 We're going to get started, so this session is called The Path to Open Pilots, Open Books Pilots, a sustainable model for making university press front-list titles open access at scale. I'm Charles Watkinson, I'm a director of the University of Michigan Press, and we have here Emma Moles, we have Rebecca Sieger, and we have James Shulman. And big thanks for some of the slides to Charlotte Lair from Lyrasys, who was also one of the people who brainstormed the creation of this model. So just a quick introduction to Path to Open. This is a lot of text, but these slides and this presentation will be made available after the event. But this is just a problem statement, and I think you're familiar with the declining sales of monographs and that long-term decline in terms of the sales model for scholarly specialist monographs. And just a certain amount of concern among book publishers about immediate OA. There's a little bit of concern about the sources of funding that will actually cover the costs of producing a high quality scholarly monograph. And then just for the majority of publishers in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, OA looks pretty scary, and that's because they're very small. And we tend to think of university presses as Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard or Princeton or whoever, you know. But actually, if you think about university presses, over half the members of the association of university presses, and that has 160 members, have annual revenues under $1.5 million, and most of them have much smaller revenue. So that's something that people really forget that most university presses are really, really small publishers. They don't have a lot of capacity to deal with complexity, and OA is a very complicated environment. So that has led to, I think, a very patchy picture of lots of pilots, and also pilots tended to be run by presses with the resources to do so. So I think of University of Michigan Press with our terrific support from the library, MIT Press and Nick and the large press, Cambridge, Oxford. And as you think about OA pilots out there, you'll probably recognise that there are lots of publishers who are not in them and are not part of that picture. And of course, the publishers are getting very mixed messages from their authors. There's still a lingering concern about OA reputation. And there are also some mixed messages from libraries in that a very small proportion of the library, of libraries, actually do support OA programmes. Because why would one support something that doesn't have unique benefit to your parent organisation when you have to defend that to your provost, to the person that you're responsible for? And of course, beyond our large research libraries that so many of the presses are embedded in, there's, you know, resource pornos is a very, very real thing. And of course, in the research library place. So, and I will point out this last point is very important. So OA models based on book publishing charges exclude researchers in underserved populations. I mean, I think that's so obvious that it doesn't deserve saying anymore, but I think perhaps we need to say it again and again. Book processing charge models tend to disadvantage people who don't have wealthy institutions behind them or wealthy funders. So how does path to open work? So academic institutions pay an annual subscription fee to access a growing corpus of titles exclusively available on JSTOR. After three years, those titles become open access on all platforms. So this is a delayed open access model based on subscription revenue. 100 titles will be published in 2023. So those are 100 titles coming onto the JSTOR platform available to subscribing libraries by the end of 2023. And then this program will quite rapidly scale. And this is a pilot. So everything depends on how well that process goes. As of April 1st, there were 32 university presses signed up to contribute for the 2023 year and more coming on board for the term of the pilot. It's crucial to remember that only participating libraries will provide institutional access to the titles during the first three years after publication. And that's only on the JSTOR platform. At the start of the third year, following the publication date, titles will be converted to OA. So that would be January 2026 for the 2023 titles. So in fact it's less than a three year delay for titles published later in the year. There will be an independent governance group hosted by ACLS which will provide oversight of the P2O model. And I'm jumping ahead a little bit and making some assumptions. James may want me to tail that down a bit. That is in process of being created and I hope I'm not making too many assumptions. Participating press has received a guaranteed $5,000 per title a year after each book is accepted. So that's crucial. JSTOR is saying we guarantee you whatever happens with this pilot. If we don't make enough money, we will still pay you as pressers $5,000 guaranteed in the second year. So between January and March of the second year, 2024 for 2023 titles, each press will receive $5,000 per title. That's guaranteed. The books will be available in print in the consumer versions but not in any other library aggregation. And the aim there is to minimise library workflow challenges and overhead costs. Like it's going to be complicated enough as a library to kind of work out which books in which collection, etc. With or without having the added burden of working out which platform you can get them on as well. And the more complexity that JSTOR has to manage, the lower the payout to the publishers. When books are converted to OA, they will be available to be published on any platform the university press selects in addition to JSTOR. And they will be indexed in the directory of open access books. Neil Stern has left leaflets completely blank. No, on this side, you can see it. And pens that he's carried all the way from Scandinavia on this in front of you. So if you don't know about directory of open access books, this is the thing to look at and take one of his pens or two. And then finally, pressers select CC by NC 4.0 for books when converted to OA. However, we want to centre the authors in this. So if they do want to have a more restrictive license or a less restrictive license, we have to be flexible to accommodate that. And here's just a few logos of the 30 plus publishers. And I'm not going to read them all, but I want you to see that it's a pretty broad range of different types of university presses. And it actually skews towards the smaller ones. So for the first time, presses like University of Arkansas press, I talked to the director there who's a very sharp, he's actually an accountant by training, very sharp