 I'm the Senior Director of Scholarship and Policy at the Association of Research Libraries. Happy Open Access Week, and welcome to the first of two sessions of the 2020 Tome Stakeholders' Meeting, our author roundtable. The second session, Where Are We Now, will begin at 1 o'clock Eastern on the same Zoom link. On behalf of the Association of Research Libraries, I would like to enthusiastically welcome the five authors of Tome-funded monographs in our roundtable this morning. And all of you for joining us to hear their experiences with open access and their thoughts on the future of OA monographs in their disciplines. I would also like to thank the Planning Committee for this program, Peter Potter, Barbara Klein Pope, Eric Van Rine, David Hansen and Kate McCready. So thank you for putting together a terrific program. Tome is a partnership among ARL, AU Presses, and the Association of American Universities. As the host of today's Zoom, a reminder that this meeting is governed by the ARL Code of Conduct. Over to you, Peter. Thanks, Judy, and good morning, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Peter Burgary, and I have the privilege of serving as the Executive Director of the Association of University Presses. My pronouns are he and him, and I am speaking to you today from the traditional and ancestral lands of the Mikasaki and Seminole people. I won't continue much further on for now. I think I'll have a few things to say at the end of this session. I'm very excited to hear what our author panel has to say, and in general, very excited over the energy and momentum that the project seems to have garnered over the last 12 months. So looking forward to a good day's conversation. Over to you, Jessica. Hi. All right, good morning, everybody. I'm Jessica Sibyak. I am the Deputy Vice President for Federal Relations and Council for Policy at the Association of American Universities. Like my colleagues at, excuse me, ARL and AU Presses, sorry, we have so many acronyms in Washington, DC. Sometimes hard to keep them straight. But like my colleagues, I am thrilled to be here, and this is a very important initiative for AAU, and we've certainly been thinking of late amidst this pandemic, the need for open access and widely available materials, scholarly materials on the Internet is more important now than it has ever been when people literally can't go to the library and sometimes physically can't leave their home. So we are thrilled and looking very much forward to the conversation today. So now it is my privilege and pleasure to introduce Peter Potter. Peter is a visiting program officer at ARL. And he has really been absolutely central to ensuring that, that Tom continues to evolve and develop and really, you know, also take the liberty of speaking for Peter Berkeley and Judy and saying that I don't think we would be here today without Peter. So without further ado, I will, I will turn it over to you. Yes, I appreciate that. So, thanks to everyone for joining us today. I'm really excited about having this panel today. As Jessica told you, my name is Peter Potter, I'm publishing director at Virginia Tech and the ARL visiting program officer for Tom. And we have a distinguished group of scholars here today who are going to share their experiences with open access, and their thoughts on the future of open access monographs in their disciplines. I know a word about Tom, just as background for anyone who's relatively new to this. Angela next slide. So Tom is a five year pilot project launched in 2017 by the Association of American universities the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of University presses. There are other scholars universities libraries and presses in pursuit of a common goal, a sustainable open monograph ecosystem. Next slide please. So how it works in very basic terms is that participating universities provide baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs. The grants go directly to publishers and the participating university presses the publishers commit to producing digital open access editions, openly licensing them under creative commons licenses and depositing the files and selected repositories. We will publish print editions as they normally would. Part of what we did with Tom was to try to maintain as much of the traditional peer review process that publishers are used to and disrupting as little as possible the the workflows of university presses. We believe that Tom increases the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opens up knowledge to a truly global leadership readership. We're starting the fourth year of the pilot. So we are at a really at a pivotal point. Now for a few words about the format of today's discussion. It will be what I hope is a lightly structured conversation among a diverse group of authors. And I'll just say as moderator I expect my job to be much easier than Kristen welkers will be tonight at the presidential debate in Nashville. Much easier. So, next slide please. All of our distinguished authors have published at least one book. Some more than that. Some of the books have been open access, but not all. And not all are Tom authors. We wanted to have a range of experience to bring to this panel. And although not all Tom authors all all have some direct experience with open access publishing which they will tell you about. We have a it's an interesting group here we have two historians and anthropologist one scholar whose work spans multiple disciplines in the medical sciences and humanities and a scholar of modern Chinese studies. So, without further ado, let me introduce the panel and we'll get the conversation going. I'll say that I have a, the format today we have, we'll go for about 50 minutes, and I have a set of questions that I'll use to create, get the discussion going. If you have questions, please put them in the q amp a. I'm not sure that it'll depend on whether we get to them in this section. I don't know how the outgoing through these questions that I have goes, but when we take a break, after about 50 minutes will take about a 10 minute break, then afterwards we'll have open discussion and take questions from anyone who has questions. We have our authors are Ed ballison, who is professor of history and public policy and vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. Angus Bergen is associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. Nicholas Copeland is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of sociology at Virginia Tech. Deborah Lena Roy is professor of neuroscience and behavioral biology and women's gender and sexuality studies at Emory University. And she's also taking on a new role at Emory as senior associate dean of faculty for the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Finally, we have Emily Wilcox, who is associate professor of modern Chinese studies and associate chair and director of graduate studies in the Department of Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. Welcome everybody. I'd like each of you to give your name and affiliation, as well as tell us what your most recent monograph that you've published, and kind of a little bit about the experience of that so why don't we start with Ed. Thanks, Peter. So my most recent book which came out in 2017 was fraud and American history from Barnum to Matt off that came out with Princeton University Press. And it was not open access. And had a another volume come up that same year actually an edited collection policy shock, recalibrating risk and regulation after oil spills, your disasters, and financial crises that was co edited with three other Duke faculty members. Cambridge University Press also not open access, and I will tell you that I'll say a little bit about the second volume actually because that one came in with such a high price point that I feel like the dissemination of it has been really limited in in ways that are very disappointing actually to me, and to my co authors co editors and the other and scholars who contributed to the volume. So it's actually reinforced an interest that I have in open access. And looking forward to the discussion today. Great. Angus. Thank you yeah I think I'm the other person whose book was not published open access it was called the Great Persuasion it came out with Harvard University Press in 2012. And I'm also a editor of a of an academic journal that's been trying to navigate the transition to open access that many journals are confronting as well as modern intellectual history it's published with Cambridge University Press. Alright, Nick coconut. You're muted. I thought it was hitting my space bar there. Hi my name is Nick Copa and I'm an associate professor of sociology Virginia tech, which is located in the traditional