The Open Access Books Network is a space for passionate conversations about OA books. Researchers, publishers, librarians, infrastructure providers — indeed, anyone who is interested — can discuss any aspect of OA books here. This group was begun by members of OAPEN, OPERAS, ScholarLed and SPARC Europe.
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DISCUSSION — contribute to any of the discussion threads, or start your own!
EVENTS — add details of any event related to Open Access books (please include a link and a hashtag).
SITE — check out our latest blog posts, and get in touch (info@oabooksnetwork.org) to propose a post on any aspect of OA books.
FROM CORE / FILES — add any publications or documents related to Open Access books.
DOCS — go here for collaborative documents on OA book projects and resources.
CONTACT: info@oabooksnetwork.org
TWITTER: @oabooksnetwork
Header photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash.
Profile image by Ronald Snijder.
Files List
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Michael Taylor, "Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage" preprint on arxiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442 " This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley. Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact. "
- Business Models and Market Structure within the Scholarly Communications Sector - ISC Occasional Paper
By Rupert Gatti
The scholarly communications sector is undergoing a period of profound transformation. The emergence of digital publishing technologies, wide-spread demands for open access to research outputs, calls for more rapid dissemination of research findings and underlying data - especially in emergencies such as global pandemics, and the expansion of publishers operations into all aspects of the research cycle are requiring and inspiring innovative new process and practices. At the same time there is growing awareness and concern in scientific and scholarly communities about the business models and operating practices being adopted by publishers, particularly commercial publishers.
The International Science Council Discussion Paper “Opening the Record of Science” (Boulton et al. (2020)) highlights many of these concerns and identifies some fundamental principles for scholarship and scholarly communications to frame developments in the sector. This paper is designed to complement that paper, and similar discussions, by assessing the economic implications of current business models for scientific publishing, evaluating their advantages and disadvantages in relation to the fundamental principles advocated, and proposing a range of models that would be compatible with those principles.
The paper proceeds by first positioning the situation within the broader setting of how to effectively regulate digital markets. The dominant business model and industrial structure within scholarly communications at the end of the last century is then discussed, as a springboard from which to consider new business models that have arisen over the past twenty years and their likely implications for the sector. The paper concludes that there would be considerable benefit to the establishment of a permanent digital markets unit to monitor and assess ongoing developments in the scholarly communications sector and to coordinate and encourage “good behaviour” across all actors in the sector.
https://t.co/90NrblsyR4?amp=1
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DIVERSIFYING READERSHIP THROUGH OPEN ACCESS: A USAGE ANALYSIS FOR OA BOOKS - white paper By Ros Pyne, Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Alkim Özaygen, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon
Open access (OA) books are reaching more countries and have greater usage and higher citation numbers than non-OA books. A new analysis collaboratively produced by Springer Nature and COARD (Collaborative Open Access Research & Development) presents these and other key findings in a new white paper that explores how OA affects the geographical diversity of readers.
It shows that OA books have substantially more readers in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and that OA also helps to increase attention to scholarship about these countries. The study is to date the largest and most comprehensive of its kind; the underlying dataset is based on 3,934 books published by Springer Nature, including 281 OA books.
Confirming previous research looking at the potential usage benefits of OA, this analysis shows more downloads and more citations for every type of book, in every discipline, in each of the three years of publication (2015, 2016, 2017) included in the sample. The report finds that OA books on average achieve ten times more downloads and 2.4 times more citations than non-OA books. Furthermore, download numbers from the open web are generally around double those from institutional network points.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12746177
- COPIM – Revenue Models for Open Access Monographs 2020
By Izabella Penier, Martin Paul Eve, and Tom Grady
A report by the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) analysing the open access economic models in use today in scholarly publishing. The report examines academic monograph publishing in the context of today’s challenging monograph publishing environment: from Covid-19 and budget cuts, to print sales, funder mandates, and research evaluation.
Launched in 2019, and funded by Arcadia and Research England, the COPIM project is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access (OA) book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is fostering community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable OA book publishing to flourish.
This project report builds on a decade of studies written by OA advocates and consultants around the world, and updates their research to describe the environment and economics of OA publishing in 2020. The report will eventually become one component of a practical ‘toolkit’ that COPIM will produce on how presses might transition to sustainably publishing OA monographs.
Version 1.0 10.5281/zenodo.4011836
- Exploring Usage of Open Access Books via the JSTOR Platform
- The Influence of Open Access on Monograph Sales : The experience at Amsterdam University Press
- OPERAS Common Standards White Paper
- Evaluating the Impact of the FWF-E-Book-Library Collection in the OAPEN Library: An Analysis of the 2014 Download Data
- A higher impact for open access monographs: disseminating through OAPEN and DOAB at AUP
- Modes of access: the influence of dissemination channels on the use of open access monographs
- Revisiting an open access monograph experiment: measuring citations and tweets 5 years later
- The Future of Open Access Books - Springer Nature.pdf
- The deliverance of open access books Examining usage and dissemination
- Investigating Open Access Monograph Services (2016)
- OAPEN-UK matched pairs pilot (2016)
- HEFCE Monographs and Open Access project (2015)
- OAPEN-CH – The impact of open access on scientific monographs in Switzerland
- Rebels with a Cause? Supporting Library- and Academic-led Open Access Publishing
- Mapping the Free Ebook Supply Chain: Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
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Increasing Visibility of Open Access Materials in a Library Catalog: Case Study at a Large Academic Research Library