But I don’t think I’m quite tracking what you mean when you describe books as a model for open access — the fee to access them, per se, is their purchase price, although that fee is lower than, say, the $37 Taylor and Francis would charge me for electronic access to a single article, or the $165 it would charge me for access to a full issue. Are you just talking about degrees of openness, or am I missing something?

There’s also the question of publication subsidies. As a Canadian, you might know that university presses in Canada follow a different model than in the U.S. Whereas in the U.S., as I understand it, presses are subsidized by the universities that house them, in Canada, authors must apply for a subsidy (about $8000) either from the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program run by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada or from their home universities. (Non-Canadians have to find other sources — back before Harper cut funding to the Dept. of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, it ran a program to funnel money through national Canadian studies scholarly organizations.) This is true even of the top presses — McGill-Queen’s, U of Toronto, etc. — and adds an extra layer of peer review and an additional barrier to publication.

On a related note, for a good list of predatory journals, see scholarlyoa.com, which is run by Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado, Denver.

Journals and books are very much supported by academics “free” labor, but they have traditionally also depended on crucial forms of paid labor, which make them difficult if not impossible to maintain in a revenue-free context, even if you subtract the cost and labor associated with producing a physical edition mailed to readers for a fee. If you don’t believe me, look at the trouble a journal like Dancecult is having right now.

In a climate where universities are doing less than ever to support journal editorship, this is a real problem. It used to be a journal editor got at least a half time assistantship (either from the school or the journal) as well as a course release for their work. Now, that’s harder to come by. . . .

Finally, a word on paying to publish. Again, I would never give money to a for-profit journal, but in some sciences and medicine, where work is supported off grants, researchers routinely pay a publication fee (off the grant) after an article is accepted via the peer review process. It has the potential to corrupt, but a nonprofit status and a high ratio of submitted to accepted papers ameliorates that somewhat. I realize that’s unlikely to happen in the US humanities, but that’s how it works in other contexts, and it’s one way to insure open access journals are able to be run properly.

What I really want to know is how much an organization like ICA collects per journal, and how that figure relates to the costs involved in producing a purely digital edition if you got rid of subscription revenue (valuable to the press, but not necessarily to the association)

And I’m certainly not sure moving to books is the answer. For one, they also cost money, which is exactly what was the problem in the first place. Academic books aren’t cheap, and especially with essay collections, many of the articles might not even be relevant. And the quality control is not necessarily guaranteed. We can certainly discuss the merits and problems of peer review, but it is at least one form of attempting to guarantee a level of quality. How many academic books have you read recently that looked like they weren’t even copyedited? (Last collection I did, the publisher had SKIPPED the copyedit entirely!)

As for reaching a community beyond academia with your essays–I know that TWC (http://journal.transformativeworks.org) has it easier than many journals on other subjects, but we certainly are read, cited, and discussed outside of a mere academic audience. So, it is possible. But as you note, it takes time and effort.