Aha you raise a good point around BPCs, but there also several community/collective funded OA books models. Bloomsbury Open Collections, to name one, prioritises supporting ECRs, unaffiliated authors, & authors in LMICs who otherwise couldn't fund OA publication (to pick a totally random example 😉)

I completely appreciate the constraints of the debate format and your background knowledge and really appreciate this hands up moment. In return, hands up, I've never been a librarian and equally have no solutions to the funding/profit concerns across publishing but always happy to chat

And the results are in for the #R2RConf debate. Caroline Black is the winner shifting the poll to 66% disagree, down from 84%* at the start.

(*I misreported 82% when it was 84%)

Both sides have admitted some gaps in understanding of scholarly books publishing, and in particular OA books publishing. The conversation feels very slanted toward STEM, once again leaving AHSS beind in the world of scholarly publishing
#R2RConf

As ever, scholarly books (monographs, edited collections etc) have been left out of the debate thus far. Preprints don't work for longer form texts, and many subjects work through books rather than articles. #R2RConf

Some evidenced points to push back against these arguments from Webster (various peer review models, cross publisher RI strategies etc). Time for questions from the floor

Black counters that publishing isn't accessible, the peer review process is an outdated model, and publishers have grown too large to truly provide integrity oversights (integrity concerns being a common theme of the conference)

Keith Webster, dean of libraries at CMU, argues publishers make research accessible, peer review is vital to quality control, publisher oversight maintains integrity of research records

Initial poll of #R2RConf is 82% disagree. Let's see if Caroline Black from CUP can sway opinions

Ah thank you! I'll quickly delete my draft message asking for the papers so I can read them later