Episode 28: Charles Watkinson on Open Access

In this episode, Charles Watkinson, the Director of University of Michigan Press and the Associate University Librarian for Publishing at University of Michigan Library, joins us to discuss Open Access ebooks and their role in the publishing community. Open Access ebooks are essentially freely available ebooks, usually for scholarly monographs, that are released under a license that allows reuse (most commonly a Creative Commons license).

University of Michigan Press has experimented with Open Access since the 1990’s, but developed their current program starting in the mid-2000’s. Their goal, under their Fund to Mission program, is to get their monograph program to almost 100% open access by 2024.

Joshua and Charles talk in this interview about release schedules and approaches for Open Access ebooks, licensing models, hybrid chapter-only models, and more. Charles also shares some of the specific approaches UM Press is taking, including combining their open access titles with their catalog subscription program. 

You can learn more about University of Michigan Press’ Open Access program, and see the list of books, at press.umich.edu. Also, the Directory of Open Access Books (doabooks.org) has more information about Open Access, a toolkit for authors, and more.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 
So this week on the BookSmarts podcast, I have Charles Watkinson, the Director of the University of Michigan Press joining me to talk about Open Access. Charles, thanks for joining me.

Charles Watkinson 
Thank you, Joshua. Pleasure to be here.

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah, it’s great to have you. Open Access is an interesting topic. I think some people on our audience know some about and quite a bit about even and others maybe know nothing. So you guys at the University of Michigan Press, you’ve been working on an Open Access program for a long time and you’ve spoken on this topic at conferences in the past as well. So I guess to start out, let’s let’s talk about what is Open Access? What is an Open Access book? Or how would you describe Open Access in the publishing industry?

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah, so Open Access is at the base, the release of a free ebook, there’s a little bit more to it than that, to be truly Open Access, that book needs to be released under a license that allows reuse and most commonly, that would be a Creative Commons license. And the other thing here is that, usually, we would do a print book, as well as an Open Access ebook, and the print book, of course, will still be for sale. So that’s Open Access.

Joshua Tallent 
That’s as simple as it sounds. That’s good. I obviously, this is potentially problematic for some publishers, you know, offering my ebook for free and all of a sudden, everybody is like, what is for free? Isn’t that going to cut into my print costs and all that other stuff? I’m sure you’ve heard all of the arguments for and against. So what do you think about that? That question of okay, so maybe I will not make as many books sales, print sales?

Charles Watkinson 
Well, so first of all, University of Michigan Press is primarily an academic publisher. So the horrible truth is that we weren’t making any money from most of our books anyhow because we are a monograph publisher, we do have a trade list and we do have a textbook list and we’re not talking Open Access for those. But for the monographs, we are never really that interested in making money, what we’re interested in, is getting the ideas out there from the academics that we publish, and of course, those academics, they’re not really interested, they’re not expecting to make money they want recognition, prestige, etc. So that’s why the financial question is not quite as burning. The other side of Open Access, that’s a really controversial side is that question, If you release an Open Access ebook, and it really gets out there into the world, could it drive print sales? Or could it potentially drive some premium ebook sales? So for example, releasing an Open Access ebook, but still charging something for a Kindle copy. I think some publishers have adopted that approach, and the jury’s out on whether that works. I think it’s true to say from our list that sometimes Open Access has really driven print sales but there has to be a special characteristic for the book, like a really active author, or something like that. It’s really hard to say what the effect is across the board. But our primary reason for doing Open Access is not financial, it’s more about achieving our mission.

Joshua Tallent 
Okay, that makes sense. So at the University of Michigan Press, you guys have been doing this for a while and you started this program. Let’s gets a little history, what’s the background behind? Why the press started going that direction and how you implemented the Open Access program?

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah, we’ve been doing experiments on Open Access since the late 90s. That’s partly because the press at Michigan has always been closely tied into the University of Michigan Library, and in fact, formally became part of the library in the mid 2000s. So those were all small experiments and there were certain fields where people were kind of early adopters, they’re into Open Access, Media Studies, Communication Studies, things like that. What’s really happening at the moment dates back to really 2020 and the experience of making ebooks free online during the early stages of COVID. So a lot of publishers did this, switched their ebook collections, to free to read for a limited period. We did it for six months. And what we really found with our monographs is that there is an extremely high spike in usage and the usage actually was Global usage in a way we’ve not seen before. And that really changed the conversation with our authors, got them really excited. And we then embarked on a program of trying to make that free to read program more constant, and also more about free to read and free to reuse. And that’s when we really started our program that we call Fund to Mission, which is a program to really get our monograph program to almost 100% open access by 2024. In fact, 75% in 2023.

Joshua Tallent 
Wow, that’s a—that’s a pretty big goal. And that’s really cool that you’ve been doing this for so long, you know, all way back in the 90s when ebooks were pretty much not really a thing for most publishers, you know. When I got started in ebooks in 2002, it still wasn’t a thing, you know, it wasn’t till the Kindle came out that things started changing. So that’s pretty interesting. When you think about that history, and you think about, you know, where things have gone. You’ve seen obviously a growth in Open Access, how many other publishers—do you have an estimate or a general idea of how many publishers are engaging in Open Access, and really, like taking this on as a project?

