What Is the Point of Academic Books?

In Pacific Standard, Noah Berlatsky examines a paradox at the heart of scholarly publishing: university press books exist to disseminate knowledge, yet high prices and small print runs keep most of them out of readers’ hands. The article weighs open access as a way out of the bind.

Clifford Anderson, director of scholarly communications at Vanderbilt University Libraries, points to a couple of ways open access might work financially. “One model,” he says, “is to charge authors a fee for publishing their monographs in open access. These fees may be paid either out of faculty research funds or by library-administered funds set up to defray such costs.” Another option would be “to offer open-access versions on the Web and charge for premium versions—such as print and Kindle editions.”

Anderson also notes that some presses are already experimenting with open-access books, such as the University of Michigan Press’s Digital Culture Books imprint. Read more …