thinker. And he said, for the first time I see an open access programme that I can get behind. So these are the presses that have previously not been able to participate in this landscape. And it's an on ramp, the three year delay for other initiatives may be moving towards more immediate open access. But this is trust building again, trust the number one term for CNI 2023. And you'll see it's international presses as well as US based and Canadian presses. And I really want to hammer and hammer on this whole theme of these smaller publishers. Path to Open supports a Biblio diversity of university presses. So Biblio diversity is a term that really started in multi lingual, in terms of multi lingualism in Europe and actually in Latin America to start off with. But it's really a relevant term for thinking about the book landscape and the book publishing landscape where there's this incredible long tail of publishers who have a very distinctive regional disciplinary cultural identity. And if you look at the picture here that shows university presses across the US and Canada, you'll see that regionality suddenly spring out. And of course university presses publish regional books, but when they publish academic books they publish through the lens of regionality. So University of Georgia Press has a very, very good civil rights list. University of British Columbia Press is very, very good on indigenous studies. And as you look across this landscape you'll see regional as well as disciplinary diversity represented. And preserving that Biblio diversity, it really has to be a core goal of libraries and also of the parent institutions that benefit from these books being published. The path to open timeline, I think the crucial thing is April 15, 2023, that's when you'll see the list of titles. And January 2026, which is when those titles will go open and you'll see other collections being launched over the next couple of years. So I'm going to pass over to Emma now for how does PTO contribute to the OA book landscape. And just tell me when to forward Emma. Okay, great. This microphone is on? Yes. Hello everyone, my name is Emma Molls. I'm the director of Open Research and Publishing at the University of Minnesota. And I think to step back for a moment and talk about the landscape as a whole is important. Another thing I want all of you to keep in mind, because it's primarily more where my work happens, is thinking about communicating this landscape with our faculty authors on campus, which can be a whirlwind for a number of reasons. So next slide. I wanted to come out with that joke where you have a piece of paper and then it suddenly unfurls and it's really long, to kind of give a little bit of a taste of the business models that we see right now happening in open access book publishing. So here is a table actually created by a weapon. This is on their website of the business model. So you may know them by other terms. But we have all the way from a book publishing charges or BPCs through freemium, institutional subsidies, library publishers, library membership models, consortial and institutional crowdfunding, and individual crowdfunding. So here on the slide it lists some examples. I think it's actually helpful to maybe take one of the publishers that each of us are familiar with and see where this kind of lines up on the table. So there's a wide variety here. I'm going to pick out one actually at the top here, which is the Tome program that was a pilot project that just ran the last handful of years. That was something on my campus where it took a lot of communication with our authors in our College of Liberal Arts to really understand what was happening because it sort of followed something that they were very familiar with but the outcome was something that they were not familiar with, an open access monograph. So what does that mean to authors? What does this mean for authors who may end up publishing with a variety of presses over their careers and as we see more business models introduce, how are these conversations working? Next slide. On the other side of that we have sort of ourselves as library funders. So I think again this is where maybe like the long list that continuously unfurls would be a nice representation too. So these are some of the programs right now that are seeking library funding. Many of you are likely a lot more familiar with some of these than others, but I'm sure there's probably an email in your inbox that is introducing this program or giving you an update on some of these programs that are looking for funding. So again a wide variety of programs that are looking for library funding. That amount of money can really vary across the different programs. Next slide. This is a little bit deeper dive into some of those programs that were on the last slide. So when we think about conditional open access models for books, that would be programs that the condition of course is based on the amount of support. In many cases the number of libraries that sign on to support that initiative or program. So again some familiar programs on this list including ones we've heard about throughout yesterday and today's program. Direct to Open is an example of this. MIT Press flips titles upon publication to open access via support from libraries. Path to Open is also on the bottom of this slide that shows of course where that fits in. We have a difference here, a notable difference. Charles told me to say is delayed open access even open access? Oh no you said I shouldn't say that. But again I think that is important for us to know across programs but also to communicate with our authors. So those of us who are doing a lot of outreach on campus, I think it's important to understand that our faculty authors really need to be brought along in this conversation and that outreach and communication can be complicated if we leave it solely on the presses or publishers to do some of that. So thinking about where we as librarians really fit into this. Communicating these models on campus. Next slide. This is a fairly wordy slide that I think the important thing is if you're a fast reader and reading through this list you'll notice that there's not a ton of difference when we think about the revenue models for non BPC open access programs. So the conditional open access versus the collective and crowd sourcing or membership models we actually see a lot of commonalities across the different attributes of each of these models. Next slide. Finally just a quick word on where we are seeing the funding, the funders or the funding community come from. This map is probably going to look like it's actually missing a lot of pin drops, but I think this matches up with what we've seen in other open access funding models. So