Path to Open

Path to Open, a new open access pilot for book publications in the humanities and social sciences, has launched its collection this month, with 100 titles covering 36 disciplines from more than 30 university presses. This represents a major and much-needed step forward for Open Access publishing in general, and for the humanities specifically.

The pilot began in January as a collaboration among university presses, libraries, and scholars. It has emerged at a moment when students, administrators, and political leaders in the United States openly doubt the value and relevance of the humanities.¹ Their questions stem at least in part from a widespread misunderstanding of the term “humanities”, the disciplines it includes, and the inquiries posed by its scholars.

Such misunderstandings are perhaps not surprising. Scholarly books, often referred to as monographs, have served for decades as the primary mode for sharing research findings in the humanities but are currently distributed in ways that privilege a narrow audience.²

University presses – long-time champions and producers of monographs – have lost crucial institutional support, leaving many in difficult financial circumstances. The resulting high prices for monographs often exclude scholars, students, and others without affiliation at well-funded research libraries, and the problems multiply for those outside the established book distribution networks of North America and Western Europe.

Compared with STEM disciplines, the humanities receive little public funding for research and publication, making the move to open access much more challenging.

A commitment to finding new ways of sharing monographs drives the development of Path to Open. As Charles Watkinson and Melissa Pitts have noted, academic stakeholders “have long seen the value in investing significant resources to sustain science infrastructures that contribute to a common good. It is essential to their mission that they collaborate and invest with that same care in the crucial infrastructure for humanities research embodied by the network of university presses”.

Path to Open seeks to create an infrastructure that allows more publishers – especially small and mid-sized university presses – to experiment with open access distribution while also boosting the circulation of research from a community of diverse humanities scholars. The initiative is distinctive among open access models because, as John Sherer explains, it proposes a “compromise between the legacy model of university press publishing and a fully funded OA model”.

Path to Open operates as a library subscription – administered exclusively by JSTOR – that guarantees payments of at least US$5,000 per title to participating publishers, to help offset potential losses in digital sales. With the launch of the online collection this month, presses also have the option to sell print editions of all books, as well as direct-to-consumer e-books.

A sliding scale for subscription costs provides more equitable access to libraries of varying sizes and budgets, and more than 60 libraries have joined to date, including members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The initial 100 titles transition to full open access by 2026, and new titles will be added in each of the following three pilot years to reach an expected total of 1,000 open access books by 2029.

The model aims to reduce financial risk for presses while also acknowledging lingering hesitation about open access publication within the humanities community. As John Sherer finds, many authors fear that “an OA monograph would be viewed less favorably than a traditional print monograph would in the tenure and promotion review process”.

Monographs take years to produce, and they function quite differently from journal articles in the scholarly ecosystem. Many of these books maintain their relevance for years, even decades, past the original publication date. Over the life of the pilot, JSTOR will track various usage metrics for all titles in the collection both before and after the transition to open access.

The partnership with JSTOR provides a unique opportunity to gather data in a controlled environment, with hopes of gaining much-needed insights into the behavior of readers, the effect of open access on print sales, and the timing of peak impact for monographs in various disciplines. Understanding such issues is key to strengthening the vital infrastructure that supports humanities research and to ensure its place alongside open STEM scholarship.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has committed to providing a robust and transparent structure for community engagement with Path to Open. In consultation with the Educopia Institute, ACLS is developing a forum to encourage dialogue among key stakeholders, including publishers, libraries, scholars, and academic administrators. Inviting scholars into these conversations is critical for a shared understanding of how open access affects humanistic disciplines, institutions of higher education, students, and individual academic careers.

Our hope at ACLS is that an inclusive dialogue about Path to Open will generate greater understanding of the stakes for various constituents within the humanities community, and guide decisions for the future of scholarly publishing in sustainable and equitable ways.

¹ Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2023.

² See also Michael A. Elliott, “The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era,” The Journal of Electronic Publishing 18, no. 4 (fall 2015).

About the Author

Sarah McKee, Project Manager, Publishing Initiatives | American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)

As Project Manager for Publishing Initiatives, Sarah McKee works to support a healthy ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of humanistic scholarship across disciplines and institutions. She previously administered Digital Publishing in the Humanities, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and based at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and served as managing editor of the born-digital New Georgia Encyclopedia at the University of Georgia Press. She is an advisory board member for the Next Generation Library Project and is a co-author of the report Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community (2022).

