A year into a global pandemic Cathy Holland, our Director of Global Publisher Business Development, looks ahead at how the pandemic has changed the state of open monographs in a post-COVID world.

This month marks one year since everything started shutting down due to COVID-19. In March of 2020 I, along with many others in our industry, had planned to attend the London Book Fair, but that was not to be. While many parts of life were shutting down, scholarly content was opening up, and in particular, monographs. In April, Charles Watkinson wrote that many publishers, and particularly University Presses, had started to make monographs, journals, and other types of content freely available for a period of time.

As the pandemic lingers on even though 2020 is OVER in all senses of the word, we thought it would be interesting to look ahead and predict what may come next for monographs in a post-pandemic world. My personal prediction is that we will see more grants for monographs include earmarked funds for getting works published. This may take a year or even two, but what we have seen through this pandemic is that ‘Open’ is here to stay, and this will need to be supported.

We asked various industry experts to share their thoughts. Here’s what they had to say:

Dr Frances Pinter – Executive Chair Central European University Press and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched:
Post pandemic I’d be looking for more clarity on the three main funding sources for Open Access (OA) books; research funders, institutions and library budgets. This should enable simplified fund flows after we’ve arrived at a consensus on a handful of business models.
I would prioritise retention of excellent editorial standards and quality control, along with cost-reduction of all non-editorial functions through aggregated and automated backroom and workflow services.
I hope we can maintain the diversity, number and range of small- and medium-sized university presses and specialist publishers. Books are important, and keeping the 80% of humanities and social science (HSS) monographs that do not have research funder book processing charges (BPCs) closed is not an option at a time when STEM journal articles are travelling towards a full OA flip.

Emily Poznanski – Director, Central European University Press:
I expect OA books to be the next wave in publishing. My immediate prediction is that an increasing number of authors will expect unrestricted sharing of their books stemming from a general change in authors’ expectations.
However, I expect that not many of these authors will have funding for full book processing charges (BPCs), which leads me to say that publishers, librarians and funders should think creatively of ways to support this now.

Niels Stern – Director, OAPEN Foundation:
The pandemic highlighted the limitations of print books. Libraries witnessed severe e-book price increases, challenging researchers and students. As people explored new routes to digital books, they discovered open access (OA) academic books. The past year has seen a dramatic increase in downloads from the OAPEN Library (hosting 15,000+ OA books). I think this trend will continue.
The pandemic also demonstrated an urgent need for more OA content, including books. To support this, I feel funders will accelerate OA policy development for books. Publishers will experiment with and embrace open publishing with new business models.
Over the last 3-4 years we have seen a fivefold increase in the number of peer-reviewed OA books hosted in the OAPEN Library. This trend will not only continue but also speed up, with new usage patterns caused by the pandemic, new OA book policies, and new business models for open book publishing. In five years we will see a scholarly publishing landscape where open is the default.

Laura Ricci – Consultant, Clarke & Esposito:
The next phase of development will require further investments in infrastructure to support Open Access (OA) throughout the books supply chain.
OA books require different approaches compared to traditional (print and paid-access digital) books – not just in terms of technology, but also standards and incentives.

Dr Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei – Co-Director, punctum books:
The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has once again shown that lack of public access to scholarly research – not only medical literature but also the entire sphere of knowledge production that investigates and reflects upon our human condition – costs millions of lives.
Keeping research closed behind article processing charges (APCs), book processing charges (BPCs), paywalls, and outdated notions of intellectual property will continue to be detrimental to humanity’s chances of survival on this planet.

Ros Pyne – Global Director, Research and Open Access, Bloomsbury:
Even before the pandemic, 2021 was set to be a landmark year for Open Access (OA) books, with policies due to be announced from both UKRI and cOAlition S. Publishers have long offered OA book publishing options, but we’re now seeing increased engagement and innovation which will surely continue. Experiments in collaborative funding models are particularly exciting as they have the potential to substantially expand OA book publication, much as transformative agreements have done for journals.
So where does the pandemic come into this? Over the last year, publishers have seen a significant increase in demand for e-books compared with print; this shift is good news for OA, which is primarily a digital initiative. Finally, as OA monograph publishing becomes more established, I think we’ll also, and not before time, see more attention given to ensuring it supports a diverse authorship as well as a diverse readership.

Elea Giménez Toledo – Director Human and Social Sciences Center (CCHS), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC):
The pandemic has caused small- and medium-sized academic publishers around the world to look more closely at the digital environment as a way to circumvent the obstacles posed by this situation. Digital transformation has emerged in this period as an imperative for the survival of publishers. But in addition, the transition to Open Access has appeared like a not so distant issue for small- and medium-sized publishers who have often considered that it was something that concerned the big ones.
Both issues, critical in scholarly publishing, are now also being analyzed by small and medium imprints. Therefore, one of the predictions that can be made is that the way has been paved for bibliodiversity to also be present in the open scholarly book space. That in those countries where there are no national strategies to promote open publishing programs, the debate can be opened to come up with innovative solutions to enable open publishing or to participate in projects already underway, such as the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). These options are especially necessary to preserve bibliodiversity and multilingualism in the digital environment.

Andrew Joseph – Digital Publisher, Wits University Press:
If publishers have learnt anything from the COVID-19 experience, it’s that OA monographs are very likely to be the way in which scholarly books will be produced in the future. The challenge is to ensure that all publications are included in this shift.
If access is to be meaningful, we need to ensure that technology and funding gaps are bridged for all. Global South publishers need to articulate their needs and drive this shift.

Please join our enthusiastic book group! We would love to amplify more voices on all topics concerning books, monographs, edited works, and more. If you are interested in sharing your thoughts with the wider scholarly communications and research community and would like to write about a topic please reach out to Suze Kundu.