a lot of these funders are coming from Europe, from the US and Canada, a lot of well resourced libraries in many cases that are jumping on board to fund some of these open access models. So I hope that kind of gives a little bit of an overview of where we stand. And in this moment at least on open access book publishing and gives an idea of where path to open fits in across what is really a fairly wide variety of programs and models that are happening. Emma, thank you so much. And thank you again to Charlotte for those useful structuring concepts and for that map. So what are we finding in terms of publisher reactions? So far what do they like? What do we like, publishers? Fits with existing workflows. We're really used to the well-worn workflows through which we can deposit to a platform like JSTOR or Project Muse where we have these ONIX feeds and we have the content and we just ask our metadata and content distributor to deliver to Muse, deliver to JSTOR, deliver to ProQuest, deliver to EBSCO. So simple. JSTOR is a trusted non-profit partner. It's not the only one but it is a trusted non-profit partner and it's a known entity that has strong loyalty from users. So it's interesting as you talk to faculty and students, they will often say JSTOR or Muse as a proxy for quality. So there's a brand association here which is very useful in that space where OA still has a little bit of skepticism and concern among some authors. This is huge, this guarantee of $5,000 per book. That's not the whole cost of publishing a book but it's a great start and the other part of this is that we then have an opportunity as publishers to recoup a little bit more of our costs. EUPressor's members have really seen a lot of skepticism around the numbers they come up with when they say this is how much it costs to publish a book. But the thing you have to remember about university presses is there is so much investment in quality control. It starts from the acquisitions editors. Acquisitions editors are expensive, highly trained professionals deeply embedded in their disciplines. It goes through the peer review process. It goes through the peer review process again after it's been to the editorial board of faculty members at the institution. You should see the length of some of the reviews that we pay for. Then it goes through a copy editing process which is more than checking the grammar, it's actually restructuring a lot of the book and then you have the book coming out. That's expensive. If you don't have acquisitions editors you lose a lot of the expense but do we really want to sacrifice that? So, homily over. But $5,000 per book really helps. It provides a third way for authors who want to reach an impact of the way but still hope that their books will sell. At University of Michigan Press we have this project called Fund to Mission which is an immediate open access programme. 75% of our front list, thanks to many of you in this room will be open access this year. 25% will not. But we're doing with Path to Open and it's different by publisher but what we're aiming to do with Path to Open is whittle away at that 25% by asking why? Why are you worried about open access? The reasons are often expressed as I want to have my book open but not quite yet. I'm up for tenure. My tenure committee is a whole lot of older white dudes. They are not happy with the idea of me doing open access and I cannot risk my career but I want openness. Can you delay it three years? Now we can say we can. Another case is a book where the editor says, you know, we've got real sales potential and we want to get it out through Amazon. We want to get it out through all of these supply chains that rely on the ability to sell an e-book. Can't we do a for sale e-book to consumers first? And the answer now is yes you can. Yes we can. There are books still that will remain in our list as closed and those ones are where permissions issues have come in and that's a whole other conversation that we need to whittle away at. So this is big. Robust usage stats, JSTOR has provided very normalised robust usage stats since the start, counter five, total item requests, also by country and by institution without going too far into any way of identifying the patron but identifying by institution and that's very trusted. And input into governance via the potentially ACLS hosted governance group. What are they concerned about? Number one thing is exclusivity to JSTOR, restricting access to other library platform partners. And that's really tricky because this is actually about friendships as well as about the whole sort of nasty feeling one has around exclusivity in an open access world. So many of the platform partners like Project Muse are run by our friends. They are deeply embedded in our community. That's a very difficult thing for us. Other platform partners like De Groyter are returning great returns to university presses. That's a very difficult conversation. Epsco ProQuest, we've had long partnerships. So this really is a sticky one and it's probably the biggest problem that the publishers are concerned about. Logistics of managing metadata for a day-to-day open access book in our systems. This is actually a huge conversation. It's just complicated. Access to the e-book for author's own institution. We will be able to work out ways of providing this, but that's a concern when authors come from smaller institutions that may not be able to afford a package even at the tiered pricing that JSTOR is providing. Fit of a delayed open access model with funder policies that increasingly emphasise immediate open access. So the idea of having this governance group is this can flex. This is about building relationships and then be built upon to develop new approaches to open in the future with hopefully fewer delays. Exclusion of small for profit academic publishers without university press in their names. This initial pilot 2023 collection is just university presses. But all of us who are university presses share exhibit booths and share disciplinary conferences with really important, really disciplinary embedded commercial publishers who are as for mission as all of us. It's non-profit for profit. I mean, when you're talking about smaller publishers, this is an accident of the tax code. So we want to find ways to include other publishers who everybody recognises are quality publishers but just don't happen to have university press in their name. And then I'm over to Rebecca for library reactions. Thank you. Is this microphone working? Yep. All right. So thanks for that, Charles. That was very helpful. Just to be clear, JSTAR's role in this, we don't own the path to open initiative. This is a loose collaboration at the moment of university presses and the ACLS. And