Good post, Charles, and one that affirms what ought to be obvious but isn’t to many scholars. One thing you didn’t mention is the usability of free content. Sure, you can get stuff for free, and its of high quality with respect to content–but how useful is it, especially to a new generation of scholars and students who are growing up (or have grown up) in a digital environment? Those students expect “performance” from that thing or entity that delivers data. True, I live in this kind of environment and make a living by it, but your readers (especially the pre-technological society readers) are sadly mistaken if they assume that only people withing the digitization industry are privy to how data can be mined, and how computer science COULD make data more interesting and useful. Today’s students and the new wave of scholar professor knows that something like PDF file for free online is electronic, but it’s really lame when it comes to what you can do with it. They’re justifiably grateful for something like the Chicago’s Assyrian Dictionary in PDF, or the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha project, or OpenText.org, but they know how much more useful the data could be in a robust software package produced by people who do data mining and cool visualizations for a living. That’s a major reason why my company has licensed material that we know is free online (like OpenText.org or the Church Fathers in 38 volumes) and poured capital into making it a commercial product – users will still purchase it since you can do so much more with it.

So you asked: How do scholars who aren’t attached to these major institutions get their scholarship out and make some money with it so they can subsidize their own efforts? The answer is for scholars writing books is to retain their electronic rights and become part of the digital age (research and scholarship aren’t going to go back to the way it was), and then license their data to commercial data providers. The answer for scholars not writing books, but producing databases is basically the same, though it is imperative for a commercial software company that the scholar is able to help the company see the usefulness of the scholarship to a student, scholar, or library. Scholars should put some imagination into answering questions (for a digital user) like: Who’s going to use it and how? How would I like to be able to use the data? What search strategies could I employ with this data if it were digital (alone, or joined to similar data sets)? At the level of conceiving projects, questions like, What would I like to see in my field that hasn’t been done in digital form? What doesn’t my discipline have that, say, the biblical studies people have? Once that question is answered, refer to the earlier set of questions.

For the record, this is part of my job – finding people working on research projects (and books). I have to think about this issue every day, and part of our success is knowing who’s out there working on what in what field (any field related to biblical studies in my case). So . . . who’s out there?!

The following comments are aimed at scholarship not popularizations. That’s a different situation, in my opinion.

I don’t think scholarship is free. But it is in most everyone’s interest to make its end product free. The people who will suffer most are publishers.

Somehow scholars have to find a way to make a living so they can research–to keep their living or gain the kind they want. Few of us are independently wealthy. So most of us teach or strive to get that teaching position.

(Unfortunately, the market is so glutted with PhDs that inevitably many, many PhDs will never get a job in their field. So they have to leave it or work evenings and weekends to break in eventually. The glut has made it a buyer’s market for schools. So not only is it hard to get a job, they often don’t pay all that well, too.)

For those of us lucky enough to get a job, our schools pay us and give us incentives to research so we increase their brand, as you say. But here’s the kicker: they (and we) end up buying back the very stuff they funded in the form of books and journal subscriptions. They pay twice.

So universities should be at the head of the line for open access scholarship–and many of them are (e.g., the UC system has a large open database). Schools have to provide some infrastructure, but it’s in their interest to do this. And as they will eventually buy fewer books, they will have the money to support the infrastructure (and some).

I’m sure schools make any money on what is published. I don’t think there’s any school revenue directly generated, at least in the Humanities, from a faculty’s research. (The sciences seem to get most of their monies from gov’t grants and private, corporate sponsorship, who hope to profit by applying the research to marketable items.) The research budget is an expenditure, a cost of doing “business”. Research is really about marketing so more kids come to the school and more people want to get behind a winning institution (with their donations). I don’t think budgeting offices should fear open access.

The loser: publishers. Some of these publishers practically hold schools hostage with their high prices. You ask: “How about publishers? How can they make money under this scheme?” They won’t. Some business models are inevitably going to go the way of the dinosaur. Also you ask: “Lest we think we can cut them out of the loop, where is the editing help going to come from?” JBL offered me substantive line editing, but MTSR didn’t offer ANY at all (a Brill journal!). The editor and reviewers of the journal, as far as I can tell, were the only people to make comments–and they were few. If that’s the case, why not just hire our own editors or take responsibility for our own writing?

As long as peer-review is maintained, I don’t see any down-side for scholarship, either.

You know I’m a big fan of Open Access. So you probably expected this. Maybe I’m being idealistic, but can you show me a real down-side?

Mike has a point about this: some products of scholarship really must be packaged in specific ways, ways that require technical expertise the normal scholar does not have. E.g., creating an interface for a database. I ran into this problem when seeking a publisher for something I did several years ago. So now it just languishes. I’d like to make it available and I actually sought to do so commercially. Two traditional publishers were interested. One even signed a contract with me but backed out, citing their lack of technical expertise. I even approached a Bible software company, but they only wanted to assimilate it into their “zillion-sort-of-useful-books” package (after someone else created my project) as another freebie. So now I am looking to work with a computer science student in the next year or two to do some undergraduate research with me on this project. They will design the interface; I will refine the database. That kind of cooperation is pushed at our school, and there is money to be won internally for such endeavors—because they advertise the idea that our students work WITH their professors. So I may end up going the OA route after all. . . time permitting. But I’m not completely opposed to commercial publishing, especially when, as Mike points out, technical expertise is necessary.

Alan: What is the database? If you care to tell me, email me at mheiser@logos.com.

Who pays for scholarship? In public schools: the taxpayers. Private: whoever paid the tuition/endowment. This is all well and good, and (I’m with Alan and Charles) the end product should be free. Why not? Publishers (like Mike) will simply have to figure out an angle to market a product that’s better than the free stuff.

Here’s something I’m amused by: scholars at research schools are paid in (at least) three ways to publish. They’re paid a salary to do research; then they keep all book revenues from that research(okay, these are mostly negligible save the rare “who wrote the bible”); and then their salary is increased the more they publish the same research. Sign me up!

[...] thought provoking blog by Charles Halton, Is Scholarship Really Free? deals with the bottom line of “money” in the open access and free online distribution [...]

Salary increase: We’ll see what September brings. But I seriously doubt if my writing a book “this year” (i.e., working on it since 2003) gives me more than a standard 3% raise. Thousands of hours for a 3% raise! That’s the pay-off, right there! Dude, get in line!!!! The riches in academia are untold!!!

I’m not starving by any means. But don’t kid yourself. Aside from some popularizations, scholars don’t make a lot on their books, whether from publishers or their raises. We’re in academia because we love what we do and someone will pay us a living wage (sometimes, usually, almost, etc.) to do it. R1 schools have more money and scholars make more. But still, I can’t imagine a gargantuan raise for publishing a monograph that offsets the years it may have taken to write it.

Yea, that is sad but true Alan. I had a marketing prof in undergrad who published a successful business book that I’m sure sold far more copies than the stuff in our fields and he calculated that from his royalties he was paid $0.30 per hour to write the book. However, he is on the board of Lowes and several other Fortune 500 companies so I guess that makes up for it. Now, if only GE needed someone interested in Ur III to serve on their…

[...] the blogosphere on free or open scholarship. First, Charles at Awilum started way back in July with this post; which was recently picked up by Tim Bulkeley, to which Charles also linked. Alan Lenzi has, in an [...]