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Forward Looking Thoughts: Monographs in a Post-COVID World appeared first on Digital Science.

To better understand the international landscape of open access monographs, Peter Potter, Publishing Director in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, will be writing occasional posts from around the world. This latest article is about author attitudes to Open Access publishing.

As the number of open access monographs grows, attention is turning increasingly to questions of how to measure impact and usage. Sometimes lost in these discussions are the attitudes of the most important stakeholder group in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: authors. What do those who write scholarly books actually think about open access? Why do they decide to (or not to) publish OA? And how is their experience with OA shaping the way they think about communicating their research?

While one recent survey shows that academic authors increasingly agree that scholarly monographs should be openly accessible, we still need more opportunities to hear directly from authors, especially in settings that allow for deeper exploration of their views on OA. With this in mind, organizers of the 2020 TOME stakeholders meeting (held in October via Zoom) decided to lead off the meeting with an author roundtable discussion. The roundtable featured five scholars (listed below) from diverse backgrounds (mostly humanities and social sciences) and with varying levels of engagement with open access. Not all had published an OA monograph but all had direct experience with OA publishing in one form or another. In this post, I highlight just a few of my takeaways but I also encourage everyone to watch and listen to the recorded session on the TOME website because it was highly informative and flush with valuable insights into the mindset of academic authors as they grapple with the implications of OA, not just for their individual careers but for their disciplines (and the profession) as a whole.

Top Three Takeaways

1. Authors have rather different reasons for publishing OA. The reasons may overlap but in general, they are strongly related to their disciplines and their particular ambitions for their scholarship. One author, an anthropologist, wanted his work to be accessible to the community members he studied. Another was interested in interdisciplinary impact. And most everyone, in one form or another, wanted to influence public debate. In each case, OA was seen as a viable means for reaching those ends.

2. Authors come to OA via different routes. Whereas OA has been a fact of life in STEM fields for over 20 years, it is relatively new to the humanities and social sciences. One of the historians in the group explained that OA wasn’t even on his “radar screen” when he published his first book in 2012. Also, given the importance of the monograph to tenure and promotion in HSS fields, it is not surprising that scholars have found other ways to dip their toes into OA waters. Some in the group did so through editing a journal that allowed occasional articles to be published OA. One scholar noted that he had co-edited a book of essays and they were able to negotiate an OA deal with the publisher prior to publication. These experiences were opportunities to learn first-hand about OA and to compare the experience with that of traditional publishing. All five found the experience positive enough to consider publishing a future OA monograph.

3. OA is challenging authors to rethink how they write and who they are writing for. According to one author in the group, “I’m reaching audiences that I never even imagined as my potential readers.” Not only is this heartening to them, but it also feeds into the sense of obligation that many feel to engage with significant public debates, whether they be local, national, or global. As another author aptly put it, “My goal for my research has always been to have some kind of impact or some kind of participation in what can often be very contentious public debates and also to be useful in various ways to the communities where I conducted my research.”

While OA may be late in coming to the humanities and social sciences, the experience of this group of authors suggests that it is beginning to find its place in the HSS ecosystem. OA may never be as pervasive there as it is in STEM (print is still very important), but authors want their work to matter—and they want it to matter beyond their own fields and disciplines. The more that OA is seen as a means to “reach a wider audience,” the more OA will be accepted by scholars, even in some of the more conservative humanities disciplines.

Key Quotes

The Authors

1. Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University

2. Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University

3. Nicholas Copeland, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Virginia Tech

4. Deboleena Roy, Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, where she is also taking on a new role as Senior Associate Dean of Faculty for Emory College of Arts and Sciences

5. Emily Wilcox, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies and Associate Chair & Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan

REFERENCES

1. “The challenge is to incorporate the knowledge and insight of humanities and social sciences into research and innovation in the natural, physical and engineering sciences.” (p. 39) –2018 White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

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In part two of the State of Open Monograph Series (Economics of Open Access Monographs), we continue our conversation with Lara Speicher, Head of Publishing at UCL Press and Erich van Rijn, Director of Journals and Open Access at University of California Press. 

We previously discussed the real and perceived costs of open access monographs in part one. Here, we take a look at where funding for open access monographs should come from as national funders (e.g., UKRI, NWO) consider open access mandates, return on investment and a sustainable future. 

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Sara Grimme and Charles Watkinson spoke to Lara and Erich about investments in open access monographs.

How Will We Pay for Open Access Monographs? And How Do We Justify the Investments?

Erich: “Last year the Association of University Presses charged an open access task force to investigate some of the issues around open access publishing. Lara and I served on that group. When the task force asked university press directors and staff what their biggest challenge in open access book publishing was, around 80% indicated it was finding funding. I don’t think that this is something that presses are going to be able to solve for themselves. Different presses have such different financial situations. Some presses, for example, have a commercial operation that cross-subsidizes their money-losing monograph program. Given the current financial state that a lot of universities are going to find themselves in, I don’t know if there is still the library appetite to come up with a collective-funding consortium. There are a lot of interesting roles that private funders can play but they’re not going to be able to provide an operational subsidy in perpetuity for monograph publishing. There has to be institutional commitment at a national level.”

“Compared to the US, it’s clear that OA publishing has a lot stronger foundation in the UK and in Europe where national governments have made great strides in the central funding direction.”

Lara: “I would say similar things. I think what we’ve already seen is that the sources of funding for open access are varied. They include philanthropy for major projects or individual books or series, institutional funding, library funding, research grants, crowdsourcing, national funding, book sales . . . .  There are so many different sources of funding, but even all of those have only funded a very small number of books to become open access so far.

It seems unlikely that there will ever be a single source, and I’m not sure how the money is going to be found to flip everything. Currently 86,000 monographs are published globally every year as reported in the 2019 State of Open Monographs report. How we get to scale is another question.