homeland of the two telemonic and peoples. I do research in Guatemala as an anthropologist and the title of my open access monograph is the democracy development machine neoliberalism radical pessimism and authoritarian populism in my and Guatemala and that was published on Cornell University and so far it's been a real great experience and you know an honor to have my work be open access in this way. Great. Debalina. Hi everyone I'm Debalina. I also want to do a land acknowledgement I'm here in Atlanta, and this is the traditional homelands of the Muscogee Creek people. I am a interdisciplinary scholar between the natural sciences and humanities, and for me, I have had an interest in open access projects for some time. It's kind of linked to my, my work in the field of feminist science and technology studies, and the idea of a democratizing of knowledge. I started a journal with some colleagues back in 2012 we started working on an open access journal. It's called catalyst feminism techno science and theory. And once that kind of got going in 2015. I knew that when I was going to open, you know, publish my first monograph that I would like it to be open access and so my book came out in 2018 it's called molecular feminism's biology becoming some life in the lab. Great. And finally Emily Wilcox. Hi everyone. So, I published my first book in 2018 with the University of California press and it is open access and supported by a Tom grant. It's called revolutionary bodies Chinese dance and the socialist legacy. I would say that in the process of publishing that book I went from never having heard of open access and really not knowing anything about what it is to being a strong advocate now for it and so I sit on the committee for the Tom grants at University of Michigan now and I've encouraged several of my colleagues to participate and I really do see it as an honor to have the financial support to be able to make my work so much more easily circulated around the world. Great. That's a that's an excellent opening. So, first question I have is for the three of you who have published open access whose recent books were open access. Can you tell us why you agree to or were persuaded to publish it away. Why don't we start with Emily and work work back. Sure. So, when I was looking for presses for my book my primary considerations were the prestige of the press in my field and that was what I was told to focus on by my mentors because it was my 10 year book. And so that was you know really how I made the choice of who to reach out to and University of California press was my first choice. And so when they got back to me and so they were interested. At the very beginning was read Malcolm at the very beginning he said we're interested and also we want to place it in this new project we have called luminous which is open access. And so it's kind of like the combination of getting the positive response from my top press and then also getting this other information about something I you know didn't really know much about. My mentors and it was kind of interesting so I had two mentors that had two different responses to that information so one person said, well, open access could be tricky when you go for tenure because some people might equate it with self publishing. And so then I went to my other mentor, and my other mentor said, I don't think you're that first mentor actually understands I'm, he was my other mentor was on the tenure and promotion committee for the university at that time. And both of them were very experienced I think they just had different levels of maybe comfort with risk, perhaps you know I think both of them were trying to give me the best advice possible but the second person said what really matters is that you'd be publishing with University of California press. The other thing that read Malcolm said in the email very clearly was that the review process would be identical. So we had that in writing that it would be identical and he said based on that. There'd be no problem with tenure. And actually this is privileged because potentially you could reach a wider audience and I think at some point in the back and forth with read other things that came up or that there would still be a hard copy which was really important to me to being my first book you know I wanted to have something physical that I could tangible. So so that may that was made a difference to me to know that he said that, you know a big part that was a benefit for me was being able to have this multimedia component because I work on dance and performance and so I had wanted to have a multimedia component and there are different ways that that had been done I'd seen with other books like having a DVD for example, but I didn't think we're that well integrated and so I saw that the luminous platform had this really great opportunity to actually integrate the videos into the digital text so as you're reading the ebook you can click and it will just play within the book so that to me was a huge incentive to be able to integrate the videos so closely into the text. And then also we discussed a little bit about the price of the book and I realized that the price was also very reasonable. And so overall it just seemed like a fabulous opportunity. And then at some point read also mentioned to me that Michigan had this Tom grant option so he was the one who told me about that I actually didn't know about it from you know just I hadn't heard about it yet. And so he said here you can you know apply for this and so I applied. So then it kind of all fell into place at that point. That's very helpful and you might mention to some people might not know the luminous program and with that is California's series, very innovative series for publishing open access books and one of the things that I'm curious about whether this year book is a luminous book and it's a tone book and some people might think well how can they be both and part of what we do with Tom is we try to work with the different open access initiatives out there University North Carolina Press has a series now for history monographs and we've worked with them as well. So did Emily was it confusing at all to you at the beginning with sort of navigating that Tom luminous University California. Not to me because the way I understood it was that luminous was the series that it would be part of at the press. And then the next step for me as the author was, you know I had to get the subvention so where was I going to get the money for the subvention and so that was I saw Tom as being associated with the subvention and luminous being associated with the publication. So it didn't seem confusing to me. Great. Yeah that's that's the way we we intend it so that's that's great. Can you tell us a bit about your rationale. Sure. Well, as I mentioned you know I was already interested in open access publications, but I think there was a series of very fortunate events that also aligned with when I was starting to write the book. One of the things that at Emory College, we were able to get a great grant grant from the Mellon Foundation on digital humanities, and Sarah McKee who might be actually listening in on this call. I was appointed as the director of this grant, and was, you know reaching out to faculty who might be working on a humanities kind of book that would be, you know, a good option for open access so I connected with Sarah and honestly Sarah kind of just took it from me and has to this days is helping me out. But at the same time, my book got published with University of Washington Press, and they have a special series called feminist techno science, and they saw my book as one of those kind of interdisciplinary books that could span the sciences as well as the science. And, you know in the sciences were a lot more used to open access publications and, you know faculty and students, you know, they often do turn to journal articles and sources through open access so I wanted that for my, my, my science colleagues and for my students as well so my book made sense for the press to be the trial one for an open access version. Yeah, I think the, my book is also on manifold. And so that is the first part that I was you know introduced okay this is going to be another type of implementation of the open access where people could, you know, go on to the manifold site and look at the book and even do some kind of annotation, which has been really great for student engagement with with the book. It's also now part of the tone project. And it's worth mentioning manifold is was is a melon funded publishing platform created by the University of Minnesota Press working with cast iron coating in in New York and I think we now have 11 books that are also available on the manifold