New path opens up support for humanities in OA publishing – Digital Science

Can a new Open Access collection help overcome the challenges facing monographs? In the latest in our OA books series to coincide with OA Week, guest author Sarah McKee explains the case for Path to Open.

Path to Open, a new open access pilot for book publications in the humanities and social sciences, has launched its collection this month, with 100 titles covering 36 disciplines from more than 30 university presses. This represents a major and much-needed step forward for Open Access publishing in general, and for the humanities specifically.

The pilot began in January as a collaboration among university presses, libraries, and scholars. It has emerged at a moment when students, administrators, and political leaders in the United States openly doubt the value and relevance of the humanities.1 Their questions stem at least in part from a widespread misunderstanding of the term “humanities”, the disciplines it includes, and the inquiries posed by its scholars.

Such misunderstandings are perhaps not surprising. Scholarly books, often referred to as monographs, have served for decades as the primary mode for sharing research findings in the humanities but are currently distributed in ways that privilege a narrow audience.2

University presses – long-time champions and producers of monographs – have lost crucial institutional support, leaving many in difficult financial circumstances. The resulting high prices for monographs often exclude scholars, students, and others without affiliation at well-funded research libraries, and the problems multiply for those outside the established book distribution networks of North America and Western Europe.

Compared with STEM disciplines, the humanities receive little public funding for research and publication, making the move to open access much more challenging.

A commitment to finding new ways of sharing monographs drives the development of Path to Open. As Charles Watkinson and Melissa Pitts have noted, academic stakeholders “have long seen the value in investing significant resources to sustain science infrastructures that contribute to a common good. It is essential to their mission that they collaborate and invest with that same care in the crucial infrastructure for humanities research embodied by the network of university presses”.

Path to Open seeks to create an infrastructure that allows more publishers – especially small and mid-sized university presses – to experiment with open access distribution while also boosting the circulation of research from a community of diverse humanities scholars. The initiative is distinctive among open access models because, as John Sherer explains, it proposes a “compromise between the legacy model of university press publishing and a fully funded OA model”.

“A commitment to finding new ways of sharing monographs drives the development of Path to Open.”

Sarah McKee

Path to Open operates as a library subscription – administered exclusively by JSTOR – that guarantees payments of at least US$5,000 per title to participating publishers, to help offset potential losses in digital sales. With the launch of the online collection this month, presses also have the option to sell print editions of all books, as well as direct-to-consumer e-books.

A sliding scale for subscription costs provides more equitable access to libraries of varying sizes and budgets, and more than 60 libraries have joined to date, including members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The initial 100 titles transition to full open access by 2026, and new titles will be added in each of the following three pilot years to reach an expected total of 1,000 open access books by 2029.

The model aims to reduce financial risk for presses while also acknowledging lingering hesitation about open access publication within the humanities community. As John Sherer finds, many authors fear that “an OA monograph would be viewed less favorably than a traditional print monograph would in the tenure and promotion review process”.

Monographs take years to produce, and they function quite differently from journal articles in the scholarly ecosystem. Many of these books maintain their relevance for years, even decades, past the original publication date. Over the life of the pilot, JSTOR will track various usage metrics for all titles in the collection both before and after the transition to open access.

The partnership with JSTOR provides a unique opportunity to gather data in a controlled environment, with hopes of gaining much-needed insights into the behavior of readers, the effect of open access on print sales, and the timing of peak impact for monographs in various disciplines. Understanding such issues is key to strengthening the vital infrastructure that supports humanities research and to ensure its place alongside open STEM scholarship.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has committed to providing a robust and transparent structure for community engagement with Path to Open. In consultation with the Educopia Institute, ACLS is developing a forum to encourage dialogue among key stakeholders, including publishers, libraries, scholars, and academic administrators. Inviting scholars into these conversations is critical for a shared understanding of how open access affects humanistic disciplines, institutions of higher education, students, and individual academic careers.

Our hope at ACLS is that an inclusive dialogue about Path to Open will generate greater understanding of the stakes for various constituents within the humanities community, and guide decisions for the future of scholarly publishing in sustainable and equitable ways.


1 Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2023.

2 See also Michael A. Elliott, “The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era,” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 18, no. 4 (fall 2015).

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TOME sheds light on sustainable open access book publishing – Digital Science

A five-year open access publishing pilot has come to an end, offering key insights into a future of sustainable open access publishing for monographs.

