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An open access venture set up by Cambridge academics frustrated by mainstream publishing expects has notched up its 150,000th reader.
Dr Rupert Gatti, co-founder of Open Books Publishers, has urged academic societies to follow the same route, saying: “It is a real chance for the academic community to control the dissemination of their research.” Open Books is a four-year-old community interest company founded by Gatti, an economist, and Alessandra Tosi, a fellow of Clare Hall. The venture was set up following “frustration at the slow progress of typical commercial publishers” and at the high prices charged for the published work.
Open Books has published 21 monographs in print and online, covering the humanities and social sciences, and includes among its authors prominent figures such as Amartya Sen, David Levine, Ariel Rubinstein, Lionel Gossman, Ruth Finnegan and Caroline Humphrey. Books are sold print-on-demand, with the biggest seller being a Cicero edition from Durham University’s Professor Ingo Gildenhard, which has sold 1,000 copies—described by Gatti as “a standard academic sale”. Meanwhile all texts are available for free online, with Gatti saying: “We want to be able to do for open access monographs what PLOS [the Public Library of Science] is doing for scientific journals. It is not that tricky, you don’t need all the paraphernalia and hurdles.”
Gatti said Tosi’s experience of having her PhD published had encouraged the founding of Open Books. He said: “Alessandra did a PhD on Russian literature in the first quarter of the 19th century—a fantastic book, published by a Dutch publisher, who asked for a camera-ready version, which they then sold for €85—unaffordable in Russia. “Alessandra had to buy the book and send it to Russian libraries herself. She had already typeset it, done the proofreading, produced the camera-ready version. The [traditional] dissemination process was necessary 20 years ago, getting print books to the right place."
Now the total cost of publishing is less than 10% of the total cost of research and copyright is tied up by the provider of that dissemination. Huge damage is being done to the dissemination of research.”
Revenue from Open Books sales currently covers around 75% of the venture’s costs, with the remaining 25% raised through funding. “We don’t require our authors to come up with upfront funding, but we do ask them to work with us by applying for any grants which are around,” said Gatti. “In the last 12 months we have broken even and revenue has matched our costs.”
Readers of the books’ online versions number “thousands a month” according to Gatti, with a readership from all over the world. However, she said: “We haven’t cracked the library market; that has been surprisingly difficult.”