they came to us for what I think of as two words, infrastructure and impact. We have the infrastructure, which is the relationships with the presses that I was talking about, but also relationships with 13,000 libraries worldwide in addition to a very broad individual user unaffiliated community. So I've been out talking to the community for the past two months and I'm going to share what the good and the bad and what we're hearing from folks to date. So what librarians have expressed to me that they like about this is the scale. You know, when I started talking about 30 presses, 30 small to medium-sized university presses, that is really something that's appealing for a number of reasons. And the collaboration of the presses in this and the scale that we can bring to it is really appealing. As Charles talked about, biodiversity helping to preserve the types of scholarship and make it more accessible and open in the long run from these types of presses is, again, really resonating. I hear that a lot. Like I'm very concerned about the future for small and medium humanities and social science presses and how we can help them survive and their content thrive in a digital space. Something that's also been appealing is the predictability. We're talking about a three-year-plus couple of months pilot and that we know what the scope of this is. We're expecting 1,000 titles. We're also saying that these 1,000 titles over this time period will be open access at the end of this. So that predictability is really helpful. The fee structure, Charles mentioned it briefly. It's, again, a collaborative funding model. It reduced costs for everyone for the monographs that are in this program. And we also scaled it to the JStore classification for institutions, which we've had in place since the beginning, which structures the fees at more affordable for those that can afford less. And that's been really appealing. And interestingly, in the first, we've only been out there for about a month and a half talking about this, but the first group of commitments in the first month to this was across the entire range of type of institution from the very small to the very large. So I feel like that's sort of a good indicator that the way we've structured the fees has appealed to that group. No matter what size or type of institution they are. Transparency with the collaboration. Again, experimenting with the community in a pilot. What I mean by transparency is really talking about the why behind why we're doing it this way, understanding what the challenges for the presses are and talking about it openly, getting the feedback from the community and responding to that, and being open to learning through this process. And I'll talk about that in a moment when I talk about the things that folks are concerned about. So again, as Charles mentioned, concerning to the publishers, as it is to the libraries, is that delayed open access? Does it need to be that long? And why are you doing that? I get that question probably the most often. And my response to that is, I don't know if three years is too long. And we should be examining that. That's why having the governance structure in place is going to be really helpful. I don't know if three years might be too long, but in monograph land, I worked at Oxford University Press for 20 years before coming to JSTOR three years ago, the first three years of life of a monograph when 90% of the cost recouping comes in. And does this model with the funding from the library and the consumer sales that happens during those first three years, does that help publishers, enable them to publish in this way? But again, it could be two years. It could be one year. I don't know. But I think we need to explore it in a very controlled and open dialogue with the community. The exclusivity, again, is why does it only have to be on JSTOR and can we explore other ways of making that content available? And I think we should, and we should talk about that as a community about what makes it sustainable. There has been a lot of feedback when exploring models like Subscribe to Open and others around... I lost my train of thought there. Sorry, I'll come back to that. Title selection. Just like Charles was talking about on the publisher side, one of the first questions we're asked about this is like, okay, this is really interesting, but what titles are in there? I need to see a title list because there's a lack of trust that these are going to be high quality titles. Anything that goes into open, it must be less than or something that's not as meaningful as a book that is made available for sale. So that has been a really interesting conversation. Reuse rights, Charles mentioned, what's being recommended, a question that comes up as well, and we need to be more transparent about that and find ways to make that available, that information available from the beginning about a title's rights. And some other feedback we've had. I had a conversation with the Ivy Plus group, the collections folks and the scholarly communication folks last week, and one of their questions was, does the model, even though we've scaled the fees and the open access delay, continue to privilege only those well-funded institutions and so the less well-funded and underrepresented communities won't have access to this content for three years, and that seems to go against when we talk about open access. And I think we just need to continue to explore that during the three years of this pilot. Thank you, Rebecca. And James, can I pass over to you for some concluding comments before we open for questions and conversation? Sure. I apologize, everyone. I missed the call where we planned the session, so Charles just told me why I'm here. Apparently, we're going to be hosting a governance sort of conversation around this project, and I'm just kidding. I've been involved in this from the beginning. I want to say first something really quickly about ACLS, because all of you have probably heard of ACLS, but probably very few of you have any reason to know exactly what we do or why we're involved in this. Very quickly, the name comes from working with now 79 learned societies from kids. My kids love the learned societies, but the academic societies for 100 years now. So we support their work. It's really important because that's a network of scholars in different fields that we work with all the time. And then, many people know about, we have fellowship programs, I think we have 14 right now, some that we fund and some that we execute for others. So we work with thousands of scholars all the time who are applying for fellowships to write a book or to move into the public sector or whatever, do very different fellowship programs. But in that process, we have