For several years now I have observed colleagues publishing their monographs or edited volumes with Routledge, asking myself why any colleague should wish to entrust such a ruthlessly profit-oriented enterprise with their scholarly work, while there are more
sympathetic commercial publishers not to mention quite a number of non-commercial publishers willing and able to publish Indological research.
Anyhow, I wish to report a concrete bad experience. Several colleagues participating in the ERC project DHARMA have contributed to a volume published earlier this year in the Routledge Worlds series. Since the ERC requires research produced thanks to its funding
to appear in Open Access, it seemed necessary to us to accept paying the publisher's Open Access fees in order to ensure that the contributions by said colleagues would appear in Open Access. My employer has paid £3.750,00 funding to the publisher late last
year as "Fees for making three chapters Open Access in the book The Angkorian
World." See the attachment. From the budget of the ERC project Archaeospace, initiated by my colleague Damian Evans (incidentally, one of the editors of the volume), we paid the same sum once more for three other chapters, though I was not involved in that
decision. The book was published on 28 April (
https://www.routledge.com/The-Angkorian-World/Hendrickson-Stark-Evans/p/book/9780815355953)
and yet not a single chapter has so far been made available in Open Access by the publisher. They would seem to have taken European tax payers' money and run with it.
Yesterday one of the editors wrote to me: "I received word from Routledge that they are working on making the six chapters open access. I am not sure why this is taking so long but it is pretty much par for the course with this publishing house. Avoid them
in the future is my advice." I could not agree more with this advice.