What Erich is saying about national funding is really important because in Europe in particular there’s already an acceptance that scholarly works, particularly in other European languages from English, are just not commercial but still need to be made available. Participating in the European OPERAS framework are a number of publishers that expect to be fully funded at the national level and have no expectation that they could operate commercially. It’s ironic that the way in which a very few scholarly publishers in the English speaking world have been very successful commercially still influences how many people see publishing as a whole. There needs to be a wider understanding of why certain types of publishing cannot necessarily fully cover costs, especially when they are mission driven.

“There also needs to be a greater understanding of the difference between journals and monographs to understand why monograph publishing in particular needs a different approach to funding.”

Erich: “I think the transformative agreement route is an interesting one to think about for books, but… one of the challenges with transformative agreements is actually implementing them. When you’re talking about publishers with the scale of an Elsevier or Springer Nature, you need that scale to implement and manage transformative agreements, particularly those that involve multi-payer workflows where you might have money coming in from third party funders, the University Library, etc. It’s a tremendous amount of overhead to administer those deals and I think it will be difficult for university presses to manage that, even the largest among us.

However, I do think that a bulk support model is part of the equation. The library membership model we set up for Luminos has been partially successful in taking money from the library budget that was previously used for other things, and diverting it to help build an open monograph ecosystem. This kind of consortium library membership model is something to think about going forward but asking libraries to shoulder the burden of supporting the open monograph ecosystem on their own is not, I think, going to be a successful strategy. That is one of the reasons why I was encouraged when the TOME initiative was developed and involved the Association of American Universities because you do need to get the chief academic officers involved to get institutional commitments beyond the library to funding monograph publication.

Lara: Do you think there is a future for monograph publishing in the current commercial model?”

Erich: “Well, I’ll give you an anecdote from the Choosing Pathways to Open Access conference in late 2018. They were talking about the monograph ecosystem and the funding dynamics around monographs and said, “if you’re going to experiment with open access models in any type of publishing, monograph publishing would be the place to do it because the economics are already broken. So why not break it a little bit more and then at least you would learn something.” I think that it’s valuable for people to think that now might be the time where we’re getting pushed to do some experimentation. Having said that, if you’re a press that can afford to do that experimentation or have the ability to cross subsidize your monograph program with other activities, that would lead you to be more adventurous than if you’re a smaller press that doesn’t have the resources to do that and where your cost recovery is something that’s being demanded of you by the university administration.”

Lara: “Moving to your question about how to justify the value of open access monographs, for us, it’s clearly about making research more widely available around the world and seeing global usage – UCL Press has recently celebrated exceeding 3 million downloads for its books and journals since launching. In terms of return on investment, the value is in making the research available to as wide an audience as possible which benefits the author, the institution, and the reader. As well as how to justify open access, I wonder if in straitened financial circumstances whether there are also questions of how to support the current monograph system if library budgets are going to be squeezed very severely.

“In the current pandemic situation, the value of open access is being seen more clearly than ever.”

Erich: “Monographs have to be published because it’s the way that academic work is done in some disciplines. It’s also about enhancing the university’s global impact. When we look at where open access monographs that are the product of so much academic work get used, it’s globally. There are places in the Global South where I would have never expected to see large usage for our monographs. The use is in territories where, generally, library budgets just can’t accommodate adding monographs to their collections. But we can see geographically that they are used, or at least downloaded, in those locations. Even through the rudimentary data gathering that we’ve been able to do is absent some of the more advanced solutions that are being explored by the Open Access eBook Usage data trust initiative, we’ve been able to see enough to indicate to us that these works have a global impact. If you shut them up, either in a print library collection, where only 150 or 200 libraries will buy them, or in ebook collections where they need to be purchased to be added to a library collection, it’s going to restrict usage. The authors that come to us who want to publish open access do it because they want to see use. That’s the driver for them and, even absent a national funding landscape, they’re willing to go knock on department chairs’ doors to try to get funding to help them in that endeavor. So right now the OA monograph ecosystem in a lot of cases is being driven by passionate faculty who understand the value of openness and ultimately I think they’re the best advocates.

Lara: “We certainly also see interest in societal impact in certain disciplines. Academics in, for example, anthropology explain that they’re very keen for their books to be widely available to the subjects of their research as well as to other researchers. That’s one of the reasons open access is really important to them and for some of our authors that’s also influenced the way they write the book. They’ve wanted to make sure it’s written in a very accessible style and jargon free because they wanted to have that societal impact and for the book to be not just freely available but also accessible to a very wide audience. We also see this in some of the books we publish on sustainability and area studies where the authors feel that their book will be very beneficial for policymakers. 

In the UK, showing societal impact is one of the expectations of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Some authors who’ve published with us are submitting REF impact case studies about their work, and they use the download figures to demonstrate impact, although that’s not necessarily enough on its own because you have to show that your research has led to policy change or other very tangible change.”

Erich: “I worry anyway about applying those kinds of numerical usage metrics to some kinds of publishing that we do. Those kinds of quantifiable metrics are useful in some ways, but a lot of the impact of a monograph is in how it shapes the discourse in a field of inquiry, and that’s a lot harder to measure.

SEE MORE POSTS IN THIS STATE OF OPEN MONOGRAPHS SERIES

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Open access monograph funding appeared first on Digital Science.

Quick Read

• Two industry experts discuss the real and perceived costs of producing open access monographs.
• There is a common misconception that open access books are cheaper to produce.
• The challenge for most university presses is that the infrastructure that’s needed to support open access publication is different to what’s needed to support a sales-driven publication approach.

Sara Grimme and Charles Watkinson talked to two experienced OA ebook publishers, Lara Speicher and Erich van Rijn, about the real and perceived costs of producing open access monographs.