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah. And do you see publishers making titles Open Access initially, and then pulling them back down again? Or only waiting until after the first year that they’ve been out or, you know, become sort of some sort of longtail backlist? Is that a process you see happening?

Charles Watkinson 
It’s been a really small part of the book market, the best source of knowledge we have about Open Access books in the industry is a directory of Open Access books. And I recently talked to the director, Neil Stern and his estimate is, it’s probably about 5% to 7% of the scholarly book output at this point, but that number is rapidly rising. Publisher-wise, I mean, they have a bunch of publishers in the University Press sector, we know of 60-ish, university presses who are active in Open Access. But there’s a real difference in doing a few books experimentally and then flipping your entire list to Open Access. There are a number of book publishers, new university presses there’s a group called Scholar Lead, who actually are new publishers who’ve been created to only do Open Access books. Probably the most distinctive of those is UCL Press in the UK and then in the US, Lever Press, which is liberal arts colleges, Amherst College Press. And then there are these scholar led publishers like Punctum Books and Open Book publishers and those are new entrants that are entirely Open Access. But it’s still a small part of the total picture.

So for a true Open Access book, where you’ve actually applied one of these Creative Commons licenses, you can’t go back, right? I mean, if you’ve applied to licenses out there, and you really can’t switch it off, free to read type programs, you can switch it on for a while, switched off for a while, that’s not considered true Open Access. And also, the reality is, you know, if you make it downloadable, it’s gonna be out there. Although, of course, the reality is, so many of our books are already out there in pirate sites, or whatever. So what is happening, however, is a kind of an embargo model so there will be books that will be closed access for a while, and then get flipped to Open Access and a particular player there’s scholarly book space, there is Knowledge Unlatched, which is now part of Wiley, which uses a model where libraries sign up to say we’d like to make this book Open Access and then once a certain target, income for the publisher is reached, the book will flip—will be unlatched to open. So there are some embargo models. But flipping back from Open Access to Closed Access, that’s a lot harder to do.

Joshua Tallent 
Sure. Now, there’s some technical things because of that license model, because of the fact that it is an Open Access title and there’s some technical things that have to happen. We don’t have to get too deep into the weeds on that but I’m curious what kinds of things should a publisher who might be thinking about Open Access be aware of in their production process or their metadata that they should be considering?

Charles Watkinson 
So there’s an interesting intersection between Open Access and digital scholarship and they are two different sorts of things but they often get sort of bundled together and that is reasonable enough because you know, something that is fully digital fully part of the web. It is only really going to function properly if it’s totally Open Access as well. And when I am sort of talking about digital affordances, like linking out to lots of different data sources or commenting functionality, so I’s just saying that, because in terms of the production process, there’s really nothing about the format that needs to change to actually make an Open Access book, it could be a PDF, it could be an EPUB 3, it really doesn’t matter. It’s only when you start to think about those digital affordances and that type of work that of course, you’ll start to think about things you’ll do differently and probably really embrace the EPUB 3 standard. But the changes really happen on the metadata front. So there has been an Open Access standard for books in ONIX since 2014 and that requires several fields to be filled in, a license type is the main one. And then there are approaches to inserting metadata into the EPUB, that one can also take the ONIX and if you’re assigning DOIs the CrossRef metadata, there are certain fields that it’s good to provide. The challenge is, you can push out these files, whether they’re actually going to be those fields are going to map to what the vendors have in there, is another question, although that’s getting much better. So for example, it’s only fairly recently that we’ve been able to easily “sell” Open Access books on Kindle, for example, that for a while one had to sort of do some workarounds but now those can be accepted. So it’s really metadata that changes.

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah. And like everything, there’s your mileage may vary when it comes to where that’s accepted, and how that’s used. And I probably have said that more times than you have, even when it comes to, to how metadata is being utilized by retail sites but  that’s cool. So do you see publishers taking instead of the entirety of the book and making it Open Access, doing more of a chapter model kind of thing? Or I guess in a work that has many chapters written by many people, you know that you could break it up potentially, depending on what different authors of the different articles or chapters want. Is that something that you’re seeing as well in the space?

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah, definitely this model of Hybrid Open Access, of course, it requires that you are able to assign metadata at a chapter level and it has extra complexity behind the scenes as you manage, you know, a book where this is an open chapter and this is a closed chapter. I know that some of the larger commercial publishers are very into that and especially when it’s an edited collection, exactly, as you said, because Open Access for books is pretty undeveloped, compared to Open Access for journals. And Open Access for journals is now a huge business and it’s really powered by article processing charges. So for many commercial publishers, especially the larger publishers, there is an opportunity to fund Open Access, which is based on essentially treating a chapter in an edited book as a journal article, and accepting a payment for that one chapter and making that Open Access. And, you know, in that context, the average edited book might have, you know, 13 to 15, individual chapters, where you could actually extract kind of an APC and Article Processing Charge for each one. So the hybrid model is growing, I would say it’s growing only among the largest publishers at this point.