platform so that's another initiative that we've been working with. And Nick, tell us about your thinking. Yeah, so originally, I didn't really need to be persuaded to publish open access because I considered it a huge opportunity and perhaps especially as a political anthropologist. Research has always been to have some kind of impact or some kind of participation in what can often be very contentious public debates and also to be useful in various ways to the communities where I conducted my research. You know, in my case, doing research on the aftermath of armed conflict in my own communities in Guatemala where, you know, what is true what is the truth has been a major bone of contention, and especially because the counter insurgency had its own definition of truth that was going to impose on communities they've had truth commissions that have tried to alter historical narrative so ever since the beginning of my research the idea has been to think about how to, you know, use ethnic graphic information and that kind of engagement to to speak back to this politics of truth in the country so that was always something that was on my mind and of course then the form of academic work. So, so much, you know, so much energy and so much attention goes into thinking about how to intervene in these debates. The way that academic work is published typically removes all of these, you know, the intellectual interventions away from the actual people that are having these conversations in the lives that are impacted and so, you know, open access is is a huge gift, and it allows me to share my work broadly in Guatemala with interested scholars Guatemala and academics who have very limited copies of academic books and maybe they'll get it go to a conference every every couple or few years and it's incredibly expensive and hard to travel, especially now. Most Guatemala and academics of course read and speak English or can easily translate little elements of it. And this is allowed for, you know, my research and my book to find some of its most engaged audiences. And so I immediately sent out my book in an email to various scholars, sometimes introducing myself by way of, you know, sharing my book and, and in some cases reconnecting with some scholars who I had met maybe once or twice, but that we were able to, you know, reconnect in a professional way and say, you know, these are conversations that we're all part of. And so that has been, you know, incredibly nice. And beyond that, one of the biggest criticisms of anthropology that's kind of what I was mentioning before is, and this is true in indigenous communities is that the research is for us, academics, or, you know, other, you know, the scholars themselves, and you're speaking to other academics and that research is often seen as a form of extractivism, extracting knowledge, extracting experiences of suffering and hardship, and then going and writing about them and engaging with cool cutting edge theories for other people in your field and the, and the goal of it is, even though we may tell ourselves that the goal is to, you know, to, to push thinking along, there's a material reality of it, which is that it's about our careers. And I think that that is something that, you know, anthropologist, this is a long standing critique, you know, hundreds of years old, almost 100 years old at least. And so that's not always true, of course, academics, you know, don't we don't make a lot of money on our books in the first place and often what we write is relevant locally and we try to make it relevant and, you know, I and many other scholars have published work or translations of our work, you know, or versions of it and distributed it locally and try to be accountable, right in those ways. But at the same time, there's some truth to the criticism. And a lot of that truth is based on the fact of, you know, paywalls and, you know, books that are in another language or books that are engaging in conversations at a particular kind of level of abstraction and these are also incredibly important conversations to have. But this is one way to give work back to communities and to bridge divides that, you know, these are long standing criticisms no easy answer to those things. And so, even in the world of, you know, regular interacademic dialogue having an open access book is a, is the most enhanced or the best kind of business card, you know, we pass around our cards at conferences, and how nice is it to be able to say well here's a, you know, copy of my book, you know, that's a beautiful way to do that and in the era of, you know, translation programs, even this can even, you know, that you can actually select, you know, paragraphs of text and translate it maybe not perfectly definitely not perfectly as artfully as it would be, but this enhances the ability for that to be circulated and for the work to matter. And so I think that it's important. Open access is incredibly important because it helps us think about who we are engaging with when we're when we write what audiences may or may not be looking at this, hopefully wrap widely expanding it and encourages a kind of accountability at different levels. So those are some feelings that I have about open access and the way that I, I mean my book is still new, and it's still circulating and hopefully, you know, it'll be read and you know, just having your book open access doesn't necessarily mean but it's going to read it needs to be good it needs to, you know, connect in ways but this can bridge a lot of the structural barriers that exists especially in the field of anthropology and other related social sciences. Great that's helpful and there are several threads in there I'm going to want to follow up on for what you just said Nick, but I want to first talk to Ed and Angus and give them a chance to talk a bit about their thinking about open access and how it may have evolved over the years and your most as you both said your most recent books were not away so if you can give us some just some of your insights into how things may have changed in your fields and in your own thinking. We can start with Angus. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yeah, my book that my last book it was 2012 when it came out and you know open access really was not on the radar screen for me at all as something that people would do with a monograph. But I will I will say, you know, a couple of reasons why I think that was the case and a couple of issues that weigh on authors in history and maybe especially in American history when they're thinking about the possibility of open access. I mean the overriding thing for graduate students finishing you know finish their dissertation trying to get it published. The overriding concern is the prestige of the press and that's really that's important for them for getting jobs. And it's important for them for for tenure committees down the line. So that's that's I think that is and will remain the primary concerns one of the things that's really exciting about Tom is trying to resolve that problem while maintaining a pathway to an open access future not to work around it which I think would be misguided. The second concern and I think this is really this might be a little more for American historians because the books can have in many cases a little bit more of a general academic audience or aim for higher sales figures reviews and the popular press and so on, is that is, is trying to get that audience trying to get reviews outside of academic journals and the interest beyond the Academy. And, you know, having these conversations they made me think a little bit about whether the book that I'm trying to finish right now I'd like to publish open access and that is one of the first questions I'd be asking the presses if I if I was talking about that possibility is will this hurt my ability to generate that broader audience outside the Academy, even as it expands the audience within the Academy so I think that's something something else worth keeping in mind. So I can say a little more but I'll stop there and turn it over to it. Thanks Angus. Well, for me, similarly the initial conversations about publishing a book that in the end came out in 2017 occurred before open access was really beginning to pick up momentum. I did have a lot of conversations with the press about the price point for the book and was very pleased that even the hardback for fraud was was priced I think at $35 which is reasonably affordable for a hardback. One point of friction involved a lot of material that I had that I that was not going to actually be in the book itself that I wanted to make available as a companion to the volume and in the end I just developed a website which I've put up at Duke with lots of