Lara Speicher is the founding Head of Publishing at UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open access press. Erich van Rijn is in charge of Open Access at the University of California Press and was one of the founders of its LuminosOA monograph program. Both imprints were established in 2015.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” as the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is famously meant to have said (at least according to Mark Twain). This is certainly true of open access book costs, where an understanding of the assumptions behind any widely tweeted number is essential. Writing about “why book processing charges (BPCs) vary so much,” the pioneer of open access book publishing Frances Pinter has written that “observers of monograph publishing often complain of a lack of transparency around publishing ‘costs.’ There is the sense that BPCs are arbitrary and do not relate to real costs. The actual story is both simpler and more complicated.” And, as Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti write on their Open Book Publisher blog, “there needs to be much more awareness of the diversity of presses operating in Arts and Humanities book publishing today – particularly those presses that are already Open Access – and the range of business models and strategies they adopt.” 

Are Open Access monographs cheaper to produce?

Lara: “My immediate reaction is “no, they’re not cheaper.” But cost very much depends on the type of book we’re talking about because there is such a huge range within what we describe as the “monograph.” While I don’t see that it being open access necessarily means it’s cheaper, I do think that there are ways of doing things that could be more cost effective. I’m thinking in particular of the Sustainable History Monograph Project which is looking at precisely this question: Is there a certain type of niche book that can be produced in a more streamlined, cost-effective way and doesn’t necessarily need the intensive commissioning, development, and production input that a trade monograph or a very highly illustrated work would. This is a question about the costs of monographs in general, not specifically about open access monographs.”

Erich: “Yes, you have to identify what is included in your definition of production costs when you say “produce a monograph.” There is a large amount of staff time and overhead that goes into fully developing monographs. Those costs can be highly variable between presses and book types as Lara pointed out. Think about the difference between a complicated edited scientific collection, and a 6 x 9 inch black and white monograph that comes in in pretty decent shape, doesn’t require a lot of development, and where peer review is fairly straightforward. These have such different factors in figuring out what the overall cost of doing them is. In general I will say that, as university presses, we tend to be heavily focused on the humanities and social sciences and there’s a tradition of deep involvement in manuscript acquisition, development, and coordination of peer review which is expensive.”

Lara: “I agree with everything Eric said. But imagine a different scenario in which traditional monographs were not published commercially anymore, sales fall off a cliff edge, and it becomes unviable. Would we approach the commissioning process differently? Could it be less labor intensive with less development if the goal was just making the information available, rather than crafting a book and building a list and doing all those things that university presses currently do for all their books. Essentially moving more towards a service rather than a publisher model for certain types of book that might otherwise be financially unviable in a traditional cost-recovery model.”

“The challenge for most university presses is that the infrastructure that’s needed to support open access publication is different to what’s needed to support a sales-driven publication approach.”

Erich: “Possible cost savings coming from not having to implement access restriction are an interesting thing to explore. The challenge for most university presses is that the infrastructure that’s needed to support open access publication is different to what’s needed to support a sales-driven publication approach. So you have to support those two different kinds of infrastructure in the same organization. On the OA side you want to be able to have somebody who can report nicely on usage and develop dashboards to demonstrate the efficacy of the publishing program. And on the unit sales-driven side, you need a sales manager and people who are constantly trying to get books into the sales channels. You also need different kinds of infrastructure in the back office where you’re processing things like book processing charges rather than doing royalties accounting. It adds up to a complicated set of operations to support under one roof. I’m rather envious of a publisher who can support one or the other, rather than both. We’re in that kind of messy transition period. It doesn’t cost any extra to do a print book. All our OA monographs are prepared as printer-ready files as part of the composition process and then they’re set up as a print-on-demand (POD) title. We’re then able to leverage the commercial supply chain. It’s an advantage you have in doing OA monographs for the moment; that you’re able to recover some of those costs through the sale of print based materials.”

Lara: “Whether to make any ebook versions available for sale is something we’ve grappled with. In terms of directly downloadable format, we don’t make an EPUB freely available, only the PDF. But our model is to charge the lowest amount possible. We’ve recently decided to make our ebooks 99 pence, for example, as another way of exposing them. There is a cost in the additional formatting and distribution but it is not large. Charging the lowest price possible is our approach. If people want Kindle specifically or that type of format, then it’s OK to charge a nominal amount, but it’s hard to justify charging the same as print. In terms of the costs associated with OA dissemination, that is definitely something that presses need to consider. Distributing to a wide range of OA platforms, collating and reporting on a lot of download data, that takes some resource to do systematically.”

Erich: “We’ve always tried to distribute our ebooks and print books that are done through the OA program as widely as possible. There are some e-retailers where the requirements are so complicated that it doesn’t make sense to get OA titles into those programs, but the Kindle, for example, is a central distribution point for a lot of people who want to consume long form content on a device. In general, wherever we can make a book available, we will but we don’t try and do so as a cost recovery mechanism. If we put a book into a retail program and it has a price, it generally would only be because having a price is necessary to get into that channel.”

“Whatever the real situation, there certainly is a common misconception that open access books are cheaper to produce.”

Lara: “Whatever the real situation, there certainly is a common misconception that open access books are cheaper to produce. There are also other negative misconceptions about OA being of lesser quality and not being peer-reviewed. So you’ve got both sides: some assuming that it’s lower quality, and others assuming that it can be the same quality but for less cost.”

It is ultimately clear that open access monographs are not cheaper to produce, and that such assumptions are incorrectly driven by misperceptions around quality and distribution costs, amongst other things. A monograph is a monograph, and differences are more likely to exist between presses and book types than by business models. It is perhaps more pertinent to ask if the monograph itself can, over time, be produced differently to be more cost-effective, and whether there are other ways of creating, packaging and distributing content. For now, however, the answer on cost seems clear.

