More than anyone wants to know about my position on delayed OA for books, even books about OA

My new book on open access from MIT Press <http://bit.ly/oa-book> won't be OA until one year after publication. In a June 19 blog post <http://goo.gl/FV4Ig>, Kent Anderson found this ironic and inconsistent.

I might have replied sooner, but his blog post appeared when I was traveling. Since I couldn't reply quickly, I had time to decide whether to reply at all. I was about to let it go, when I saw that a good number of friends, allies, and strangers were defending me on their own, at Anderson's blog and elsewhere <http://goo.gl/XUS0a>. I thank all who have spoken up. Here are a few points I'd add.

1. Some of my defenders argue that it's reasonable for an author of a book that will become OA to ask for an embargo period in order to earn some royalties. I agree, and btw, I say as much in the book itself. But there's a simpler response in my case. I didn't ask for the embargo. On the contrary, I asked for immediate or unembargoed OA, and failed to get it. The one-year embargo is a compromise with MIT Press. 

If "money talks" (the title of Anderson's post), I was listening to another voice. I might have been foolish to request an arrangement that would have put my royalties at risk. I'm ready to take shots on that one. But the request I actually made is contrary to the one Anderson seems to think I made.

2. I didn't ask for the advance either, and didn't know I was going to receive one until I'd already written and submitted the manuscript.

Before writing his blog post, Anderson asked me two questions by email: Did I receive an advance, and how did I square charging for the book with my OA principles. I don't blame him for not knowing that I requested unembargoed OA and didn't request an advance. He didn't ask about them.

He acknowledges that the advance was small. But he sees that as "a good indication that MIT Press didn't overpay for the book, and knows its true market value." Anderson may be the only person anywhere who knows the true market value of my book. I suspect that even MIT Press would call the decision to publish it an educated gamble. In any case, I'm confused by his argument here. Was the advance so large that it supports his thesis that money talks, or so small that it shows MIT's belief that the book has little value? He can't have it both ways.

3. I could have refused to compromise. I could have looked for unembargoed OA from another publisher or I could have self-published. True. I believe this is what Anderson thinks I would have done if I were consistent.

But there's another way to be consistent. I also told him by email that I've consistently defended this kind of compromise when other people publish books on OA-related topics. I referred him to my 2007 blog post <http://goo.gl/bsdiS> on Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter's book, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge, 2007).

Perhaps I was wrong to defend book authors like Chopra and Dexter all these years. That's a discussion worth having. But the compromise I accepted in my own case, after trying for my first choice, was not an opportunistic change of course motivated by the fact that this time around the author was me. It was not a change of course at all.

This consistency could be read two ways. It could mean that I, the uncompromising zealot, have been a hypocrite for at least five years. Or it could mean that I'm not an uncompromising zealot.

4. One reason I compromised was to reach the audience of people who take a position more seriously when it's published in a book, and even more seriously when published in a book from MIT Press. Anderson anticipates this and replies, "Hmmm, where have we heard that argument before?" The suggestion is that conventional publishers have pressed this argument and OA proponents like me have rejected it. But as I wrote seven years ago <http://goo.gl/6MkDm>, and have often repeated since, "If you tuned in late, I acknowledge that [conventional publishers] add value. It's a myth that OA wants to dispense with these valuable services...The true bone of contention is not whether these services are valuable but how to pay for the most essential services without creating access barriers for readers."

5. However, the main reason I was willing to make this compromise was that all the analysis in my book was already OA. As I explained in my blog post announcing the book <http://goo.gl/i3ize>, and again in my email to Anderson, I felt free to accept this compromise because "everything I've said in the book I've said in some form or another in an OA article over the years <http://goo.gl/wcwQ>, probably more than once."

My position here is actually closer to Anderson's than to that of some of my defenders (though it's not identical with Anderson's). I would not publish new analysis about OA in a TA-only form. But the analysis in my book is not TA-only, and Anderson knew that.

6. When Anderson paraphrased the sense in which the analysis is already OA, he said the book is a "repackaging of some of the material Suber has published via blog posts over the past decade." I said "articles" and he said "blog posts" (actually he said it twice). This appears to be a deliberate alteration. When I said "articles", I linked to the articles I had in mind <http://goo.gl/wcwQ>. When he said "blog posts", he linked to my personal home page, replacing the link to my articles.

Some of the articles on which I drew for the book were published in my newsletter, and some were published in journals and books. Anderson may think my newsletter is just a glorified blog. That's fine. But even if that's his objection, it doesn't explain why he thinks certain journals and books are glorified blogs, or why he replaced the accurate link to my articles with the less accurate one he put in its place. Moreover, I wrote a blog as well as a newsletter, and it's untrue that the book draws on the blog the way it draws on the newsletter.

7. "Luckily," he notes, I don't live on book advances and have the support of several foundations. That's true. In the preface to my book, I thank the foundations that have supported my OA work over the past decade, and Anderson lists some of them in his post. Again, the suggestion is that I work to advance OA because money talks. Perhaps I should explain. I was a tenured full professor of philosophy in 2003 when I quit in order to work full-time on OA. Since then I've lived on grants and fellowships, often precariously. I don't regret my decision. But insofar as money talked, there was no mistaking its emphatic warning that I should hold on to my tenure and salary. But I don't blame him for not knowing this background. He didn't ask about it.

#oa, #openaccess
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