Jen Slajus is the Client Sales & Marketing Manager for Longleaf Services.
Three years ago, my nonprofit publishing services company, Longleaf Services, a subsidiary of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, received a Mellon Foundation grant to develop a digital-first open access pilot program to allow university presses to publish history monographs openly.
Since then, I have learned that, even with generous funding, producing open access monographs and making free content universally available can be significantly more challenging than creating equivalent paywalled print editions; the fundamental concept of metadata standards breaks down when there are more than one set of them; and sometimes the only way to progress is to step back, get scrappy, dig into the weeds, and work tête-à-tête with your partners. After publishing 35 open access monographs, with more in the hopper, now is a good time to reflect on how we got here.
Aptly named the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, or “SHMP,” which more easily pops out of your mouth, the program’s primary goal was to create an economical and transformative open access publishing process. We would use affordable, third-party, web-based workflow tools that could be adopted widely, thereby enduring beyond the initial three-year funding period and helping to prove the long-term merit and viability of open access books in the real world of mere mortals, not just the (theoretical-minded) OA Gods. ¡Viva la Revolución!
Three additional goals were metadata related:
1) Devise and propel a more comprehensive set of OA monograph metadata standards across our two dozen SHMP-participating presses. Factor in requirements from open access and institutional platforms in the humanities universe: OAPEN, Internet Archive, JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, and EBSCO. Focus on the practical, demystify the basics and achieve meaningful results in the online universe.
2) Create a budget-friendly, easily integrated, and highly automated method of collecting metadata from publishers and disseminate their data, book cover, and electronic content files to the open access platforms listed above. The process should seamlessly fit into presses’ existing data management workflow.
3) Post-publication, analyze the impact of SHMP titles in the real world, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
We had our mission.
Fast forward a blurry month or two of deep immersion into the world of open access monographs, gathering metadata requirements from our platform partners, and industry standards from Editeur, who provide these basic FAQs. I blended these requirements and recommendations, along with several ONIX snippets, and seasoned it with my own 28 years of book industry experience and best practices to produce our very own SHMP Metadata Guide, which I gleefully shared with all 23 presses.
Crickets.
The hurdles
Did they see these requirements as being extra-ordinary? Or somehow generating that. much. more effort? For one or two books they were giving away for FREE?
It quickly became apparent that the CoreSource metadata and digital asset management system, already in use by a number of university presses, which we had craftily planned to use to auto-distribute books’ content and metadata files to platform partners, didn’t support a number of required open access attributes via industry-standard ONIX 3.0 xml files. (Breathe.)
Missing attributes included a secondary publisher to accommodate the open access funding body, the open access license link in its proper ONIX place, the contributor-level ORCID, or ISNI, and, the final nail in the coffin: the <UnpricedItemType> to identify an OA monograph’s $0.00 retail price. (CoreSource is currently planning to address these gaps in 2022.)
In fact, it turns out that EBSCO and several other major platforms built around selling books also don’t accept items with prices below $0.01, so we were unable to send them metadata directly either. Though fortunately OAPEN pushes our data and content files to them through a backdoor. Another jaw-dropper: Overdrive, the leading digital content provider to public libraries in the US, doesn’t accept open access books. And the only way Amazon will feature a free Kindle version is when the publisher also offers a for-sale print version.
As John Sherer, the UNC Press Director and driving force behind SHMP, puts it: “Our systems (CoreSource, Firebrand, Virtusales, etc.) were basically built to help Amazon sell our books. Even in the UP world, we designed metadata to help EBSCO, ProQuest, MUSE, JSTOR to sell our books. They were designed for discoverability within walled gardens owned by sellers of content. And then, not surprisingly, these same systems are ill-equipped to spread metadata for free content. Metadata distribution isn’t free, but it is essentially free in paywalled models because the companies that distribute metadata will recover their costs through commissions on sales. When those incentives are removed, the existing system breaks apart, and we are in the ironic position of potentially doing a worse job of distributing free content than we do paywalled.”
For the same reasons, many of the participating presses also struggle to market their open access monographs. Should they include them along with their for sale books in new release catalogs even though some major outlets won’t feature them? And do they risk cannibalizing their print edition sales?