In our next post, Lara and Erich will continue the discussion as we ask how we will pay for open access monographs, and how the investment in open monographs can be justified.

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post The Economics of Open Access Monographs appeared first on Digital Science.

To better understand the international landscape of open access monographs, Peter Potter, Publishing Director in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, will be writing occasional posts from around the world. The first is about South Africa.

University World News reported last month that higher education leaders in South Africa are planning to pursue transformative agreements with the big five scholarly journal publishers—Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage. This move comes as existing contracts with all five publishers come up for renewal at the end of 2020. While the plan is still being formulated, the basic idea is to take the money currently being spent on journal subscriptions (ZAR500-600 million or $29-34 million) and redirect it towards a pay-to-publish model for funding the dissemination of research.

After reading the story, I reached out to Glenn Truran, who directs and is part of the negotiating team for the South Africa National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC), the body that negotiates consortium agreements on behalf of the country’s 26 public universities and six of the national research institutions. I asked Truran if a similar effort might be underway to move the country toward OA monograph publishing. Truran offered his thoughts and put me in touch with a number of others who are directly involved in the book publishing scene in South Africa. The picture that emerged from these conversations is of a country beginning to embrace open access monograph publishing.

Truran explained that the country as a whole is looking to align with the government’s White Paper on Science, Technology, and Innovation (2018), which advocates strongly for open science, not just in STEM fields but in the humanities and social sciences as well.(1) And while he admits that OA book publishing is still very much “in its infancy” in South Africa, he echoed what others told me in saying that the goal is to move it forward in coming years: “So while we are starting from a really small base, I expect to see a significant growth in open monograph publishing over the next five years.”

For scholars in South Africa who write books, the base of publishers is indeed small, comprising a number of local university presses and independent scholarly publishers as well as some familiar international publishers. The main universities with established publishing arms are Witwatersrand (Wits UP), University of South Africa (Unisa Press), University of Cape Town (Juta Publishing), Stellenbosch (African Sun Media), KwaZulu-Natal (KZN Press), and Pretoria (PULP). Among independent scholarly publishers, those most frequently mentioned are AOSIS and HSRC Press, and the international publishers with a sizable presence in South Africa include Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis, and Macmillan.

It is difficult to estimate how many scholarly monographs are published yearly in South Africa but the number is growing. Andrew Joseph, Digital Publisher at Wits University Press, estimates that the total number of monographs (not including textbooks, conference volumes, etc.) in 2013 was about 40.(2) Institutional incentives have pushed that number upwards. As I learned from Maria Frahm-Arp of the University of Johannesburg (Executive Director of the Library and Information Centre and Associate Professor of Religion), the scholarly book publishing system in South Africa is supported by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), which provides subsidies to institutions (not to researchers) based on the number of books or book chapters produced by its faculty in any given year.(3) The current per-title book subsidy is around R1 million (c. $57,500), with a maximum of ten books per institution per year. The maximum was increased from 5 to 10 in 2016, which led to a significant increase in the number of books published/subsidized per year. Since then, however, the numbers appear not to have increased significantly.(4)

For scholars who want their book to be published open access, the options are limited but growing. University presses face the all-too-familiar lack of institutional funding, which has kept them from moving more aggressively into OA publishing.(5) An exception is the University of Pretoria Law Press (PULP), which was established in 2005 to address the lack of published indigenous legal material in Africa, especially in the area of human rights. All of its c. 30 books are available open access. Among non-university based publishers, AOSIS and HSRC Press appear to lead the way with a total of 57 (14 in 2019) and 433 OA books respectively in their catalogues. Some international publishers offer an OA option but this requires payment of a BPC, which is generally too high for most scholars to afford.

Data from Dimensions can give us a glimpse into the impact that OA is having on monograph publishing in South Africa. The first figure below shows the number of monographs published in BRICS countries over the last ten years and the percentages relative to each other. China is by far the largest producer of monographs in BRICS countries while South Africa is the smallest.

The second figure shows the proportion of those books that are OA for each country, over that same period. In South Africa, 5% of the total monographic output is OA.

Looking ahead, it seems that OA monograph publishing in South Africa will continue to grow, even if absolute numbers remain modest. Meiya Nthoesane, Acting Director of UNISA Press, estimates that by 2025 about 80% of all monographs in the country will be OA. He admits that 80% sounds high, but he then explained, “If I told you in January 2020 that by March 2020 80% of the world will work remotely or at home, it would have sounded ‘crazy.’  All I am saying is that the need for paywalls will be outpaced by open scholarship and open access demand.” And COVID-19 will only “fast track” the process as the impact is felt on South Africa’s already struggling economy. In the end, therefore, the primary impact of OA in South Africa will likely be felt more on the consumption than the production side. That is, the international move to OA will greatly increase access to monographs in South Africa, which will allow institutions to shift shrinking collections budgets to other, more pressing needs. According to Maria Frahm-Arp, this might ultimately be COVID-19’s “gift” to South Africa.

REFERENCES

1. “The challenge is to incorporate the knowledge and insight of humanities and social sciences into research and innovation in the natural, physical and engineering sciences.” (p. 39) –2018 White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation

2. ”Scholarly publishing in South Africa: the global south on the periphery” by Andrew Joseph http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.253, p. 14.

3. Department of Higher Education and Training 2015 Research Output Policy https://rm.mandela.ac.za/rm/media/Store/documents/DHET%20Submission%20of%20Outputs/DHET-Research-Output-Policy-2015.pdf

4. “Report on the Evaluation of the 2018 Universities’ Research Outputs” https://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/1/2020/May%202020/report-on-the-evaluation-of-the-2018-universities-research-output_april_2020.doc.zp189504.pdf

5. On the state of university presses in South Africa (and Africa in general) see:  https://www.africanminds.co.za/research/the-african-university-press-in-a-digital-age-practices-and-opportunities/  and https://www.usaf.ac.za/scholarly-presses-in-south-africa-how-sustainable-are-they/

SEE MORE POSTS IN THIS STATE OF OPEN MONOGRAPHS SERIES

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Where in the World are Open Access Monographs Being Published? Part I: South Africa appeared first on Digital Science.

