Books. Pah! It's all just stuff

Toby Green from OECD. And sheep.

Digital puts the user in the driving seat, and from a user's perspective, the content in books is no different from the content in journals, grey literature or even databases. It's all just stuff that answers a question the user has or gives them tuition or the tools to do their work. But why do publishers still insist on presenting their stuff online in containers that replicate those determined by analogue processes?

Toby Green, Head of Publishing at OECD explained how after user research, they created a new portal for datasets that allows users to discover all of OECD's data-driven content, and especially the content found in its books. http://data.oecd.org

The OECD has lots of stuff that they produce. It might be a journal article, a dataset, a working paper, book or not-really-sure-what-it-is. Generally, the books they produce are written and produced in two weeks. The Secretary General of the OECD needs to turn things around very quickly to make available for national governments. People don't want a product, they just want the relevant stuff on a topic. So they went out to talk to users to see what their tasks were.

User profiles were generated with typical tasks. What they also said is that they don't want a data portal, they just want to find the answer to their query. They knew it was there, but didn't know how to find it. It was a big change to the project as they had to change the scope. They ended up with a data rebuttal engine. Within a few minutes you can get answers to so many questions or assertions.

The OECD iLibrary enables people to download, embed and share data. If they want premium content to print and download they can pay. Green calls it premium open access, which he believes is a much better model than other existing ones. They offer web, spreadsheet, book, chapter and document. By allowing embedding, they aren't giving away content, they are gaining usage statistics on traffic as well as promotion. The idea of letting go of content which is a vital part of their mission, but also of their business model so they can be sustainable and pay the bills.

They have a technical term for their programme: Russian Doll publishing. It has had an extraordinary impact on their readership. They have seen growth in chapter downloading, but they still see strong demand for books.

Making open pay

OECD's Catherine Candea

The final session at the ALPSP International Conference was chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD. The panel reflected on the constant pressures on publishers to make content free and asked how can publishers survive and even thrive?

Frances Pinter, interim CEO of Manchester University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched considered sustainable pathways for open access scholarly books. Getting to open access is going to be harder. Income to publishers for the kind of books we are talking about is going to be a mixture.

We don't know yet, where in the continuum we should be looking for up-front funding ('someone pays' model). We need to know as we move forward what the trade-offs will be to find funding for the costs and satisfying expectations of users who access content, and to pay for the added value that publishers can deliver and want to be recompensed for.

In the social sciences and humanities lots of people still want to read printed books. What will people want? We really don't know yet as it is too early in the process to know what does and doesn't work.

'Digital is riding railroads through disciplines in different ways.'

Third party permissions present major challenges which need to be looked at. Books in long form are an important part of research output in the humanities. Should that remain closed just because it doesn't work for books? If it does, it will shoot the discipline in the foot. If the content remains closed, how are you going to measure impact?

There are a number of open monograph models including the open access edition and sales from print and/or ebooks (NAP, Bloomsbury Academic), institutional support for press (World Bank, Amherst) and library press collaboration (Mpublishing/Michigan).

Pinter's own Knowledge Unlatched is about to launch in pilot form. It is not-for-profit and aims to help publishers recover origination costs for monographs while helping lbiraries from around the world share the costs of making books open access. They use CC BY-NC licence and include front list titles. Their goals are to make open access for the humanities and social sciences sustainable so these disciplines don't get left behind.

Libraries can choose to jointly make a title fee payment to publishers by pledging to unlatch a collection via Knowledge Unlatched. In return, publishers make a flag PDF version of unlatched titles available on an open access licence. Hosting and preservation is done via HathiTrust and OAPEN.

There are 14 publishers in the forthcoming pilot with approximately 100 titles in 4 subject areas. In order to unlatch a 30-title collection, 200 libraries will each pay a maximum of $1800 each. Knowledge Unlatched will take 5% to cover costs. Who benefits? Pinter believes readers, libraries, authors, independent researchers and publishers, amongst others.

Pierre Mounier

Pierre Mounier, Associate Director of the Center for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo), reflected on how policy has changed recently from activism to policy, from green to gold.

There is a 'gold' rush with a growing market for gold publishing. But every gold rush has its drawbacks, often leaving gold rush ghost towns. Is it a sustainable model in the long term? Publishing in this model relies on only one source of funding.

Mounier counselled that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater: the bathwater is the old clunky access to information that we want to throw away, the baby is the reader themselves and their needs. Publishers need feedback from readers.

The traditional model is a cycle of income-to-publication-to-usage-to-sales-to-income. With the gold model it is replaced by funding-to-publication-to-usage.

