Open Access News

If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.  "Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.

As the press’s executive editor for art and architecture, Ms. Bielstein writes from the barricades. She knows that publishing art monographs costs a pretty penny. Art historians need high-quality illustrations to support their arguments, but in most cases, they must shell out for reproducible images, even of works in the public domain. And they, not their publishers, foot those bills. "It’s not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to illustrate a book that may sell only 400 or 500 copies," she says in an interview. Contemporary subjects still under copyright, and subject to an artist’s or estate’s whims, can prove to be an even costlier proposition....

Now two leading scholars [Mariët Westermann and Hilary M. Ballon] are poised to issue a major [Mellon-funded] report ["Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age"] on the state of art-history publication....[T]he two authors also see a developing resolve among scholars, publishers, and image providers to make art monographs easier and cheaper to illustrate and publish. They take heart, for instance, from a major proposal by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, to make images freely available to scholars....

[T]he most prominent recommendation in the draft report concerns permissions. All parties agree that it is harder than ever to navigate what Ms. Bielstein calls "the ecosystem of rights publishing." What’s fair use? Should a museum be able to charge for a reproducible image of an out-of-copyright object in its collection? Most do. And as digital publication tempts more and more publishers and scholars, how will they protect images that appear in an electronic book or an electronic version of a journal article?

The report’s authors urge those in the field to "organize a campaign to break down barriers to access and distribution of images, in all media and at affordable prices, for scholarly research and publication." (Ms. Bielstein’s book makes a similar exhortation.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken a revolutionary step toward that end with the "scholars’ license," which it hopes to have in place by this fall. "We have responded to what scholars needed and wanted," says Doralynn Pines, associate director for administration. "We are proposing, in certain areas, certainly for scholarly purposes, ... that we permit people to use the images with no fee." Under the old way of doing business, a one-time use of one transparency or digital image from the Met set a scholar back $135....

The Met’s scholars’ license may well turn out to be the crowbar that pries open the doors of other image repositories. "There have been a lot of eyebrows raised and a lot of interest" at other institutions," Mr. Shulman reports. "I have no doubt that other leading museums are figuring out if they can do it or if they should."

Ms. Bielstein says that "what the Met is doing is of inestimable value," because the museum continues to be "a pacesetter for other museums on matters of policy and professional practice. Still, this is just the beginning. An enormous amount of effort and activism is needed to ensure that the public domain is open and accessible to everyone."...

Comments.

1. Klaus Graf recommends an article by Susan Bielstein, a conference presentation by Bielstein, and an article by Kenneth Hamma.
2. In my January 2004 article on OA in the Humanities I said, with perhaps too much resignation, that copyright and permission barriers explain "why open access will come last to art history." I'm very heartened to hear what Westermann, Ballon, Bielstein, and the MMA are doing. They should give courage to scholars in other fields where the barriers are objectively lower.