reviewers and panelists and letter writers. So we work with thousands of scholars all the time. So we haven't been that involved in publishing in recent years, but we have at various points in the past. But I think one thing that I would emphasize coming to this project and what I'm going to say a few comments about what I've learned by working with Charles and John Shearer and others in the publishing community and the library community and talking about this project. One of the things that's kind of obvious from our point of view is that scholars write books and they need to write books and they want to write books in humanistic fields and they want people to read them, right? And they want people to read them and then they want to read other people's books. So what is sort of usually step way back and it's very sane about a model that increases access to scholarly literature into books is that it helps on that process, okay? So on a very basic level. Rebecca mentioned the term Bibliodiversity, which was really interesting for me to think about and learn about in working on this project. And it very clearly is just that the more financial pressure on presses, the more they're going to publish another book on the history of the Civil War or a book in Indigenous Studies, right? A book that is going to sell less, they're going to take less risks. So the question here is how can, you know, by subventing with some money from libraries that are already going to buy 200 libraries that are already going to buy these books, subventing the presses so that they can be there to take more risks and to increase the diversity of the humanistic scholarship that gets published. So that was something that made a lot of sense to us. I guess the, you know, Peter Baldwin is on our board of trustees. So we have a voice of open access in our years all the time, which has been terrific. For ACLS, working with the scholarly societies, journal, open access in journals are just complicated. It's not that the societies are morally against it. It's just a really complicated question for their model. And some of them are doing things and some will do more things. But books are really a different story. And as Peter says in his book, Open Access from MIT Press, Athena Unbound, that just came out. One of the things he says is, you know, if 200 libraries are going to spend $75 on a book, that's $1,500. So why not get, like, more benefit and get, you know, those 200 libraries would get the book, other people. I mean, he's talking about a slightly different model. But his point is the money's already in the system. And if we just squeeze the money to different places, as he says, I don't have a quote, he basically says, it's no particular difference for the libraries, but the difference for the world is enormous. So it's not an immediate open access program, but it definitely gets wider access all the time. The last thing I'll say that I learned, and then I'll open it up for questions, is this question of the quality of the books. I mean, because if I'm you and I'm a library, I'm like, I'd like to buy the good books if they come in a package, but I just don't want to buy just a pile of books, right? One of the things that I've learned by thinking about this more and working with others is that a good book, a good book defined by usage or popularity or prizes or anything like that, it's not an act of nature, right? It's not like the tornadoes or the tides. A book doesn't get good because it comes out as a good book or a widely read book. It's a product of how access it is and how reviewed it is and how many people know about it and how easy it is to get to. I mean, if it's locked up in 200 libraries that buy the book, then it has to be defined to be a good book in order to get into that. I mean, it's crazy. So these books can be good books. These books in fields that are still being established. I mean, we got lots of books on Jane Austen, which is great, but there are lots of things out there that need to be said and need to be argued. But if we're going to be sitting here 25 years from now and reading books because they're not many people bought them or read them, but that's because we didn't figure out how to get them exposed to people. So anyway, those are things I've learned along the way and I'm going to turn back to Charles to be MC. Thank you, James. So over to you. I mean, here are some sort of questions, but don't feel restricted to these. And on the final slide, we will have where to find out more at ACLS and JSTOR. But why don't we just pass this over to you? I wouldn't mind coming up to the microphone and perhaps introducing yourself before you speak or comment. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for the presentation. Alicia Salas, University of Oregon. I'm curious if you have any plans or have talked about with this pilot and with the delayed open access. Any plans to experiment with pricing on those published materials? Is the plan to price those according to a standard, just a standard pricing model, the traditional way, or has there been any discussion about possibly expanding access through a more affordable pricing versus just going from too expensive to completely open? Welcome any thoughts or feedback you've heard from some of the constituents groups you've been working with on that. Alicia, that's a really interesting question. Can I just ask you a clarification question? So are you thinking particularly here of the price of the print book or the e-book to a consumer? Either. If 200 libraries are going to pay 75, if you drop that to 20, would you get 400 or 600 and would it be the same to the publisher? Would that be an alternative means of expanding access while waiting for that embargo to run out? Rebecca, do you want to talk about the library side of it? I certainly have some comments about the consumer pricing. I think actually it's probably more about the consumer pricing of the book itself which would be in the publisher space because the way our fee structure is working it is an annual subscription fee so it's not specific to a title for the path to open participation and I think I'll just make a point about what that cost is. So at the very large institution it's about $50 a book over the course of the three years. The very small institution it's $8 a monograph making it if you think about the distribution of the funds for the subscription but for the print side and the consumer side I think that's a hugely interesting question so there are some things of course that we have to leave to the publisher to work out and pricing to the consumer would be one of them but just speaking for University of Michigan Press what we're recognizing is a really interesting space in terms of thinking eventually