companion materials bibliography discussion of research methods lexicon of fraud slang many other things that are that are there I think that that enrich the readers sense of what underpins the book. And it would have been great to have folded that in in some way which an open access channel might have facilitated. I know a little bit before the wave was beating beating to crest in my case. I will share Angus's sense that within the historical profession there's maybe a greater degree of conservatism about the questions that surround open access and perhaps maybe cultural anthropology I don't know. I think, while there are definitely historians intrigued by open access and embracing it, there are four Tom works by historians, for example. There, there is a degree of skepticism and concern, partly what will this mean for evaluation and tenure and promotion. But also I think a concern, especially around making anything available before final publication. In terms of what that might mean for excessively early access by other scholars to to research so historians, at least my perception is have been fairly slow to take advantage of the preprint options institutional repositories, using channels that are our ends platform for for getting research out early. And part of that is as a concern about about what would it mean if somebody scoops you. Yeah, that's a that's definitely a question comes up and the question of preprints is very, very, a very interesting one I think in particularly in the humanities and social sciences is of course, I think that's prevalent more in the STEM fields, but how we deal with that in the humanities and social sciences will be very interesting. There was a question in the queue that I think can be very easily answered was to Emily about the book being priced reasonably and and I think Ed said the same thing. There aren't open access books freely available to all Emily do you want to answer that. Yeah, so thanks for the opportunity to clarify so. So there's two different option well I think there might be more but if there's at least two options to purchase my book which was published open access. So the open access version is a digital version, which is free, which is free to anyone anywhere in the world who has the internet link. There's also a paperback option and that costs I think around 30 something dollars so if people want for whatever reason they want the physical copy then that's what they pay for. Great. Thank you. That's, that's helpful. I want to turn to devilina here, and give you a chance to talk about your, you have a unique perspective I think on this in this group that you bring to this discussion so what you know what is publishing your book away taught you. And in your new position is it is it going to your senior associate dean of faculty at Emory and is, will that be your experience publishing away will you bring what perspective will you bring to that job as a result of this. Yeah. So, I think actually. When I found out early on in the process of the book was going to go the route of away. That actually helped me a great deal to think about how to frame the book and actually do the writing so as a scientist. I've been trained to write articles. And, and we're not trained to write books. But when I was, you know, thinking of going up for full professor, my women's studies colleagues told me that I would need a book. So that was, for me, it was a hard kind of, you know, transition to be thinking in terms of like a kind of a larger narrative and arc and how to write a book I was not trained to do so. So when I found out that the book was actually going to be a and that one of the features of away is that you know people can just click a link and get to a chapter and read the chapter they don't, you know, they won't have to purchase the whole book. They don't have the orientation to the text that really helped me to think about each chapter as maybe its own article, you know, that could be read, and you didn't have to read the whole book you just be able to click on if you're interested in bacteria, you can read bacteria. If you want to know about, you know, I have a chapter called should feminist clone about cloning techniques and feminist politics, then you can read that chapter so that really actually helped me to frame the book itself. And I was struggling with how to how to write it so that was helpful. I think also, you know, as I mentioned, you know, I have been working on this journal on catalyst. I think seeing the success of that small journal, and how it was getting across to different audiences, and not just within academia. That also made me know that this open access book was not just going to be for scientists working in a lab, or feminists that are in academia and so my audience actually who I was writing to changed as well. And so those were big influences I think when I signed on for the OA process as a senior associate dean of faculty now. I will say that the open access experience for me really did. You know, two things one, I know that the book has garnered the attention of audiences that it wouldn't have before. You know, locally, as well as internationally. And so I think when you're in that phase of, you know, the of the career where, yes, your work needs to get out there but you also have to show evidence that you're being recognized on a national as well as an international level away can help you do that. You know, and, you know, I've received invitations we might talk about this a little bit later, but from places I never would have thought my work would be accessed and read. And the other thing is that you know there is a push to kind of a public facing scholarship that I think all of us as academics it is really our charge in a way to be responsible for the scholarship that we have and not just, you know, keep it to ourselves as Nicholas was saying, there's a responsibility to work with others to learn with others and to communicate knowledge is coming from different spaces and I think that public facing scholarship that always also allows you to do and gets you to that place is something that you know I definitely encourage for our faculty. Yeah, you raise a great point and Nicholas did mentioned it to about, you know, just the awareness of reaching a broader audience and when I look at the numbers I've been tallying the, the, you know, usage numbers for the early tone books and, you know, these books are selling, basically average book will sell a few hundred copies whereas the number of downloads and views are averaging over 2000 per book so that in of itself just tells you how much or tells you that you're getting more exposure. I'm wondering the question for anybody who wants to take this is the effect on your writing, knowing that you are reaching that broader audience. I mean, I mentioned sort of thinking about the book differently in terms of chapters as the street discrete units, but also thinking about not just reaching academics does it change that will it have an impact on your on your writing, and anyone can jump in here. I feel that my feeling was similar to double Lena so you know I write about dance in China and so there's two audiences there that are outside of the traditional kind of academic audience on the one hand you have dance practitioners, who I want to be able to read the book and who are reading the book, and then also dance scholars in China, and both of those audiences actually have you know I've gotten emails from people who belong to both of those communities who have read the book and found it to be really beneficial and so I did make an effort to write the book in an accessible way. For example with a strong narrative and putting a lot of the discussions of engagement with secondary scholarship into the footnotes and so those yeah so I did definitely think about these larger audiences and in a way that might have been theoretical if it weren't open access but it felt very real once it was open access. I can comment on this a little bit. You know I started writing my book, not knowing about open access of course is my dissertation and you know, we have these ideas and anthropology of writing and having or politically engaged anthropology, or particular versions of it, of engaging with different communities and so they're in your mind, but then we wind up writing in ways that aren't necessarily as engaged or as, or as accessible for multiple different audiences and I think one of my biggest audiences development professionals, and who are probably not interested in a lot of the theoretical discussion and so clarity is is very important there although they have a lot of influence and power so you want people to take these ideas up, and you want them to engage with them and and also to have