Joshua Tallent 
Okay. There’s also a connection here, and we are making content open and more available, more broadly available to readers. There’s a connection here to accessibility as well. So at the University of Michigan Press, are you guys adapting your models, your development of ebook files, your EPUB 3 to accessibility? How are you taking on that part of that? And how does that play into your Open Access model?

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah, I mean, again, it’s interesting accessibility and the business model that allows one to do something free like to produce a free ebook they actually, I mean, they’re not into they’re not dependent on each other but there is this kind of philosophical underlying principle that what one is trying to do is expand the availability of knowledge for all and if one’s coming from that place, it’s really important to include people who use screen readers and other people who need accessibility affordances in that community. So we have connected the work on digital scholarship, accessibility, and Open Access together at University of Michigan Press. And that really means doubling down on EPUB 3’s, really thinking a lot about our text described, by text, the description of images, thinking a lot about metadata that indicates the level of accessibility of a particular book. So yeah, that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do. And it’s certainly connected to Open Access, but it’s a little bit separate. One thing that is really important here is the way we’re funding our Open Access program, the Fund to Mission Program is primarily by selling collections of these books to libraries, and it may sound odd to be selling a free collection. So what we use is what is called an incentivized model, where essentially we say to a library, buy our front list, it will have about 50 to 75% open access in it, but if you commit to purchasing it in the way that you would have purchased a Closed Access front list, we will give you complimentary included access to all our backlist titles, which remain restricted access. And we have about 80 to 90 Libraries now signed up to that model and that’s our primary revenue source for the Open Access we’re doing. And we do about 80 monographs a year, we’re now this year in 2022, delivering 40 to 45 books, Open Access in that front list.

Joshua Tallent 
And when they do that model, they gain access to everything. The front list that they’re acquiring, is that now they can rent that out as much as they need to, or is there also a renting model or a borrowing model that you build around those titles that are not Open Access?

Charles Watkinson 
Right, it’s a really good point. I mean, what they’re buying is they’re buying perpetual access to the frontlist collection so that would mean those 45 books that are Open Access, plus all the restricted access books in that frontlist, so the other 35. And for those books, it’s unlimited multiuser perpetual access, they can do what they want, they’ve bought those books, and they can do Interlibrary Loan etc. For the backlist, what they’re buying is term access so they will only have access during that period that they’ve bought the front desk for so 2022, for example. The reality is actually they can do anything they want with those backlist titles but they do lose access from our platform after the end of that calendar year. And then for 20, unless they’re up for 2023.

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah, that’s a great model and that puts the publisher in a great position. I would think to say, hey, we’ve got great content here that we want you to get access to. But, you know, we want you to make sure you get everything, not just the couple of books that you might want. There’s a benefit to the world to have access to more of that and so when a library is able to buy into that model, I’m assuming that’s great for you guys, because then you can also go back to your authors and say, well, we’ve got all of these different libraries that will carry your book, regardless of whether it’s a paid book or Open Access book, right. But you’re just making that available more broadly because it’s part of this inclusive system. That’s pretty cool.

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s good because it mixes self-interest with the values that librarians hold dear and one of the things that’s interesting about the front list is, you know, during this period of online learning, libraries have really discovered a particular problem in supporting international students. So for example, if they have students in China, actually, the Chinese students getting access to authenticated materials, getting through authentication walls, can be really problematic. So Open Access has provided a way to actually serve their patrons better because librarians spend so much time having to deal with platform type questions, I can’t get this I can’t get it that. Open Access actually removes quite a lot of the burden of that from their work. So it’s a good model, there’s self-interest, there’s local benefit for the institution they’re responsible to, but it also achieves a much larger and exciting goal.

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Charles, I appreciate all of this. Is there anywhere that people can go to learn more about the work you guys are doing or about Open Access, you want to promote any of the organizations or locations where people can learn more and educate themselves on this topic?

Charles Watkinson 
Yeah, of course, absolutely. The press.umich.edu is our website and that’s where you can access information about our Open Access books and the books themselves, which are a lot of them pretty fun reading. And they’re delivered on our own platform, Fulcrum, which is kind of a nice reading experience. And then the other source of information I would recommend is the Directory of Open Access Books and that has the catchy name doabooks.org and that also has links about Open Access, a toolkit for authors, things like that. So those are two main sites.

Joshua Tallent 
Yeah. And I’ll include links to those in the show notes for people who are interested. So yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate you joining me and kind of opening the doors a little bit here to the Open Access World. I appreciate the help.

Charles Watkinson 
Thank you very much, Joshua. This was fun.

Joshua Tallent 
That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating in Apple podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast and also share it with your colleagues. And if you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.