Another alternative is to consider the freemium model. They use HTML and produce PDF, ePub for restricted access and an Amazon version for Kindle. It is a combination of free open access and premium services and licensing. They develop premium services for libraries and their patrons which is then licensed to libraries. There is premium access to books and articles with a dashboard, data supplies and services, information, support and training, branding and customisation. But this is not a static offering: they will evolve and add to the service, with more to come in 2014 and 2015.

Open Edition has 100 journals, 800+ books (16,000 anticipated in 2020) and 60+ subscribing libraries.

'Bust out your Excel spread sheet. It's all about finding things in the margins.' 

- Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox

The keyword for Mounier is diversification for sustainable business models. Consider funding (gold), crowd-funding, in-kind institutional support, premium services income and print (on demand) sales.

Niels Stern, Publisher for the Nordic Council of Ministers, closed the session by outlining the five step process they went through to digitise and broaden access to content. These deceptively simple steps include:

1. What is our winning aspiration (visibility and impact)
2. Where will we play? (researchers politicians, government officials)
3. How will we win? (digital distribution)
4. What capabilities must we have? (formats, channels, production tools)
5. What management systems are required (outsourcing partnerships)

Digital distribution was introduced as an open access project, streamlining and modernising the organisation. They are building a repository and policy which has created value for them, and they did this through listening to their target groups.

Keep an open mind. Openness is a very necessary thing when you feel you have a problem. Confront problems in an open way otherwise you won't solve the problem. His suggestions for making the transition included: 

• Stop copying your previous behaviour
• Revisit your arenas
• Zoom in on your target audiences
• Listen
• Identify new needs
• Finally, act and make new solutions!

Best practice is not always the best solution. Open did pay for them, and it can pay in most cases. It's about finding the right balance.

ALPSP Conference Day 3: Giving away the farm

'Giving away the farm' was the penultimate session from this morning's programme. Chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD, the panel reflect on the pressure scholarly publishers are under to give away content. 

With six month embargoes being demanded and some publishers moving fully to giving away their output as soon as it’s published, what effect is this going to have on the industry?

Wim van der Stelt from Springer provided an relatively upbeat assessment of where they are at. It’s good that the Finch group recommended the gold OA route and acknowledged that content needs to be paid for. Meanwhile, Europe, as always, took the wrong decision and have come down on the side of green with a 6 months embargo or gold, but with the funding still insecure. 

Springer pioneered the hybrid journal and now have price adjustments for selected hybrid journals every year. They moved into real/full open access when they bought BioMed Central in 2008. Not only did it provide them with an open access portfolio, but also helped their systems and processes to be author oriented. Most importantly, they bought in the new culture enabling them to shift from legacy culture. Oh, and it also makes money.

Springer Open now has over 405 members in 46 countries. Their Open Access journals are in all area including economics, social sciences, humanities, etc and 15% of all their articles are already open access. Springer Open now includes books! 

His advice to publishers on what they can do included:

• provide hybrid option
• start full open access
• transfer subscription journals to open access
• look at sister journals
• sponsored journals
• new journals
• be creative with financial models for society journals

But don’t forget... open access is just a business model so keep on providing the service of validation, structuring and dissemination and don’t forget to develop new services.

Jose de Buerba from the World Bank took us through their transition from charging for publications to making everything free. They are the largest Development Agency worldwide with $35.2 billions in projects approved during FY12. With 10,000+ staff and 120 field offices (mostly in developing countries) their annual publishing outputs in 2011 were: 367 journal articles (75% published externally), 438 working papers, 146 books, 500+ other pieces of analytical work very diverse subjects.

The World Bank mission is to help generate a world free of poverty, but their conflict was between: mission or money. They have embraced green OA so they can be open about what they know (data and knowledge), what they do (operations and results), about how they work (partnerships for openness), and have open government (transparency, accountability).

This video puts it neatly:

The new currency is for development impact and their Open Knowledge Repository has had 140,000 downloads since September. The business model comprises: budget from the institution, publishing service fee, revenues from commercial activity from value added products.

Xavier Cazin from Immateriel.fr considered paid content vs paid comfort. They are one of the four ebook distributors in France. Distribution is still pertinent for their ebook market and it involves seeing all kinds of publishing offers based on the same content.

The certainties of print costs have gone and with digital content it has become difficult to understand what people are expecting on pricing. One trend they’ve seen as a distributor is that of people making a business out of refurbishing public domain content. Why does it sell? And why at that price?

He considered what customers are willing to pay for: 

• ease of access (where they are now)
• handy (readable with my current device/app)
• easy navigation through the content

And what are the reading rewards? A rich and well designed environment, content/curation appropriate to current needs and sharing functionalities. In his view, the product unit price should work to equation of ease of access + reading rewards = value. For the reader, content quality + authors reputation = content reputation. Based on this, the total revenue should be: product unit price x number of customers/readers with the former related to reading comfort and the latter to content reputation.

For anyone not clear on definitions of OA there’s an overview on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access