My co-author Beth Herst and I are pleased to post that our new book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, is now online. It is available to anyone on the University of Toronto Press website at this link. You can download it as an e-Publication for your reader, or as a pdf, both in its entirety or chapter-by-chapter. And you can also buy a hardcover through the link.

Why Open Access?

As open access is a new approach to the publishing of academic books, it merits some explanation. Academic books ought to be published open access. They are supported almost entirely by the public sector through the salaries of university faculty, research grants, and publication grants. This is the case for our book, with the public sector paying Sandford Borins’s salary until 2021 and pension thereafter, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) providing research and publication grants. Knowledge that is created through citizens’ tax dollars should be available at no additional cost to citizens. SSHRC has applied this principle to journal articles supported by its grants since 2015, but not yet to books.

The Inside Baseball

I’ll look a little more closely at the financing of our book in an open access context. The University of Toronto Library (UTL) allocated some of its funding to University of Toronto Press (UTP) to acquire this book. By doing this UTL is supporting and showcasing University of Toronto faculty and having the book available to the entire university in perpetuity. And it is encouraging other university libraries to do likewise.

With the funding UTP received from UTL as well as a publication grant from SSHRC, it will cover its fixed costs (editorial, production, marketing) associated with our book. As authors, we will receive a modest royalty out of UTL’s payment to UTP. If our book were not open access, faculty and students nonetheless would have free access to it through university libraries. By publishing it open access, we are also making it available for free to readers who would not normally have access to university library systems. We are therefore seeking to raise its visibility and increase its potential readership at some possible cost in foregone revenue.

A Public Good

We began this post by framing open access publication of books like ours in economic terms as the return due on public investment in academic research. There’s another economic term that’s equally relevant: public goods. Textbooks define these freely available, publicly provided goods or services as “non-excludable,” meaning people cannot be prevented from using them, and “non-rivalrous,” because use by one person does not diminish their availability for use by anyone else. Typically cited examples include infrastructure like street lighting and public roads and services like national defense and court systems, all funded through taxation and available to everyone.

We believe that the knowledge generated by academic research is also a public good, an essential, inexhaustible social resource and political catalyst that should be non-excludable. The fact that our book explores the screen media forms influencing how we understand and engage with the public sphere strengthens our conviction. We are in the midst of a constantly expanding surplus of “information” of unknown provenance, undisclosed purpose, and unverifiable import. Knowledge, in contrast, is increasingly a scarcity commodity. Academic research, in the humanities and social sciences particularly, is under attack by critics whose ideological motivations span the political spectrum. It is more important than ever to advance the status of such research as a public good. That is why we offer it as one.