I think of myself as a trade book writer, but I've had some books published by academic presses. And now I am getting emails asking me to respond to a survey by Canadian university presses on the subject of open access publishing.
Apparently the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences has proposed that ASPP, the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (i.e., the federal subsidy money offered to scholarly publications), will only be available to Open Access publications, that is, works that upon publication are made available in digital form at no cost to anyone who wants them.
Meanwhile, SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has advised the Association of Canadian University Presses "that the policy change will not be accompanied by additional funding" for the presses.
Now the university presses are sending emails to their authors declaring [I'm quoting from the email of one large Canadian university press]:
most if not all of the 40-50 books a year the ASPP funds would not be submitted to them [by us, the university press] because we could not afford to lose the sales resulting from such a policy.The emails, I guess, are to advise their academic authors to panic.
Goes around, comes around. The universities, vigorously supported by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, have been leaders in the campaign to normalize "free copying," when it means that universities can take pretty much anything they want and call it "fair dealing." The university and schools community in Canada has been pretty successful, even getting the Copyright Act changed for their benefit.
Now the federal government's agencies are saying, hey, if you can take anything you want, how can you justify asking others to pay you for what you offer? If you take it for free, you ought to give it away too, no?
Now the academic presses see the consequences. They'll be out of business, pretty much, or trying to turn into trade-market publishers. Or more likely, they will go the way of the open access journals, and turn to vanity publishing. Open access journals, which give away their work "free," (in order to spare university libraries from having to pay for subscriptions), typically charge the authors they publish many thousands of dollars to have a piece published. Presumably if you want to get a history book published with an academic publisher, you had better be prepared to get your department or university to pony up an estimated $28,000 to have the university press publish it and give it away.
I don't live by academic publishing, so I'm ignoring the questionnaire. But if you do, you should consider it carefully.
