In the summer of 2010, Amartya Sen, the Nobel prizewinning Indian
economist, wanted to publish a book he had edited that explores why
ethnic or religious violence erupts – and how it can be prevented.
Rather than approaching a hallowed university press, he turned instead to the open access Open Book Publishers in Cambridge.
He wanted Peace and Democratic Society
to be freely available to readers and policymakers in the developing
world so it would have a real impact on civic debate, said Alessandra
Tosi, co-founder and managing director of Open Book Publishers and a
life fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Since its foundation in 2008
by a group of University of Cambridge academics, the press has
published 42 books and has charted a dramatic rise in readers from just
over 5,000 in 2009 to nearly 150,000 last year.
It is now seeing
soaring numbers of readers from developing countries, including
Professor Sen’s native India, Nigeria and Ethiopia (where figures show
that there are more readers of its titles than in Canada).
All its
books are free to read online, and a handful are free to download. In
addition, the press sells traditional printed copies of its titles.
However,
in poor countries internet connections are “generally unstable, which
make reading online for any length of time, or even connecting,
problematic”, Dr Tosi said.
So since May 2013, the publisher has
made four of its books available to the world’s poorest via Worldreader,
a non-profit organisation whose app permits digital books to be read on
almost any mobile phone. It is now working to put all of its titles on
the platform.
More than 8,000 readers in 113 countries have
accessed these books on their phones – most of them from developing
countries, particularly Nigeria and Ethiopia.
Open access
publishing solutions for poor countries obviate the need to buy academic
books at “prohibitive” prices with “lengthy and expensive” shipping,
said Dr Tosi.
“Only a very small percentage of the population [in
the developing world] owns computers,” she said. “But a very large
proportion uses mobile phones for things such as banking. Increasingly
these devices are used for mobile reading.”
There are already huge
online libraries of free books, with Project Gutenberg, perhaps the
longest-established such initiative, offering more than 45,000 titles.
But Dr Tosi emphasised that Open Book Publishers, as an academic press,
publishes only peer-reviewed titles with a “quality guarantee”.
With
the university population growing rapidly around the world but academic
material generally hidden behind paywalls, Dr Tosi fears that without
open access, students in developing countries will have to rely on
“unchecked” and “sub-par” publications available online.
Some of the titles in the press’ catalogue – The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts,
for example – may not immediately appear to be relevant to developing
countries, but Dr Tosi noted that it has also published three books on
African oral literature. Other titles include Feeding the City,
an ethnographic study of Mumbai’s 5,000 dabbawalas, who deliver 200,000
home-cooked boxed lunches to the city’s workers every day.
Open
Book Publishers is also planning to team up with a South African
organisation, Paperight, which makes digital books available to a
network of photocopy shops so that readers can pay for part of a book to
be printed locally, thus giving scholars in developing countries
another way to save money.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/open-access-publisher-brings-scholarship-to-developing-world/2013833.article