A manual workaround
We had a goal of publishing 75 titles over the three years of the grant, and we wanted to apply as much Mellon money for the production of the books themselves, so we went old-school: files loaded into DropBox and manually uploaded onto each platform, eyeballing whatever ONIX xml files the presses could provide to “validate” inclusion of all required metadata; we return them to the presses for revision, as needed. They ultimately own their metadata for all editions and will need to send these title records to Amazon and all of their other retailing, data aggregating, library, and institutional partners.
Even today, a few of our SHMP presses struggle to meet our ONIX 3.0 file requirements, still relying on antiquated legacy title management systems that deal only in ONIX 2.1 files, the version of ONIX that was “sunsetted” seven years ago and doesn’t support all required open access attributes. A couple of presses don’t yet have a direct relationship with Crossref to secure their own DOIs, since their primary focus continues to be paywalled print books, which keep their lights on and acquisitions flowing.
When a publisher is unable to meet our basic open access data requirements and asks to provide these in an Excel file (or, gasp, email), who can lose sleep over missing Thema categories, keywords, or related products, even though these vital missing marketing attributes will diminish their title’s overall discoverability? We make do with the core data that allows our partners to ingest these titles and then rely on the natural interconnectivity of web platforms, plus the secret world of data-embellishing librarians, to enrich these titles over time. And, of course, we all keep asking system providers to step up and support all OA attributes once and for all.
The state of play today
As of September 2021, we have helped 16 presses launch 34 SHMP open access books and have added one open access platform to our distribution mix: ScienceOpen. According to our records, these books have gleaned nearly 90,000 Total Item Requests, Views, Resolutions, downloads, printings, emails, clicks, hits, touches,–what precisely to name these ‘engagements’, especially when each one may mean interacting with the full text or just a piece of it, such as a cover image, page, or chapter? (See References and Other Helpful Resources on OA Monographs below) — by readers in nearly 200 countries across these six OA platforms: OAPEN, Internet Archive, JSTOR, Project MUSE, EBSCO Faculty Selects, and ScienceOpen.
Soliciting, collating, and analyzing these usage data has been another meta adventure. Of course, had we more resources we would have deployed a SQL database on an FTP server as our usage data repository and developed APIs with participating platforms. Instead, we consume sometimes inconsistent emailed reports, perform some manual page view counts, and run a mix of Access and Excel Power Queries that feed our single instance of Tableau.
We provide participating publishers aggregated usage updates monthly, as well as one- and two-year anniversary summaries of their titles’ impact. If we can obtain enough data from the publishers, we plan to offer comparisons between these digital open access versions and their for-sale print siblings that are published three or more months later, to examine the so-called cannibalization effect.
Participating authors have expressed amazement at the speed at which the entire SHMP publishing workflow was executed, gratitude at the opportunity to reach, or expand, their intended audience by providing a free ebook option, curiosity at the unique global and institutional reach their digital monograph achieves, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of open access as a legitimate publishing model and one that should be acknowledged as such during the tenure process.
We also receive the occasional personal note of appreciation via our SHMP reader survey, the link to which is embedded in each ebook, like this one:
What is the name of the book you read/used?
Chuj (Mayan) Narratives Folklore, History, and Ethnography from Northwestern Guatemala
How easily can you normally access a university press monograph?
I can rarely access or afford books like this
Which of the following best describes you?
Other
If other, please describe…
Literacy Council volunteer, Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala (www.adoptavillage.com)
What are the chances that you will purchase a print edition of this book?
Unlikely
Where were you when you accessed this book?
Central America
So maybe the ultimate response to how impactful SHMP OA books have been in the real world: to some readers, free = priceless.
Title Count: 34
Total Item Requests
Sum: 89,808
Average: 2,566
Minimum: 45
Maximum: 12,643
Median: 1,247
References and Other Helpful Resources on OA Monographs:
- Open Access monographs in ONIX for Books FAQ
- COPIM and their blogs
- Scholarly Kitchen’s metadata articles including this recent one
- Project COUNTER The definition of COUNTER’s Metric Type that represents the number of times users requested the full content (i.e., full text) of an item. Requests may take the form of viewing, downloading, emailing, or printing content, provided such actions can be tracked by the content provider’s server.
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