them be responsible as well as a mechanism of you being other communities responsible. But in the later stages of the final editing, when I knew that the book would be coming out as open access. I did it changed the way it just changes the way you look at your text sometimes you're like okay well, this is going to go live in a way that a book on a shelf and it's really, to think about so many people reading your work I mean it's in on the one hand you want people to read it. And on the other hand, academically, I mean, my experience with external reviewers is, you know, a form of tough love where you get a lot of feedback and it can be a painful and humbling experience and so the idea of, you know, really being in public and really saying, you know, speaking to audiences around the world, and perhaps simultaneously. I think it, it does raise the stakes or raises the feeling and I think actually that could be really good because deeply engaged academic writing in that way I think it, you know it forces us to think, you know, harder about who my communicating with who are these audiences and other questions that, you know, good editors will tell you should always be thinking about these things you should always be writing clearly, you should probably always put a lot of the theoretical discussion and put notes right I mean these are the comments we get from editors. It's like this is not your dissertation you're not writing this for you know, for five people, you know you, you want to engage more and so I think that they enhance what's already good about the writing that we should have already been doing. And they, you know, I think it could potentially change the change the discussion and just to, you know, to broaden this a little bit out from that I mean, going forward. You know, since tenure, I've been doing a lot more writing for open access things that are just online that are their academic adjacent the ideas that inform them are academic. I'm writing a lot of things in translation Spanish English, and I'm writing for, you know, Guatemalan audiences and for international audiences to. And I think that that is, you know, kind of the, the ethic going forward with open access is to kind of have this public facing research, especially, you know, people that are trying to engage these public debates and not all scholarship is trying to do that in the same way. And I think that's also very important and it does, you know, and these, these conversations are incredibly important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all doing the same kind of public engaged thinking or scholarship. So, I'll stop there for the moment. Ed, I had a question for you and Angus can weigh in as well. When we were talking earlier, I think you mentioned, you know, you do have this experience with publishing some open access material and you mentioned I think that some of the, some of the cancellationary materials you published had a lot of viewership, a lot of people accessed it. Does, how is that kind of affected your thinking about about away. The primary example there actually had to do with a version of preprint I guess so I also edited a book, co-edited a book with David Moss in 2009 government and markets toward a new theory of regulation, interdisciplinary volume with discussions from across the social sciences. And we were able to negotiate in that case, open access before publication to versions of the chapters that were essentially preprints. And the, there were tens of thousands of downloads of different pieces of that of that volume. And that's because we had, we had a piece in there from Elizabeth Warren, early version of her call for the consumer creation of National Protection Bureau, and some other very prominent authors in the book. But that also those downloads came from over 100 countries. What that has really that experience has suggested to me is several things first of all, the way in which more open access can drive print demand in some cases I don't think that happens in every instance but it certainly happens, not infrequently. It has suggested to me the value of this mechanism for achieving the core goals of any research university which is not just the creation of knowledge but it's effective dissemination. And I just would like to echo Nicholas's emphasis on the obligation that scholars have to engage with really significant public debates. Locally, nationally and globally. I do think, and of course, Tom is a key experiment in this regard, we have to think very carefully about how to achieve those goals in a sustainable fashion. So the question about what the long term business model for open access might look like, and of course that might there might not be one answer there might be many answers there is one that we all have to think about and I certainly am thinking about that quite a lot these days, partly as an author and as a historian but also as, as a vice provost at Duke who works very closely with Duke University Press. So, so I think every academic press is trying to think through that sustainability question. That's great. And very helpful. We had a question and I think Angus is going to take this one on about the idea of an embargo like would it have changed your thinking if your book had an embargo period where the book is total access first perhaps for a year to allow the press to recover costs, and then go away. Yeah, I just wanted to say, I think, I mean I'd be very supportive of that idea and it would be to me if I was signing up with the press and I was going with a convention taking the conventional route the idea that it would eventually be open access would be a major selling point. I'd say a couple things about that I mean one is I'm a, I'm a very ardent believer in an active user of our university repository where you can take you know pieces that you publish in journals that are not freely accessible outside subscriptions and often deposit versions of whether the original version some journals that you do that or sometimes an author version, so that they do become freely accessible my experience has been it's not scientific at all but is that when you do that your work gets, gets cited quite a bit more. It's easier to share it's easier to site it's easier to use. And it's also reflective of exactly what I was saying about the mission of you know if you're if you're writing your work you're writing to be read. You're operating if you feel like people are not able to access it because of their individual circumstances. So, at the same time you recognize that if you if you want to print book and if you want to print book that as I was saying earlier is going to is going to be broadly disseminated and reviewed as such, you know, often there will be a prerogative where the press wants to have some sort of exclusive right to it for a period of time, and that the life of these books is hopefully very long and so the idea that you know you satisfy that need but then eventually people are able to access and use your work over a 2030 year an ongoing period when it's still an active part of a scholarly conversation is really is really appealing and would help you to achieve over time a lot of those goals I was talking about that institution institutional repositories help to fulfill. So just quickly jumping in on that point. I would be very interested in an option at this point, you know the very few authors for whom I mean I think the book fraud did very well, but the sales are now declining as is normally the case after a few years. And I'd be willing to make the bet actually that if it were to become away the print sales would go up. All right, I think we are at the at our break point. So we're going to take about a 10 minute break and come back and feel free for those of you watching or listening to ask questions, and I'd like everybody the panelists to think about when we come back just some talk a bit about experiences that you've had or or what you've seen since your open access book for those of you published open access the way you think the open access edition had an impact on how the book has been received, you know anecdotes of, you know, did you get invited to conferences that you might not have invited to speak somewhere so give that some thought, and we will return in 10 minutes. Thanks everybody. Welcome back everyone. Thanks for sticking with us and I encourage you all to put questions in the Q&A, if you have them. What I wanted to start with though was I sort of primed the pump for this beforehand I wanted to get folks reactions to just those who have published away just evidence that you've seen that that open access had an impact on how the books been received how you've been received. And why don't we start with Debalina. Sure. I have been