of the book going OA and what to price the print book at to make it still attractive as a saleable item after the book goes OA and in general we don't like changing our prices too much so as we think about the prospect of these books going OA in three years we're probably going to choose pricing that considers that from the very start so that means always doing a paperback it also means thinking about what the consumer will basically if you knew there was an open access version but you wanted to read this thing in the bath what would you be willing to pay for the print version so I think you're going to see a lot more pricing of paperbacks that has that at the back of the publisher's mind and that's going to be good for access and I think you know that would also apply to our direct-to-consumer e-book copies Thank you again Thank you for that question Thank you that was really interesting I wear a couple of hats and over the years I've had conversations with publishers about reprints and I'm curious about how that might factor in this process you know I do book history and collection development but there is this push to try to get access to books we've recovered that we didn't know had such value of course proving the value but I'm curious if there's any relationship that might say a positive nudge toward that direction of reprints Mary Emma, thank you so much Rebecca, James, Emma Are you talking about bringing books back into print? Bringing books that are long sits out of print maybe a very small print run but have value as we continue to understand things about culture, society whatever bringing them back into print but doing this way because publishers have said it's too expensive to reprint these books but this is a different mechanism It's a really interesting point this pilot is focused on future publishing of new content and sustaining that but I think that would be a great topic for the governance group to explore examining whether or not this program could have an impact on that as well and just one other quick thought on that Mary Emma which is that a lot of times by planting something in the middle of two groups that actually could get along if there was some bridge between them is a good starting place and so I think that as Rebecca said this project is a pilot and well defined and everything like that but we've talked at different points about what about and I think Rebecca said is three years the right time there could be an accelerate to open books that are in authors or certain books that should move faster or to open and your point of those books that are buried in a mystery zone of are they in copyright are they out can they be reprinted can they not be who would want to everything like that again once the common ground is established that's the kind of thing that can be built on top of this one would think and I would add one thing and I hope Mary Emma won't mind me saying this so Dr Mary Emma Graham is going to be one of the presenters in the final plenary and is somebody I've had the pleasure of getting to know through the ACLS commission on diverse digital scholarship but her own work in really raising an understanding of African American writers and bringing that back into the mix into public awareness I think that's really points to the importance of that question and the governance model that we've discussed so this is my colleague John Shearer the director of the University of North Carolina Press who's exploring this more with the Mellon Foundation but this governance model will place the voices that represent or at least uplift marginalised readers marginalised at the centre of the future of this project so that's going to be very very exciting to have a really consensual governance model a really sort of diverse governance model that will actually help with the selection of future books with the direction of this program and I think that's going to be one of the central exciting things about Path to Open Charlotte could you introduce yourself please? Yes I'm Charlotte Lair from Lerysist one of the reasons why I like this model is that it's actually approaching open access not in the diversity, equity, inclusion angle, I mean it is but it's really coming from the idea around sustainability and that's a big sticky word especially among book publishers what is that and what does that mean and it's because book publishing hasn't necessarily been sustainable especially for the presses represented through this model and so what I'm wondering and this may get to the governance but I'm also wondering about what Emma might think about this are there plans even within the first year the transparency of showing how much was raised how much went to each publisher and what the publisher thought as far as you know those who got the 5000 was that good enough and for those who had that big bestseller that made the big bucks how does that translate into impact how does that translate into sustainability overall for the publisher across their entire portfolio because we'll know those are subsidizing other activities right this is getting to that big sticky question of sustainability and so is that part of the plan just to say it raises a very very important point and it raises a point that's very uncomfortable for many of us and I think I don't know and this is probably speaking out of school but I think it might be uncomfortable for JSTOR as well which is there's a level of transparency that we expect and will expect I think I hope as a governance group about what's happening that is appropriate to open access in the way that the idea of exclusive platforms really jars that I think is going to be very very important out of this program and I'm hoping that it can be a way of talking about some of these things that I think I don't know University Press has perhaps been a bit on the a defensive about like what do acquisitions editors do what is the value that they add because that's why we are more expensive than a scholar led publisher it's because we have acquisitions editors and they go and they deeply dive into conferences and they lead in their disciplines and we cover many many many disciplines and that's expensive and the question is are libraries willing to support artisanal foods are they willing to support local producers are they willing to support reinvestment in local economies because in our personal lives of course we are but when we spend our acquisitions dollars are we reinvesting in that way in things that might be a bit more expensive but they're better for the community, for the environment for sustainability I'll just say I believe Charlotte that there's a plan to have an annual report issued during the course of this program to make things as transparent as