To help better support the discovery, sale and analysis of books, Jennifer Kemp from Crossref and Mike Taylor from Digital Science, present seven reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata.

Book publishers should have been in the best possible position to take advantage of the movement of scholarly publishing to the internet. After all, they have behind them an extraordinary legacy of creating and distributing data about books: the metadata that supports discovery, sales and analysis.

Librarianship and the management of book catalogs at scale took off in the nineteenth century. The Dewey Decimal Classification, the various initiatives of the Library of Congress and the British Library followed. Innovations from the 1960s gave us MARC records and ISBNs. The late 90s produced ONIX, which gave the book industry a tremendous start in migrating online.

However, progress in the decades after appears to have been less dramatic. Some might even argue that this tremendous legacy and wealth of metadata experience has acted as a weight, and has slowed progress. Nowhere is this lack of progress clearer than in the discovery and analysis of book chapters: approximately one-quarter of books published per year has chapter-level metadata, and about two-thirds of books don’t have a persistent and open identifier, ratios that have not significantly changed over the last ten years.

Only one-quarter of scholarly books make chapter-level metadata available

The proportion of edited books and monographs with chapter-level data is approximately one-quarter of all books published in the last ten years. Calculating this figure is necessarily approximate, using numbers published in Grimme et al (2019), and based on data and observed trends in both Dimensions and Crossref.

So why the lack of progress? 

For many publishers and their vendor partners, with systems geared up to the efficient delivery of title-level information, the case for moving towards chapter-level metadata can seem daunting (and potentially expensive!).

Metadata is necessarily detailed and it’s not the kind of thing most people will dabble in. Practitioners, as in other technical fields, have expertise that others may find difficult to leverage if they don’t know what questions to ask. Organizations often find themselves entrenched in outdated approaches to metadata.

Crossref and Metadata 2020 are collaborating to produce arguments for why publishers should move from book-level metadata to chapters. They’ve been working with representatives from the scholarly community, including both small and large presses, not-for-profits and university presses.

Here we present 7 reasons why publishers should collect chapter-level metadata:

1. Increased discoverability
   Increasingly, we’re seeing students and researchers move away from traditional book catalogs and onto more general purpose tools, that are often optimized for journal content, and which may – inadvertently – exclude books and chapters from search results. Making chapter level data and DOIs available places book content into these new channels at no additional cost, and starts to reduce the dependency on specialist vendors. Discovery is simplified, requiring less familiarity or expertise to find relevant book content.
2. Increased usage
   Exposing the contents of books at a more granular level drives more users towards the book content, and increasing usage numbers and (depending on platform and business model) revenue.
3. Matching author expectations
   New generations of authors expect their content to be easily discoverable in the platforms they use. Without chapter level data, this content won’t easily be found in Google Scholar, Mendeley or ResearchGate. For younger researchers, for those in certain disciplines or using resources well-suited to it, if the chapter metadata – which in many cases requires either an introductory paragraph or an abstract – is missing, the book may as well not exist.
4. Author exposure
   About half of scholarly book publishing is thought to be in the form of collected works: books where two or three editors get credit at the top level, but dozens of authors contribute to the chapters. Without chapter-level metadata, these authors – the book authors of tomorrow – get no credit for their efforts.
5. Usage and citations reporting
   Having chapters readily available in the modern platforms means that they start to accumulate evidence of sharing and citations from the moment of being published. Where chapter content is available on its own, the lack of associated metadata inhibits this evidence. After all, the DOI is a citation identifier. Evidence of impact is now critical for research evaluation, funding, tenure and promotion, and without this data, an author’s chapter may as well remain unread.
6. Supporting your authors with funding compliance and reporting
   Authors are increasingly being mandated by their funders to report back on the status of their books and chapters. And, in the case of Open Books and Open Chapters, the funders and authors are frequently the ultimate clients, who are looking to record and report evidence of both academic or social impact. Making chapter level information and identifiers available will facilitate this evidence gathering, especially for open chapters within otherwise non-open books, and increasingly common phenomena.
7. Understanding the hot topics in your books
   Whether you use Altmetric, or one of the other data sources that capture book activity, being able to access the social and media metrics of the chapters in your book gives you an immediate insight into the topics that capture interest at a broader level. Vital information when it comes to planning more books in the space, especially if you’re on the lookout for books with trade crossover potential.

With chapter-level data, publishers can summarize their programs and compare how many authors they work with, how many book titles they have and where there might be gaps in subject and authors omitted from the metadata. Does the scholarly record fully reflect each book? If not, there may be a good deal of information that is simply unavailable to the machines that read the metadata and use it in systems throughout scholarly communications.

Fortunately, it’s becoming easier to manage this data. Although traditional book metadata systems don’t always support chapter-level data, they do often permit publishers to register title-level DOIs, and with Crossref encouraging ISBN information alongside the generation of chapter level DOIs, some of the significant challenges have been reduced.

Both Crossref and Metadata 2020 offer best practices that make clear the need for richer metadata. It’s also important to acknowledge the very real barriers to providing robust metadata, whether for book chapters or anything else, which is why having the conversations and being aware of available resources is important. Because, though it may be difficult, the hurdles are often up-front making the decision to invest in better metadata, factoring in associated costs, setting up workflows, etc.

But as we have seen from the previous decades, book publishers and their suppliers are experts in managing substantial amounts of metadata. Just as no-one would argue to roll-back all those advantages, we believe that – once deployed – industry-wide creation and distribution of chapter data would be an advance from which there is no retreat.

