For our book news project, the topic of this week’s class was scholarly publishing, but for me the real revelations were about open access books – in other words, books being shared for free because the author and publisher think they should be shared.

This week has been surprisingly eye-opening all around on this topic, as much because maybe I should not be so surprised that there are people and institutions who don’t think they just exist in this world to produce profit.

For our patrons here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, I was particularly impressed by the foundational level at which open access drives the Athabasca University Press here in Alberta, Canada, one of our case studies for class. They offer most of their books as no-cost downloadable pdfs under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, under which their authors still retain the copyright to their work. I encourage our patrons to check out their offerings, then go looking around for other open access publishers and offerings.

Secondarily, this does also potentially end up serving as a marketing tool for earning some actual profit, if I’m any sort of example. As a result of our ‘required reading’ of the AU Press site, I’ve downloaded several books in pdf format and, more importantly, ended up buying one in print format because I found my initial scan of the pdf so intriguing.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in open access news, having just learned about Article Processing Charges (APCs) – a way that more profit-driven publishers essentially double-dip, or preemptively recoup presume future profits, depending on how you look at it… and also a potentially limiting factor overall in scholarly publishing and the role of libraries in publishing – I was interested to discover a story close to (our) home, from the University of Alberta Library (UAL), about a new initiative to support open access. Unlike other examples we studied, however, the initiative lives in an overlapping space between commercial and fully library-based publishing. 

In this article posted in University of Alberta Library News, Trish Chatterley, Head of the UAL’s Collections Strategy Unit, describes two new contracts, negotiated nationally via the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), to waive APCs when publishing with Wiley and PLOS. I find this particularly interesting for having been negotiated at a national level and presumably leveraging the combined bargaining power of CRKN's 71 member post-secondary institutions. I’ve mentioned CKRN before because of their CRKN Open Access Journals List to support the discoverability of open access journals within library catalogues. The range of efforts being made by this coalition in support of open access is heartening.

All that to say that there are so many options out there for how to publish and how to read. Highly recommend taking a wander down some of the paths less travelled once in a while…

Happy exploring and happy reading!

– Winston

Works Cited

Chatterley, T. (2023, February 8). UAlberta Library Signs Open Access Publishing Agreements With Wiley And PLOS. University of Alberta Library News. https://news.library.ualberta.ca/blog/2023/02/08/ualberta-library-signs-open-access-publishing-agreements-with-wiley-and-plos/