Our Open Access Vision
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. More about Open-access (OA) literature.
At UNC Press, the broad dissemination of scholarship is core to our mission, so we enthusiastically share the vision of many OA advocates. Despite the opportunities afforded by digital formats, most traditional academic publishing models reinforce networks of privilege where scholars and students at well-resourced universities can read our books and journals, but anyone outside that network must overcome significant financial obstacles to access our publications. Expanding access must be a primary goal for any organization that claims to espouse progressive views of social justice and equity.
But we also must emphasize that the creation and marketing of high-quality scholarship requires significant investments in time and money from the Press and from our authors. Without a major transformation in how humanities publishing is funded, we may never be able to align with the most ambitious versions of OA. Currently less than 8 percent of our publishing expenses are funded through stipends or institutional/state subsidies. As a result, cost-recovery transactions are a fundamental aspect of our sustainability.
We acknowledge that charging libraries, scholars, and students for print and digital access is simply shifting the financial burdens within a small and under resourced ecosystem. But like all university presses, we are not-for-profits who return value back into that ecosystem in both time and money. For example, we pay our authors (almost all of whom are active academics) up to half a million dollars in royalties annually. Individual books that generate surpluses help to reduce the prices and deficits for the majority of our list. We are raising money for endowments to directly support the publication of scholarly books and journals. There are no stockholders or executive bonuses at the Press. All income goes to support our larger scholarly mission.
To expand access, we are actively experimenting with models where digital editions are free for downloading, reading, and sharing. But many restrictions on reuse remain in place to protect authors’ legal rights and preserve our ability to do cost-recovery through print sales. And there is indeed income on print sales, even when digital editions are openly available. Our director, John Sherer, was a co-director of a recent NEH-funded study that looked at this question and validated the idea that print books sell even when digital editions are free. Our internal data suggest the same thing, although overall revenue is diminished. Nevertheless, that income allows us to consider opening even more of our scholarship. In the spring and summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis, we opened most of our scholarship in order to support students, scholars, and libraries whose access to collections was diminished during the pandemic. Ironically, print sales actually increased during this time.
UNC Press has been a leader in OA among university presses. We have actively participated in numerous programs, including two NEH/Mellon Open Book grants, the NEH Fellowship Open Book Program, TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), Knowledge Unlatched, as well as a number of open educational resources being developed within the UNC System. We were the primary investigator in the Mellon Foundation–funded Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP). This pilot is supporting the publication of open digital editions of high-quality books from university presses in the field of history. Led by UNC Press’s subsidiary, Longleaf Services, we are helping our twenty-three partner presses ultimately produce at least seventy-five OA monographs. You can find the published SHMP books indexed on the OAPEN platform and the Internet Archive. At the bottom of this page we have listed all our OA book projects at UNC Press. We are implementing a use-case of the new Book Analytics Dashboard Project. This pilot program will allow us to measure the exponential increases in usage we see with open editions. We will use this data to demonstrate impact and value for our OA publications.
Strategies for Open Access
OA looks very different depending on the form and discipline of scholarship. As a result, we have developed different strategies to move us toward more open scholarship.
Scholarly monographs: The monograph is the lifeblood of university press scholarship. It is how humanities research is advanced and preserved. While we have participated in numerous open monographs experiments and seen the exponential increases in usage of open works, we have yet to see a sustainable model for scaling OA monographs.
Our current priority is the newly announced Path to Open pilot, developed by UNC Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and being operationalized by JSTOR. Path to Open is an imperfect solution which necessitates paywalls to access for three years before a book becomes completely open. But it has the potential to open far more new university press monographs than any other program, and it does so without any external or grant funding.
Open Educational Resources (OER): An OER is essentially an open access textbook. Through our Office of Scholarly Publishing Services, UNC Press has already facilitated the publication of numerous open textbooks. We continue to explore partnerships with UNC System scholars to develop, publish, and promote these high-quality volumes that save students in North Carolina thousands of dollars.
Journals: Academic journals are arguably the most dysfunctional channel of all scholarly publishing. Dominated by global commercial conglomerates, the prevailing business model derives profits by creating artificial scarcity and delimiting access to research. UNC Press, through its Longleaf Services subsidiary, has been a participant in the Arcadia-funded Next Generation Library Publishing pilot for three years.
We are now embarking on our own initiative to implement the NGLP open-source tools within thew UNC System. This use case—called the Partnership for Open Publishing—will advance humanities and social science scholarship originating across the 17-campus system while also becoming an extensible business model to support a wide variety of potential future implementations.
We have been working with faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in the newly created Academic Research Community Alliance, which is a community of like-minded scholars supportive of a non-profit, altruistic, high-quality scholarly publishing alternatives to standard publishing models.
Additionally, the Press is participating in the recently launched Subscribe to Open program from Project MUSE. This program aims to eliminate financial barriers for both readers and authors and leverages the enormous body of scholarship on the MUSE platform.
Policies on OA
We support the posting of electronic theses and dissertations into open institutional repositories, even though we have seen for-profit commercial enterprises take advantage of open licenses by selling these manuscripts, usually without compensating the author or host institution. We also have noted how some publishers try to suppress or otherwise disguise the reality that many university press books originate as dissertations (that are frequently available in open repositories). Our publishing process at UNC Press transforms and enhances these manuscripts so significantly that the existence of the original version is not a significant concern for us. Recently, the Press published a revised dissertation that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and on the long list for the National Book Award.
We have not yet identified a specific fee or stipend that would be required to “open” a book. Various pilots have suggested amounts ranging from $3,000-$5,000 (for previously published books) to as much as $15,000 and more (for new books). OA stipends have no impact on our decision to publish. Instead, they provide us with options for how we would publish. For now, we target $7,500 as a minimum stipend for immediate open access. But any author who wishes their book to be published OA should reach out to us to explore options.
We permit authors to post preprints of book chapters that appear in anthologies of edited collections. We entertain individual requests for posting final pdfs of chapters, but authors should expect there to be an embargo period before we will permit that.
We actively invite publishers who want to publish an OA journal to reach out to us for partnerships. We permit authors of journal articles to post preprint versions in their institutional repositories or on their own websites.
We strive hard to ensure that our journals are available to institutions at modest prices either unbundled and sold directly by the Press, or in aggregations from third-party vendors like J-STOR and Project MUSE.
While removing pay barriers is the key to expanding access for many readers, we also acknowledge that ensuring access to readers with disabilities must be part of our commitment. We currently partner with a number of vendors to accommodate all requests we receive.
The Future of OA and UNC Press
The landscape around OA is rapidly shifting. We need to be prepared to respond to international requirements as well as the rapidly changing mandates coming from the federal government.
UNC Press was founded a century ago to solve the publishing challenges of the early twentieth century. Our ambition now is to address today’s challenges and opportunities to develop new, low-friction models of open access publishing where usage increases exponentially while reducing financial burdens among all the participants in the ecosystem: scholars, societies, presses, libraries, and readers.