantly to libraries in the US.

We reached a point where university libraries cannot afford to buy access to the research done by scholars in their own institutions as journal costs are now too expensive even for the wealthiest universities.

The report by Dame Janet Finch and subsequent new policies announce by the UK Research Councils (RCUK) fully support Open Access publication for all UK publically funded research. While these are important steps in the right direction, the Finch recommendations and RCUK policies fall well short of pushing through the wholesale reforms required to make Open Access publishing the prime outlet for research results. The Finch/RCUK approach sustains the existing publishing landscape in journal publishing: the provision of Open Access articles would be paid by the author instead of by the reader. Whilst this will certainly force publishers and researchers to make their work available to readers for free, it will be down to the existing publishers to set the price authors are required to pay. This would de allow commercial publishers to maintain their exorbitant profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer and academic research budgets—albeit through a different payment channel, author charges rather than reader charges. It will also introduce a new series of publishing distortions. Researchers working at institutions with large budgets to pay for the dissemination of their staffs’ work will have access to the top journals. Internal rationing of available publishing funds may favour some researchers over others.

And these distortions will be exacerbated even further when it comes to the publication of monographs, where publishing charges are likely to be even higher. In fact the Finch Report says very little of book publishing, concluding that “it is difficult to encompass monographs within the discussion about promoting wider access to publications”. Despite the progress with scientific journals, there are very few viable Open Access publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences, especially when it comes to publishing entire books.

Yet there is a simple solution available. It is time for members of the scholarly community to stop waiting for government legislation, funders or publishers to wholeheartedly embrace Open Access, and to recognise that commercial publishers are not required in the process of assessing quality or disseminating research findings and that they can take matters into their own hands. Digital publishing has changed the way books are produced and distributed. Scholars are accessing information increasingly (or, in the case of most undergraduates, exclusively) online. We no longer need expensive printing and distribution networks: the Internet provides an instant, global and cheap publishing platform.

I have been part of a group of academics in Cambridge and London who were frustrated by the commercial publishers’ inability to adopt an Open Access model. We set out to discover whether Open Access could be a sustainable model for publication, and founded Open Book Publishers in 2008. In a small team, and on a shoe-string budget, we publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, Open Access monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We do this not by charging authors, but through a ‘freemium’ model: we make all of our monographs freely readable online, but, to cover our modest costs, charge a reasonable price for printed editions and certain digital formats. The model is incredibly fast and cost effective, and allows us to retain the quality and academic rigour of a traditional university press.

Our model is now well-honed and successfully spreading knowledge around the world: our books are currently averaging around 500 views per month which is more than most printed academic books see in an entire lifetime. They are accessed by people in over 180 countries (most academic books are only available in Western university libraries), with large numbers coming from the developing world.

Of course our is not the only way ahead for OA publishing in the humanities and social sciences, but by providing a sustainable model we are hoping that other academics and institutions will take note and feel emboldened to launch similar initiatives.  There's no reason why there shouldn't be a creditable Open Access book publisher in every university around the world, but it is going to require a collective shift in the academic mind-set. And an important part of this will be for academic institutions (appointment boards and libraries) to recognise the changing world of publishing and the active role they can play in it. And for funders to recognise that sustaining a publishing model which is obsolete and costly stifles industrial innovation. Our once beloved university presses used to perform a necessary and noble service, but they are no longer serving our needs. The future of our work’s dissemination is in our own hands—precisely where it should be. The question is whether we are prepared to hold on to it.