very pleased with how open access has spread the word about the book. One of the first invitations that I received to talk on molecular feminism was from this undergraduate group of young women who identify as feminists who are in STEM and they call themselves FEM STEM at Colorado College. And so they were students in chemistry, in physics and biology, who came across the book because of open access, and invited me to give a talk and you know, I guess one of the audiences that I had imagined for the book or you know was the feminist working away in the lab at the bench, and hoping to get across to them and that for sure happened because of open access. And another invitation that came was for a philosophy roundtable of other faculty and graduate students so it was exactly doing that work that was another audience you know so there is some kind of humanities and philosophy of science grounding in the book. You know so I have received multiple invitations to talk about the book around the world and you know I got invitations from Singapore and then the pandemic happened, but I had received and this one I think to date is my favorite and I hope it does get to happen after the pandemic is received an invitation for a keynote at a gender studies symposium in Bucharest, and part of the invitation was that there would be a visit to Dracula's castle. I know for sure OA is responsible for my you know invitation to visit Dracula's castle. That's that's that's a span. That's excellent. Nick I know you had some some anecdotes to So, I feel like I said my book is still new and I'm, well it's a year old at this point but I've today in fact I'll be giving my first invite to talk about that book. At what it was scheduled for just before the pandemic hit it was scheduled for I think it was March 18 or something and then everything collapsed of course and so it's now been rescheduled into a zoom meeting for today. It's for a broad audience it's for the Pulse Institute of Development Studies at Cornell, and I'm really excited to present and it's an audience that will have. It's this new program that's been created with their extension agents, there are people who do you know agrarian research people who are more on the technical side. People who are doing kind of critical agrarian studies work and I think this is a, you know it's a nice opportunity, you know when you think about audiences that are so, you know, diverse in their orientations and in their own intellectual and professional projects. A lot of people who may or may not be inclined to pick up an academic book, because it's, you know from a discipline that they don't necessarily read well. But if it's openly available to them, I think that and you make points and you make a couple of inroads I think that there are some opportunities for people to say well I'll go ahead and check it out. You know because it's because it's right here, and then with the job, or not the job but the with the with the presentation or the the announcement for the, for the talk. You know, and the emails go around. When I started doing was putting the link to the, the open access site on Cornell press on my, on my email, and just as a way that anybody who wants to download this book and can get it and also have it now on my, my Twitter bio so anybody who, not that I have a huge following that that's a way for people to, you know, to get something that I think it's pretty rare I don't really see that too often, you know we often look for folding monographs out there and they're you know you can find really older versions that are online and I think that, you know sometimes it's not even a question of not having access or not having a library copy but it's having a digital version of something is incredibly nice. You know, these are searchable from keywords, I mean that's a way of relating to a text that is, you know, as an academic we have all these, you know we finally have our are now are a lot of our filing cabinets are folders on our desktop. And we can. Okay, well here's the theme and I'm looking for this thing and you have a huge body of scholarship and article form, and then you can do keyword searches for things like, you know, and mass scale. So, I think that that invitation for my talk today was based on people who, and this is a fun experience and I'm, you know, I feel like I'm still fairly junior scholar but, you know, having somebody send you an email where they're quoting a piece out of your book a passage editor book saying this is a conversation we've been wanting to have it's like, this is so exciting, you know I'm Wow yeah I thought you know, when you get into the, the levels of writing a chapter about something. You know, sometimes you forget that, you know, people do care, you know people are out there that are really listening to it and so I'm excited for that opportunity I'm excited to, you know, I'm hoping that this conversation is also an opportunity for more people to think that books are out there, and they're open access and I know that these are exciting things for people. People want their work to be read, and that I think that there's going to be increasing demand for public facing scholarship on the part and that it may be a change in the orientation of the people who who are doing the writing are going to have that desire, even if they're not able to get into it I think that's an orientation that we're going to see, see more of. So you wanted to weigh in. Yeah I just wanted to jump in as a, as a journal editor. You know I just to build on something Nicholas was just saying is the shareability and social media is really important. Our journals with Cambridge University Press and they let us occasionally have articles be published open access if they're, if they, you know, we think they might generate some excitement. So we had one, just a few months ago that got got that we made open access we let people know it was open and it got shared more than 10 times as much as any normal article we publish. People people don't want to tweet about something that's paywalled I mean it's just not. Yeah, that's just too much of a hurdle and so having scholarship freely accessible for people to site in in public forums like that actually can can grossly expand the potential discussion surrounding it. I want to put in a shameless plug for later today. That's going to be an important subject. Charles Watkinson and I in our in our next session we'll be talking about giving up a report on Tom, the three year report and and Charles in talking about the importance of altmetrics and and using social media and it definitely shows up in the in the early numbers as to what helps a book be successful, and we actually will will look specifically at Emily's book and debilina's book as two examples. So, please stay tuned for that. Go ahead. If I if I could just jump in Peter, I just I want to link the last couple of comments and actually yours as well to the question that just come up in the q amp a right, which asks how can one actually move the standards in promotion and tenure cases to take it account of the evolution of communications mechanisms and to actually facilitate a transition to more open access. And I think here that the crucial question this is another element I think a really key element of the sustainability issue is defining standards of excellence that that people see as legitimate. And there's work to be done there. So we've had several references to usage through open access but what what kind of usage what do we mean by usage how do we define it what what do we mean by a download. And of course there are emerging altmetrics that that provide I think a lot of substance to the conversation. We also have seen at least a Duke through some internal discussions. Of course that what we assume are the gold standard things like impact factor, have all kinds of limitations to them, and also all kinds of biases built into them. The process that we that we need now is one of extending and amplifying the role that for example university presses have played in establishing excellence in scholarship. So that we have parallel kinds of metrics and modes of assessment and evaluation that take account of things like social media presence. It's not straightforward it's not easy but it's absolutely essential if we're going to be able to make the case holistically from university to university about how 10 years standards promotion standards need to take account of this new reality and then facilitate it. Emily you wanted to weigh in. Yeah, it was a more on the previous topic but on this point I agree that the standards of excellence are the most important thing at least I know at my institution and so the peer review process being unchanged I think is critical. I