possible is absolutely not the attention to hide information about this it is intended to be collaborative transparent my understanding is also that the governance board will include library scholars and publishers and that's where it'll all be held accountable right because they'll all have their voice and what information should be shared and where great conversations can happen about what is proprietary and what is not and why it is and I always feel it's one of the most important things we can do on the vendor publisher side is openly communicate what it costs to make a monograph where does that cost live from how much does a press sell of a monograph and getting to an understanding of the reasons behind doing things not just the outcomes of it Thank you Yes, Rice majors, UC Davis I don't know if I have a question I have a kind of a topic I guess so I was able to find a study that I had read a long time ago over ten years ago that when a book is cited in scholarship over 25% of the time the book is over 25 years old so it can take a while for a book to be cited and part of that is that the current generation of scholars heard the findings at a conference and it really takes that next generation of scholars to need to go and read about it and I'm wondering this strikes me as kind of an interesting balance of just in case and just in time because if you really needed the book you could just buy it but if you're doing collection development because you just want to you want to create a large collection to support the future of scholarship you could wait the three years and it becomes available to you and to your users and I'm wondering if you have any of you have any data like that that kind of is informing this where that three-year window I mean I'm hearing that you tend to make 90% of your money in the first three years when you publish a book and that's kind of maybe playing into that magic but from the user standpoint is that three years consequential and do we know that? I don't think I can rattle off the statistics off the top of my head but this is absolutely something that is incredibly meaningful because this scholarship it's bought instantly when it's published because of an acquisition workflow of the library not because you need it at that moment and especially in humanities and social sciences it does take a while to work its way through that academic enterprise right and the usage of JSTOR I think 50% of our usage is like very deep backlist but I don't have enough detailed response to that but I think it's going to be important for us to share that and actually during the pilot we do expect some books will be opened up faster because they'll get funding in one way or the other or we're going to have presses put in books that need immediate open access so that we can study the difference in what happens like in the print sales but one thing we're definitely going to be looking at is what happens with citations once these books are open are we increasing the number of citations so I think that's a terrific area for us to be examining the impact of this work and just one more thing on the impact on our licensed ebooks on JSTOR where libraries have to buy them on average it's bought in 14 different countries the open access books of which we have almost 10,000 now out of 130,000 150 different countries use those books so the impact of open it is getting to that underserved community everywhere whether they're at an institution or just somebody interested in a topic and it doesn't matter what the age is I was just thinking for a humanist it's really hard to pivot your research agenda in real time if you see a book published that's interesting you tend to buy it so that in three years you can take that up as your next project unless it's really directly impacting what you're looking at right now thank you I think it's a fascinating point yes it sparks all kinds of thoughts we know so little about how humanities read we've had all these studies of early career researchers in STEM and researchers in STEM we have vanishingly few studies of what is happening in early careers and more mature careers in humanities disciplines it is interesting the point about the practice of buying the book right now putting it on the shelf then coming to it later thank heavens for those people who do that because absolutely that's happening there's also an interesting suggestion from Steve Fallon from De Groiter online that peak impact in the De Groiter collections is achieved in two years more than three so why have we thought about three and that opens up lots of questions like what do we mean by peak impact what does that mean but also that's a really interesting claim and one that is a hypothesis that now we can work on and the final thing is that point about 25 years it gets at some of the discomfort the university presses feel in this open space remembering that traditionally we've made money from our backlists and that's how we've supported our operations so with open access are we eroding the potential to make backlist sales I personally think we aren't because what Amy Brand at MIT Press has also said is that instantaneously our books are published they go up online on LibreGenesis or Sci Hub it's not like we're restricting access anyhow let's at least partner with libraries to make an openness a little bit more manageable sorry I beg your pardon please go ahead thank you Holly Mercer University of Tennessee so I'm answering the first question and thinking not just as a librarian but as a librarian whose University Press became a division of the University of Tennessee libraries in 2020 and I've learned a lot over the last few years and one of the things that I have learned is that for modest University Press path to open isn't just a path to open it's also a path to ebooks and and so I see this as something that could really be transformative for one of the the smaller University Presses also as a library we participated in Tome but our University Press could never really benefit from that we were giving funds to our U.T. authors to publish in larger University Presses but our Press publishes mostly authors that are in regional universities smaller institutions that don't have the resources to participate in Tome they're not ARLs and so something like this is really going to help our University Press I think be successful in the long term so from a sustainability perspective it's something that's really going to make a big difference I feel Thanks Heather Heckman University of South Carolina to Holly's point about Tome we did not participate but we had some of the same obstacles our Press is not part of the libraries but we are trying to work closer together I was going to ask a follow-up question about