In December of 2022, Emory University in Atlanta hosted the fifth and final stakeholders meeting for TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)

TOME launched in 2017 as a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The goal of the pilot was to explore a new model for sustainable monograph publishing, one in which participating universities commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of monographs by their faculty, while participating university presses commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories.

The December meeting gave stakeholders (publishers, librarians, authors, and representatives from a number of societies and foundations) the opportunity to gather—both virtually and in person—and assess the outcomes of the initiative while also deliberating on next steps. In this post I briefly discuss one discrete piece of the assessment: What did we learn from the pilot about eBook usage and the impact of the OA edition on print sales.

Over the course of the pilot, more than 130 scholarly monographs have been published in OA editions with funding from the 20 participating TOME institutions. Given the long lead time associated with monograph publishing, most of the books (over 70%) were released in the final two years of the pilot, which means that any usage data collected by the publishers would be preliminary at best, so the initial analysis focused on the first 25 books, which were published between May 2018 and September 2019. Prior to the December meeting, the publishers of these 25 books were asked to collect usage data from each of the platforms hosting the OA editions. In addition, they provided print sales figures, both for the TOME editions and for comparable titles on their list. The resulting data were compiled into a spreadsheet for analysis. 

Not surprisingly, the main challenge to analysis of these data was the apples-to-apples problem. Some repositories and platforms collect downloads while others track views only. Some base their stats on single chapters; others on the entire book. Meanwhile, publishers do not all place their OA editions on the same platforms. As a result, the spreadsheet ended up looking a bit like a checkerboard with pieces on some squares but not others. For instance, here’s how a small portion of the spreadsheet looked when the data were filled in:

Figure 1: Sample spreadsheet of downloads/views.

“TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles.”

Peter Potter

Still, when all the data were collected, one thing was clear: the OA editions have been heavily accessed online. By July 2022, the first 25 TOME books tallied nearly 195,000 downloads and views. The average per book was 7,754.1

These findings are in line with those of other OA book initiatives. In November 2022 MIT Press reported that the 50 books published OA in 2022 through its Direct to Open program were downloaded over 176,000 times.2 This works out to roughly 3,520 per book. Likewise, the University of Michigan Press reported in January 2023 that the 40 Fund to Mission books released OA in 2022 were downloaded over 149,000 times up to the end of December, reaching an average of 3,826 per book.3 While the per book numbers for both D2O and Michigan are lower than that of TOME, the TOME books accumulated their stats over a longer period of time.

TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles. As can be seen in this bar chart, the average number of downloads/views per book (7,754) is significantly higher than the average unit sales per book (590). 

Figure 2: TOME usage/sales (first 25 books).

We also considered one of the biggest questions that publishers continue to ask about OA books: How does the OA edition affect sales of the print edition? With this question in mind, publishers provided not just the sales figures for TOME books but sales figures for comparable titles on their list. (Each publisher was left to decide what it deemed a “comparable” book.)  As this chart shows, the print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps. 

Figure 3: Print sales: TOME vs. Comps (first 25 books).

“The print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps.”

Peter Potter

These findings should be taken with a grain of salt. As several publishers pointed out, identifying comps for any single title is mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the sample size (25) is too small to warrant drawing any firm conclusions. For instance, most of the 25 TOME titles had print sales between 300 and 500 copies. Only in four cases did sales exceed 1,000 copies, and if these four titles are excluded from the sample the average drops to a number more consistent with the comps. Understandably, therefore, most presses were reluctant just yet to draw any conclusions about OA’s impact on sales.4

Of course, we know that the impact of scholarly books goes well beyond downloads, views, and sales figures. A future post will look at the Altmetric data for TOME books to see what they tell us about alternative measures of impact. Meanwhile, a final report on TOME, including an in-depth examination of attitudes and motivations of the stakeholder groups, is due to be released in the coming weeks.

 1 The median was 5,243, with a minimum of 800 and a maximum of 27,470. 
 2 https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-direct-to-open-books-downloaded-more-than-176312-in-ten-months/
3 https://ebc.press.umich.edu/stories/2023-02-01-so-how-did-they-do-in-2022/. These figures filter out a digital project with very high usage, which was considered an outlier.
 4 A larger study of OA impact on sales, sponsored by the NEH, is forthcoming from AUPresses. https://aupresses.org/news/neh-grant-to-study-open-access-impact/

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Open Access Monographs: Digital Scholarship as Catalyst – Digital Science


Bringing humanistic research into the digital environment – and supporting new and diverse voices and perspectives – is one of the great benefits of Open Access, write the authors of the latest in our OA books series.