think that's even more important than usage statistics because oftentimes you go for tenure before those statistics are even available because your book just came out so. From my perspective it's more about the peer review process, having integrity, and also the peer review process makes the book better in the end so you need it not just for the external approval but actually to maintain the quality of the book so for me that's the most important factor. And then just on the earlier point of, you know, anecdotes about the book reaching wider audiences I have noticed that I've gotten so I've got a lot of international invitations to speak about the book but I've gotten some from unexpected places so for example from museum curators. And then also from the National Folk Dance Ensemble of Serbia, you know because they were able to access the open access so I think I'm reaching audiences that I never even imagined as my potential readers. And if I could just add a point about, you know, the, this discussion of standards of excellence so part of my job as dean of faculty is to oversee tenure and promotion in the college. And this has been happening at least at Emory for some years now where an open access is maybe part of this conversation but establishing those standards of excellence is kind of a conversation that's have should happen at the university level at the college level but also at department level so I think it's important for junior scholars to bring these topics up as well if the chairs of your departments are not to say can we think about what counts as standards of excellence. I'm not in a field where you know it's easily accessible or it's meaningful to have an H index right so can we talk about what would count as impact. For example, that you know your work is not only being picked up by other scholars but by museums and by, you know, not for profit organizations so I think that it is a conversation that can't just happen top down. I have one anecdote that I would throw in here from a different side of this kind of usage and impact story so when I was at Cornell University Press I was overseeing the anthropology list, and I've received a book proposal from a young scholar working on Southeast Asia in an area where it's really difficult typically to sell, to break even on books we publish, but the author was able to tell me that he showed me that he had had an article in the flagship journal of the Anthropology Association that had been the number one downloaded article for the previous year. And that convinced me to have the book reviewed and got positive reviews and it ended up being a successful book more so than I would have expected and there I think the article was open access and it helped to kind of prepare the way for the book coming it sort of paved the way for this author and he's gone on to be you know a very successful writer. Question of translation came up in the chat and I wanted to see if folks wanted to weigh in at all on that so this question of you know when we talked earlier about the book being having a creative commons license and some creative commons licenses are more permissive than others. And in many cases historians and and humanity scholars want more restrictive license with no handy part of the CC license. How do you all feel about that and how it maybe impacted your thinking about the translation of your work. I can start with that just because my book is under contract for a Chinese public Chinese translation to come out next and in that case because I read Chinese like I wanted to be able to have a say in being able to authorize that translation and so that was important to me and the fact that University of California press. The contract was such that I maintain as the author I maintained the ownership I guess of the copyright so I was able to directly negotiate that and the press didn't even have to be involved so in my case that worked out well I'm yet you know it'll be perhaps different if it someone from another country wants to do the translation I'm not sure you know if it seems like they won't be able to do that without my permission which I guess I'm okay with as long as they can still if I can grant that permission that's my understanding of the situation so to me the open access doesn't really create a barrier for that but I'd be curious to hear from others. Any other thoughts on that. I think Charles you had an interesting point if you're still there Charles Watkinson about sort of the different perspective that a publisher brings. I think it's it's just this acknowledgement that the translation market is is complicated. And if one is passionate about equity of access, one has to remember that there are markets book markets which are still predominantly print markets and affordable print editions is really the focus. And so how we incentivize local publishers in those markets in Africa in China to produce those afford in India as well to produce those affordable print editions we have to be sensitive about what a local language away ebook edition might do to their incentives. So some of these areas are a little bit complicated and we have to think thoughtfully about equity. And that's a good way to bring us around to the question that's come up in a number of these chats and so forth is partly a question of sustainability of a program like Tom and and issues of equity with with not every perhaps not every institution being able to support publication of monographs with $15,000. What are your all thoughts about sort of the, both the sort of making this program sustainable and in the equity question. I think the first point to make is that the parameters in North America, particularly in the United States are just different from what they are in Europe. So in Europe you have an emerging system where state support for research is then connected to an expectation of open access. And that's most clearly delineated with journal articles, but it's it's almost certainly coming for books as well. And it's just a cleaner conversation. It's just much messier in the United States because of the lack of that type of public support for research outside the sciences inside the sciences is not that dissimilar you have the NSF you have the NIH, who are moving along an analogous path with respect to the work that they support. So what it means in the humanities interpretive social sciences is just much more, much more complicated. And I think it creates a huge set of obstacles to finding that sustainable path one, one of the questions in the q amp a noted goodness of University budgets are about to go under enormous pressure they already are under enormous pressure they're going to be significant cuts this year probably next year. So where is the the space going to be in those budgets for an OA intervention. And the further you move down the financial strength of universities, the more that's going to be a really significant question. There's a desire for access for readers, but we also, as the question I think is pointing out we need to be very attentive to the questions of equity about producers and the scholars who are working unless we will resource institutions. This is, this is not actually offering an easy answer it's just noting the difficulties of the of the of the issue. I haven't thought about, I haven't thought about not is not to answer the equity question which I think is already almost irresolvable question we think about the chasm of inequality between institutions and between, you know, scholars position to different institutions and between disciplines and different institutions in terms of equity these are deep problems. I also think that the sustainability in the business model question of academic publishing in general is in some Broadway linked to open access scholarship is devalued. You know in American society, I would say very much so and it's in at worst it's under attack. The Academy's under attack intellectualism and science or under attack funds are drying up as a result of that. And I think there are a lot of attacks on scholarship and scholars individually that are based on caricatures of what scholarship is what we have to offer and the kinds of interventions that we would like to make. You know, in our response, unfortunately is a little bit slow we are not necessarily up to the challenge their mass media pylons substitute for any kind of real engagement. Many scholars have lost their jobs right and the fray of this public discourse is a house of mirrors, it's limited at best and it's deeply pathological right at its worst and you know ironically in a time of extensive access to information. And what we have is a suffocation of discourse through deliberate dispersal of misinformation that's based on listening different