the statistics you shared and I understand if you do not have this at the top of your head but when you say average is that a mean or a median I assume that it's kind of a skewed distribution a few books having a lot of places or maybe pulling it up I don't want to answer any more in depth because I'm wrong a little possibly very wrong but I think this is an area we have to explore and I think through the pages about Path to Open we should start thinking about those questions and talking about them and sharing some of that usage it's come up in a couple of the conversations just trying to better understand the impact of that of the delay to the open access and whether it's meaningful or not I think this is probably just stating the obvious but I care about the full distribution not just where the center is and I bet that the Press is due as well because you're looking at that when you're working on your budgets so thanks Thank you so much for that and I think it really fits into perhaps the conversation we had at the last session around usage statistics lies lies and downed usage statistics I mean it's like if we're not being actually asking those questions about the methodology and about what we're actually talking about we're going to have a lot of wild claims without context so thank you so much for that and I just pointing out so University of Tennessee Press if you want to know about Appalachia you go to University of Tennessee Press if you want to know about the civil rights movement you go to University of South Carolina Press and you see perfect examples of Presses that manifest in their focus in their academic publishing the concerns and perspectives of their regions so important and you're publishing those books because they're important to publish not because you think they're going to reach a million copy sales and your motivation to publish that type of content is very very different and collectively distributing the investment from the community that helps support that I think is one of the aims of this program for sure Any other observations or comments anything from the panelists that has struck you during this conversation I mean I would say Charles you know we've talked a lot about libraries who are very vulnerable and upfront in their support for University Press whether that University Press is part of the library or not I mean I think these last two comments I get to that because we're thinking a lot about making sure we have that Biblio diversity within the books that we acquire within our own library and then we are also met with this sort of complicated aspect that I think is part of that you know journal STEM history of now being responsible for how are we helping our own campus authors publish open access and so I think that's just those are two things that we're thinking about in sometimes in the same moment but sometimes very separately from one another so I just wanted to highlight that on those last comments when we kind of think about a program like Tome which was really doing that work of here is a way that our campus authors have access to creating publishing an open access book and then thinking on the other side of that how do we think more holistically about our collections and our readers and placing open access within maybe that sort of part of our brain so thank you for those last two comments I think that really highlights that connection Bruce Thank you This is really a question for James Introduce yourself I'm sorry Bruce Hedrick with JSTOR At the end of the day what's the ACLS want to see out of this Please start by defining the end of the day Ha ha ha ha Not today but three years from now One of the things that's nice I used to go to CNI a lot I didn't go for a couple of years and it's so nice to be back here because of the collisions of networks that happened at a place like this so obviously there's a strong network of deans of librarians of deans of libraries and of AULs for technology but when introduced into a group like this of someone doing something different like those clear fellows yesterday I think everyone's like oh I like to hear about what you're doing and what's going on out there and what happens I think a lot is that we don't collide our networks we barely have time to have the networks that we have and so the section before this about the layers of work that we all collectively need to figure out how to do in order to track usage of publicly available assets of works and citations I mean there's so much work that goes into infrastructure and we all see the gaps in infrastructure and so the end of the day for us is again just seeing scholars who there are all sorts of mythologies about open access policy publishing I shouldn't publish my book open because because then I wouldn't have a book to hold well you actually can't have a book to hold okay so just displacing that myth is one thing and then some of these myths are based in reality will I get credit for it how will my department look at it part of that is again tracking usage wouldn't your department want your book to be read a lot and cited a lot that would be a good thing so if we constrain how how much access there is to your book it's going to be used less and your scholarship will be valued less and what is value and right now we have such narrow definitions so there's so much that we can do especially if we want humanistic fields to thrive and move forward right like we want we want people to be able to publish long form works right and particularly in fields that you know they haven't had that opportunity to not have the Biblio diversity that we're talking about so for the end of the day for us I mean this is a long answer but you asked a big question I think that ACLS is interested in this there are just some sort of gaps in sort of obvious solutions that can help everyone involved you know the people who write the books want to read the books so libraries that are paying for books want more books and they want them not just for themselves obviously they have to account they're writing a check right you're going to get some books you're going to get some value for this right but you are knowing at the same time that at the end of an embargo period it's going to open up to the world and that's going to help your authors so it's such a to me this is a win-win about lifting the whole collective infrastructure of how we get the hard work of writing a book disseminated so if we can help to be a place where some of those networks collide that's great so on that note I'll just ask you one question wouldn't your lunch be much better if you had an orange pen but you also have to take a DOAB leaflet if you take one so thank you so much to our panellists thank you so much to the audience