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REFERENCES

https://riojournal.com/article/38698/
The State of Open Monographs Report
The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot 
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/12/07/enriching-metadata-is-marketing/
https://www.ingenta.com/blog-article/five-reasons-chapter-level-metadata-increases-value-academic-books/

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Crossing the Rubicon – The Case for Making Chapters Visible appeared first on Digital Science.

Many publishers have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by relaxing access restrictions, and various library communities have developed resources for maximizing this temporary free access. University presses have been particularly vigorous in responding to support the rapid move to remote learning and research. More than 80 members of the Association of University Presses have opened up a wide variety of their books (as well as journals) since early March.

The initiatives vary in scope: Some presses released a selection of content useful for understanding the pandemic while others have made available much larger collections. They also vary in terms of time limit (end of June is the current norm) and degree of openness (some collections require registration, others do not; some titles are free-to-read, others are free-to-download also).

When asked about the rationale behind opening up whole collections, press directors highlight the “mission-driven” identity of their organizations. As Donna Shear, director of University of Nebraska Press, notes “Honestly, it was all about mission. Students and scholars need easy access to materials, as do professionals. We didn’t want to put up any roadblocks. As a part of the overall academic ecosystem, we felt we needed to do our part.”

John Sherer, director of University of North Carolina Press (which has removed paywalls from its collections with aggregators), agrees and also reflects on the pragmatic opportunity this offers: “One of the perhaps unintended consequences I’m hoping for in this crisis is that our books will actually be used a great deal, validating the idea that the type of publishing we do is worthy of support, whether it is through cost-recovery (selling stuff) or more creative models (like ‘subscribe to open’).”

In uncertain times, these are experiments in openness

Not all university presses are participating and there is a definite feeling of nervousness behind the scenes. Are we giving away the farm? Will our authors feel that we’re protecting their rights and incomes at a vulnerable time? Will libraries spend their precious budgets on other publishers’ works when they see ours are free at the moment?

Tony Sanfilippo, director of The Ohio State University Press (which opened up all its monographs, textbooks, and journals early) graphically describes his decision process:  “What I had to weigh was the lost revenue versus the continued access that scholars and students needed through this extraordinary crisis. How I could help hundreds of students, graduate students, and scholars. Considering the current collapse of book sales, in retrospect, the lost revenue becomes less relevant because there’s little reason to believe those books, in particular, would have earned much revenue currently anyway. And at this point in the annual textbook cycle more books are being returned than being purchased.”

As the German essayist Walter Benjamin wrote: “These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence’. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.” Not only do these temporary free-to-read initiatives give presses the opportunity to highlight their “mission-driven” identities, but there is a pragmatic interest in understanding what the effects of making ebooks editions free might be. This is particularly important as funders move to include books in their open access policies. We are, for example, in the midst of the consultation process on the UK Research and Innovation proposed open access policy, currently set to include monographs, book chapters, and edited collections from January 1, 2024.

It’s early days in measuring the response to these initiatives

From a quantitative perspective, Google Analytics unique pageviews of the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection have increased over 650% since the collection was made free-to-read on March 20, COUNTER 5 unique title requests are more than double what they were for the equivalent period in 2019, and over 95% of authors in the collection have indicated that they are supportive. Anecdotally, Sanfilippo reports that the reaction “has all been very, very positive. Authors, administrators, scholars, students, librarians; they have all universally supported this move. It has made the staff a bit nervous, but the support and praise we’ve been receiving from the administration for this move has been reassuring.” Shear adds that: “Our administration has been very supportive of our decision, even writing about it in their newsletter. We’ve only had two book authors ask that their books be put back behind the paywall, and I wonder if we took the time to explain everything to them, they’d change their minds”.

Usage of the University of Michigan Press’s ebook collection illustrates the unprecedented geographical spread of engagement since books were made free-to-read. A snapshot of content views at one point of time on 04/14/2020. 

Sherer also points out that: “The reaction from my community (that is, my authors, our librarians, teachers, students and researchers) has been overwhelmingly supportive. When we try to pick up the pieces and rebuild a book publishing model, these are the members of the community that will need to voice their support for the work UNC Press does.”

As Sherer highlights, there is a grim reality behind the positive experiences of these free-to-read programs. Monograph and coursebook publishing were already struggling financially before the COVID-19 shutdown and as many presses project their 2021 financial year budgets, the financial situation looks bleak.

As the scholar Samuel Moore writes, “Higher education is predicted to be badly hit by the crisis and this will have a knock-on effect on purchasing decisions, university press subsidies and overall budget availability. . . While this might increase the amount of open access research available, it will be at the expense of the loss of control by the research community and the continued dominance of a handful of players.” Clearly communicating that demand for university press books online is exploding even while library monograph budgets sharply decrease is more important now than ever if the bibliodiversity that university presses, scholar-led publishers, and small independent commercial publishers represent is to be preserved.

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DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post State of Open Monographs Series: Opening Monographs in an Age of COVID-19 appeared first on Digital Science.

Welcome to the first post of a specialized and dedicated book blog series supported by Digital Science. Like many colleagues working in scholarly publishing we have seen rapid changes in the industry over the last few years. Following a discussion on the future of the monograph with key leaders in the university press space at the 2018 ALPSP conference, we collaborated with thought leaders from the book space to produce a report on The State of Open Monographs. This report was well received by the community, so as a follow up we wanted to continue to explore this specialized, but very important, type of content.

