Experimentation in the Open Access Monograph Market: Open Access Publishing Models and Workflows

Sponsored by Project Muse

Recorded on 04/09/2018
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 35

Open access publication in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is well established, though still a marginal percentage of the market, while in the humanities and social sciences, open publication is still in its infancy, without a firmly planted business model. Hear how Dean Smith, the publisher of Cornell University Press, navigates the sometimes fraught and binary positions of librarians, publishers, and authors when talking about open access, and how Cornell University Press is working to develop sustainable open business models through experimentation with grants and workflows.

This episode explores grant funding for open books, partnerships with services like MUSE Open, discovery, and metrics, and highlights one university press’s efforts to open up its catalog and the ways those efforts are paying dividends of greater use and increased visibility.


About the guest:

Dean Smith is Director of Cornell University Press—the first university press in the U.S.—and oversees a program that publishes 130 new books a year and features 3,000 titles in print. His career in publishing spans 30 years and includes experience in scholarly, STM, trade and association-based publishing in a variety of roles. Dean Smith brings a wealth of experience in leading digital publishing initiatives, global sales and marketing expertise, and strategic planning skills. At Project MUSE from 2010-15, he helped launched the University Press Content Consortia—a multi-publisher e-book initiative which features 45,000 eBooks to sit alongside 600 scholarly journals on the leading digital platform in the humanities and social sciences. In the Fall of 2013, Smith published Never Easy, Never Pretty (Temple University Press) and the second edition of Football in Baltimore (The Johns Hopkins University Press) about the history of the Baltimore Ravens and their 2012 Super Bowl season.


About the Music:
The intro and outro music in The Authority File is “Grapes,” mixed by I dunno. The transition music is “Peace ( There’s A better Way ),” mixed by Loveshadow. The music is available on ccMixter, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (cc-by 4.0).