In celebration of Open Access Week, we are offering sneak previews of our forthcoming guide, Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How To Make Your Work Openly Accessible. This guide is the second volume in our series of educational handbooks, following on the success of Understanding Rights Reversion. Our goal is to encourage our members to consider open access publishing by addressing common questions and concerns and by providing real-life strategies and tools that authors can use to work with publishers, institutions, and funders to make their works more widely accessible to all. We will officially launch the guide on November 3 during our workshop on “Writing To Be Read” at the New York Public Library. In the meantime, here’s a short excerpt from Chapter 1 about monographs and open access.
Conventional publication and open access are not mutually exclusive. For example, many conventional publishers allow authors who publish with them to also upload the authors’ final versions of their works to open access repositories. In such cases, authors can benefit from the imprint of a well-established print publisher while still making their works openly accessible.
Many publishers are developing programs to make books openly accessible. For example, the University of California Press recently launched Luminos, an open access publishing program for monographs. Authors who publish with Luminos can make digital editions of their books openly accessible under the University of California Press imprint. Open Humanities Press has also launched an open access program for monographs, making the books it publishes in print available as full-text digital editions published under open licenses.
Book authors who are interested in open access may choose to negotiate with conventional publishers to publish their books in print but also retain the rights to make their books openly accessible. Authors who have already assigned their rights to conventional publishers may be able to exercise or negotiate for rights reversions that would allow them to make their books openly accessible. For more on this possibility, please see the Authors Alliance guide Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, and How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.
We will post excerpts from Understanding Open Access throughout the week. If you have questions or comments, or wish to share your own experiences with open access publishing, get in touch and let us know!