kinds of affective and you know responses. And for political purposes, and we have so much to offer public debate and in a thoughtful more slowed down fashion. And, but what we have to offer is unfortunately it doesn't it mean one of the biggest questions we have, we have major questions that I think scholarship has provided wonderful answers to. We need to rethink what constitutes a healthy just and sustainable economy. We're grappling publicly with deep seated racial inequality ecological collapse rising tide of fascism. And, you know, for those public facing scholars on Twitter. That's not really a forum to have these conversations. It's a how it's, you know, people can throw things out and clash in different ways and, but it's not the kind of space where we can meaningfully have the dialogues that we need about moving forward to get past the, you know, the, the politically connected kind of misinformation and to have, you know, more of a democratic space of dialogue, and I think that open access can help us a get into those debates and also maybe to be used if open access is a growing space of scholarship, then it can be used as a space of saying look scholarship is doing you know we are not hiding away in an ivory tower and we're not. You know, we're not just talking to ourselves that there's a growing ethos of it and it goes beyond, you know, monograph publication, it's about, it's about public engagement on the topics that that we engage with and that we write about and that we think about and to bravely engage with those with those discussions. So I think that, you know, the more that we do to demystify and to get rid of the caricature about what academic work really isn't the kind of conversations we're really having, which frankly just are not part of these public conversations and I think that, and this is a longer term issue, but hopefully, you know, by demonstrating the value of academic work maybe there might be more funding in the future, and you know more egalitarian funding at that I have one comment sort of if we have time. I feel this is also an issue of equity among disciplines because so much is invested financially by institutions into this forward research in the STEM fields. In terms of the scale of resources that go into supporting research and I think monographs are primarily published by humanists and to a certain extent social scientists and so this is a way that institutions need to support that research, in my view and so I think that's one aspect of the equity issue. In addition, of course, to the issue of different institutions having different levels of funding to provide and I think I've noticed that some professional organizations are now offering publication subventions so like Association for Studies has one. And there's some others that have those so that might be a way to make these subventions available to people who are at institutions that don't necessarily have the support for this kind of a subvention. Go ahead. Yeah, I'll just make another point about equity which is that I mean it is worth contrasting the potential inequities of this emerging possible system with the inequities of the old system. Just in the sense that, you know, university presses have this very strange dual role and that they are, you know, on the one hand evaluating the quality of work and on the other hand evaluating the potential sales. And, and you know that those potential sales figures play the, I mean my impression is a place of really major role in determining what gets published and what doesn't which is which is often disconnected and meaningful ways from the impact of a in a field of study. And so, you know, switching the funding model yes it will create new inequities but it might actually help to resolve some of those market pressures that that play an excessive role right now determining what gets published by which presses. I have about two minutes left and I, there was a question in here about about we talked about metrics and usage data and, and we know that it's not. It's difficult to interpret some of this data and we need to get better at that but as authors do you do you, how do you take advantage or do you use. Do you follow like how your book is doing in social media and how many downloads is getting and do you use that information at all and if it were, I guess if it were more readily available more sophisticated would you use it more. Emily. Yeah, I mean I look at my statistics on the luminous page and I have also I have to admit I posted them on Facebook like I have 1000 downloads and just to like generate excitement and so I would love to have more. I actually have not been doing a very good job to find out the stats and in fact Peter, you showed us something. I had no idea that my book was being read in China, for example. Yeah, so I need to do a better job with that but it is, it's great. It's great that that kind of data is available. I will share with you both. As I said where I'm going to talk about your books later today and I'll share that information with you if you can't be there for the discussion but you'll be able to see what I've been able to collect so far it's very Any final thoughts in this last minute or two. Anybody want to add a final thought to tie a bow on this. So let's throw one, one bit of perspective which is, if this is the future, we need to be thinking much more intentionally and systematically about how to integrate this type of discussion into graduate education. So many of the comments today have referenced advice that came from a mentor and by definition, really the mentors don't have any clue about this kind of thing. And that's a that's a challenge, but it's one that we should be paying attention to. That's a fabulous point, one that I was hoping we'd come back to. So I think we will wrap things up right now. And I think Peter Berkeley will close this out. Yeah, thanks Peter I have to confess that was a fantastic conversation I felt like a bit of a fraud trying to summarize all the great points that have been made and to that, you know, Judy Jessica Peter and I get caught up frequently and kind of the day to day bits of administering the program and all the other aspects of the work that we do. And we forget that it's actually not about the presses or the libraries or even the provost, it's about the scholars. And so having this conversation today has just and recent during the scholars in Tom has been absolutely fantastic farm actually really grateful for that opportunity. I think a couple of themes that emerge that are going to be super important are, you know, Peter early on mentioned the difference between telling somewhere between 150 and 250 print copies, and getting an average of 2000 downloads for a monograph that's huge that's transformational. And it's kind of the, it's what we've been going for for the past, well three years of the program and what Judy maybe 17 years of negotiating the program before that. I think that some of the, some of the, the new opportunities that we spent a lot of time talking about translations which is exciting and kind of I think something we haven't really fully thought through in the early days of the program. And I think that's something for us to all to take back and think about. It was interesting to see some old school conversations in the chat room and in the q amp a about embargoes. Of course the, the tomes term of reference does not allow for an embargo, but there are other pilots and other experiments out there that do the, I think the equity issue is and remain hugely important. And so we started home that it was going to be a challenge, but we just felt that that we couldn't break the pilot with the solution to something so complicated, but it has loomed over us the entire time. And I couldn't say anything substantively more eloquently than Nicholas did so I'll just leave that at that. I thought Ed's comments about metrics were super important. And it made me think and someone mentioned in the q amp a, it made me think a little bit about whether the, the he metrics that Chris long is developing up at Michigan State might not play a role in helping us with something to replace what you know presses and scholars have used for decades which is dollars to as a surrogate for how successful the scholarly argument embedded in a monograph actually is. But I see that it's 1131 on my laptop anyway. So those are I think great takeaways for the three sponsoring organizations. And once again to the scholars thank you so much for giving us so much great stuff to think about. And hopefully we'll see everybody again at one o'clock. Thank you. Yeah, thanks to everybody who participated. I didn't have to use the mute button at all so well done. Thank you. Thank you all. Yeah.