How research is generated and shared can drive meaningful change across disciplines, organizations, and communities. Consider digital scholarship. Emerging tools and methodologies prompt new questions; resultant hypotheses and argumentation call for innovative presentations; interactivity and other enhanced user experiences bring about heightened awareness and agency; increased inclusivity leads to new, diverse perspectives. Combining digital scholarship with open access (OA) publishing models expands significantly the possibilities for impact by offering more equitable access to research, alongside new and powerful ways for authors to articulate complex arguments. In sum, the intersection between innovative forms of scholarship and revolutionary dissemination processes can benefit multiple stakeholders the world over.

Creating multimodal digital monographs, for many authors, is about making the humanities relevant and accessible to wider audiences who can both benefit from and contribute to scholarly production in tangible, meaningful ways. At the same, open access publication provides not only wide distribution but also a mechanism by which digital scholarship may undergo formal development and evaluation with a university press. But the ability to create open multimodal publications is itself fraught with inequity, requiring collaboration partners, expertise, and funding not yet widely available to all scholars or to their publishers.

In an effort to take stock of the wide range of innovative practices and system-changing interventions that characterize a growing body of digital scholarly publications, Brown University and Emory University co-hosted a summit in spring 2021. The intention from the start was to call attention to the faculty-led experimentation that was taking place across a number of libraries and humanities centers, some of which already involved university presses. Shifting the focus away from tools and technology, as important as those discussions remain to the larger scholarly communications ecosystem, the summit emphasized author and audience needs and opportunities. As such, it highlighted the importance of investing in a people-centric, content-driven infrastructure.

“How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship?”

Case studies of eight recently published or in-development OA works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions among scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses: What models for publishing enhanced and interactive scholarly projects are emerging? What are the common challenges that remain and how do we address them? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship among the wider scholarly communications community?

While each of the projects, representing a broad disciplinary range and span of subject matter, offers a different perspective, when taken together they reveal lessons learned and clarify key priorities. All the projects demonstrate in myriad ways how digital content and affordances can enrich and deepen a scholarly argument. Some works provide distinct opportunities to examine the ethical implications of humanities research and to consider the new ways in which digital publication engages with audiences beyond the academy. Others foreground the powerful outcomes of collaborations between university presses and universities, modeling how such partnerships leverage resources and expertise to strengthen the humanities infrastructure and allow for innovation within it.

Although the summit focused on a selection of projects supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monographs Initiative, the presentations and generative discussions that followed raised important concerns and opportunities that extend well beyond the featured projects. These findings were released in July 2022 at the Association of University Presses 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. A key objective of the report, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community,” is to promote greater inclusion and equitable access of diverse voices as the development, validation, and dissemination of digital scholarship continues to unfold.

That digital scholarship developed and distributed as an OA monograph can transform how and where research is carried out and whom it reaches is undeniable. In the case of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2021), four project editors compiled the contributions of more than 100 scientists, humanists, artists, designers, programmers, and coders. The atlas contains 330,000 words and 600+ media assets, and had attracted 60,000 unique visitors in the six months between its publication and the date of the summit. The publication As I Remember It: Teachings from the Life of a Sliammon Elder (University of British Columbia Press, 2019), published on the RavenSpace platform, offers a model for including Indigenous communities in the creation of scholarship, while also addressing the needs of both public and academic audiences through a thoughtful interplay of text and multimedia.

“We need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public.”

For all the successes noted in the report, we need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public. Such scholarship has the potential to offer powerful counterpoints and alternatives to the disinformation that pervades current discourse on the web, and to bridge the gap between scholarly and public discourses. 

As the pathways for humanities scholarship expand in the digital era, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community” serves as an invitation for all its practitioners to engage in conversation about the evolution of content itself, as well as with the authors who create it and the audiences whom they seek to engage. The importance of sharing and learning together as a community, for finding innovative and productive ways to share expertise and resources through collaborative models, emerges from the summit and cannot be underestimated in these still early and formative days. We further hope that more universities will seek ways to support their own faculty, as well as the publishers of their faculty’s work, in efforts to bring vital humanistic research into the digital environment and to welcome new and diverse voices and perspectives throughout that process.



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