With this blog series we aim to:

• Further the goals of the original report to bring a community together to discuss many topics important to books
• Educate, inform, and serve as a platform for sharing ideas that will be instructional for book publishers
• Work with a variety of people who care about book-specific topics and are experts in certain areas of book publishing
• Discuss ideas for overcoming certain challenges in the book space

We care about the book space – books are critical to the scholarly ecosystem

Through our exploration of the book space, we have come to understand that long-form research in the form of a monograph is a primary method of research communication in the social sciences and humanities. STEM fields, on the other hand, tell the world about their work in the form of journal articles. All segments of research contribute to society and the publishing community needs to be in a place to support all forms of output. The research ecosystem has come a long way from its early days when topics were siloed, research was printed, and various research communities did not talk to each other. Today research is continuing to be more and more interdisciplinary as topics in Social Science and Humanities cross over with STEM fields of study.

“Books, as the primary method of research communication in Social Science and Humanities fields, deserve to be treated as first-class research publications. It is time to weave them more strongly into the scholarly narrative and address challenges that stand in the way of doing just that.”

Monograph publishing has seen significant change in the last few years, particularly as a result of open access and funder mandates. However, it has also stayed frighteningly the same, with little changing in the metadata and publication space, leading to a continued state of disintermediation and fragmentation across publishers.

If we start with the state of funding, there has been significant confusion over the last 12-18 months regarding Plan S and open access mandates. Authors of monographs still find it extremely challenging to secure funding for their monograph (or even their book chapter!), and funders supporting journal publication feel very differently about the price of a £10-14,000 monograph – even in the face of an open access mission.

Disintermediation and fragmentation also remain an issue for monograph authors, whether publishing open access or not. A lack of consistency in metadata collection, paired with the fact that books tend to appear on multiple platforms, has led to issues around discoverability, access, and fragmentation of books.

In 2019 Digital Science worked with members of the scholarly community – in particular, Peter Potter and Charles Watkinson – to write a report on the current state of the open monograph. As Michael Elliot wrote in his introduction to the report:

“At a time when the research mission of higher education – particularly the research of the humanities and the social sciences – remains poorly understood beyond the academy, the mission of making our research widely and openly available could be more urgent than ever.”

The report exposed a number of issues in the open monograph ecosystem, or, as Michael put it, opportunities.

Key in the report was the fact that:

• The true value of monographs is obscured by a lack of metadata, identifiers, and a slow lag in the uptake of DOI’s
• Costs to transition monographs to a more open world are expensive, confusing, and lacking structure
• The publication of monographs tends to be driven by the needs of a print-based market, and as such, lag behind journals

We hope to explore each of these points in more detail over the course of this year. There are, in addition, many other themes that we see beyond those highlighted in the examples above.

Get involved and help share this blog series

We hope to expand on these issues with members of the community so that we are able to give you a space to share your thoughts, frustrations, and hopes for the future. Most importantly, we want to make this blog series of use! So if we can share best practices around metadata tagging, delve into providing real-time feedback to authors, or find new ways to communicate open funding mandates and sources with the community (both authors and publishers), then we will be fulfilling the purpose of this series.

In particular, we look forward to working closely with guest authors, each of whom will work on a theme close to their hearts, passions or frustrations! If you have an idea that you’d like to explore, or are keen to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. Please email publishing@digital-science.com if you’d like to hear more.

See the other posts in this series

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Blog series on the State of Open Monographs 2020 appeared first on Digital Science.

Digital Science has today launched a report on the state of open access monographs. The report addresses the question of how we integrate and value monographs in the increasingly open digital scholarly network.

Key findings include:

• Open access is still a relatively small part of the monograph landscape. As of mid-2019, the Directory of Open Access Books lists fewer than 20,000 OA books of all dates (https://www.doabooks.org/). This is compared to an estimated 86,000 monographs published internationally every year.
• Initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched and TOME are experimenting with new business models that presume a world where open access becomes the norm for monographs.
• While monographs continue to be central to the intellectual and professional identity of HSS fields, the technology for publishing them continues to be driven largely by the needs of a print and journal-based market. As a result, monographs remain largely outside the growing digital scholarly information infrastructure.
• The challenges scholarly publishers face in adding open access monographs to their publishing programmes include issues with general discoverability and inclusion in library catalogues. They also face the challenge of how to measure the value and distribution of open access materials, in the absence of sales data and difficulties gaining usage data.
• Monographs famously collect citations at a slower rate than journal-based research articles. Data in this report from Altmetric shows that monographs also accrue impact over a longer life cycle in a broader context, and show higher rates of impact in policy documents and wikipedia, than equivalent journal-based articles.
• OA sheds a harsh light into how academic book publishing is faring in its transition to a networked digital world, and reveals dusty corners and dirty piles of laundry that we might rather have forgotten.

The report shows how assessing the current state of open access monograph publishing is particularly challenging, if for no other reason than that the terrain is so messy — more so even than it is for journal publishing.

Key report recommendations for fully integrating monographs into the digital scholarly information infrastructure include:

• Urging publishers to adopt DOIs at both a volume and, preferably, chapter-level, that will support the discovery, monitoring and impact of monographs across the increasingly open scholarly infrastructure.
• Recommending that distributors and aggregators make their usage data available in interoperable and standard forms, and support data aggregation and interoperability by consistent use of DOIs.
• That funders recognize the value that monographs contribute to scholarship and that they fund the move towards open access at an appropriately sustainable rate.

Mike Taylor, Digital Science said:

“As a career-long advocate of scholarly books, and the arts and humanities, it’s been a delight to work on this white paper. Monographs have a unique role to play in scholarship, offering academics the opportunity to make more considered contributions that have a more prolonged impact than journal-based articles. The move towards open access publishing threatens to leave monographs behind, but having reflected on the infrastructure and evaluation issues, I’m confident that the monograph has a very healthy future – as long as aggregators, publishers, and funders embrace the changes needed.”

Download full report

The post The State of Open Monographs appeared first on Digital Science.