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A five-year open access publishing pilot has come to an end, offering key insights into a future of sustainable open access publishing for monographs.

In December of 2022, Emory University in Atlanta hosted the fifth and final stakeholders meeting for TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem). 

TOME launched in 2017 as a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The goal of the pilot was to explore a new model for sustainable monograph publishing, one in which participating universities commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of monographs by their faculty, while participating university presses commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories.

The December meeting gave stakeholders (publishers, librarians, authors, and representatives from a number of societies and foundations) the opportunity to gather—both virtually and in person—and assess the outcomes of the initiative while also deliberating on next steps. In this post I briefly discuss one discrete piece of the assessment: What did we learn from the pilot about eBook usage and the impact of the OA edition on print sales.

Over the course of the pilot, more than 130 scholarly monographs have been published in OA editions with funding from the 20 participating TOME institutions. Given the long lead time associated with monograph publishing, most of the books (over 70%) were released in the final two years of the pilot, which means that any usage data collected by the publishers would be preliminary at best, so the initial analysis focused on the first 25 books, which were published between May 2018 and September 2019. Prior to the December meeting, the publishers of these 25 books were asked to collect usage data from each of the platforms hosting the OA editions. In addition, they provided print sales figures, both for the TOME editions and for comparable titles on their list. The resulting data were compiled into a spreadsheet for analysis. 

Not surprisingly, the main challenge to analysis of these data was the apples-to-apples problem. Some repositories and platforms collect downloads while others track views only. Some base their stats on single chapters; others on the entire book. Meanwhile, publishers do not all place their OA editions on the same platforms. As a result, the spreadsheet ended up looking a bit like a checkerboard with pieces on some squares but not others. For instance, here’s how a small portion of the spreadsheet looked when the data were filled in:

“TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles.”

Peter Potter

Still, when all the data were collected, one thing was clear: the OA editions have been heavily accessed online. By July 2022, the first 25 TOME books tallied nearly 195,000 downloads and views. The average per book was 7,754.¹

These findings are in line with those of other OA book initiatives. In November 2022 MIT Press reported that the 50 books published OA in 2022 through its Direct to Open program were downloaded over 176,000 times.² This works out to roughly 3,520 per book. Likewise, the University of Michigan Press reported in January 2023 that the 40 Fund to Mission books released OA in 2022 were downloaded over 149,000 times up to the end of December, reaching an average of 3,826 per book.³ While the per book numbers for both D2O and Michigan are lower than that of TOME, the TOME books accumulated their stats over a longer period of time.

TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles. As can be seen in this bar chart, the average number of downloads/views per book (7,754) is significantly higher than the average unit sales per book (590). 

We also considered one of the biggest questions that publishers continue to ask about OA books: How does the OA edition affect sales of the print edition? With this question in mind, publishers provided not just the sales figures for TOME books but sales figures for comparable titles on their list. (Each publisher was left to decide what it deemed a “comparable” book.)  As this chart shows, the print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps. 

“The print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps.”

Peter Potter

These findings should be taken with a grain of salt. As several publishers pointed out, identifying comps for any single title is mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the sample size (25) is too small to warrant drawing any firm conclusions. For instance, most of the 25 TOME titles had print sales between 300 and 500 copies. Only in four cases did sales exceed 1,000 copies, and if these four titles are excluded from the sample the average drops to a number more consistent with the comps. Understandably, therefore, most presses were reluctant just yet to draw any conclusions about OA’s impact on sales.⁴

Of course, we know that the impact of scholarly books goes well beyond downloads, views, and sales figures. A future post will look at the Altmetric data for TOME books to see what they tell us about alternative measures of impact. Meanwhile, a final report on TOME, including an in-depth examination of attitudes and motivations of the stakeholder groups, is due to be released in the coming weeks.

 ¹ The median was 5,243, with a minimum of 800 and a maximum of 27,470. 
 ² https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-direct-to-open-books-downloaded-more-than-176312-in-ten-months/
³ https://ebc.press.umich.edu/stories/2023-02-01-so-how-did-they-do-in-2022/. These figures filter out a digital project with very high usage, which was considered an outlier.
 ⁴ A larger study of OA impact on sales, sponsored by the NEH, is forthcoming from AUPresses. https://aupresses.org/news/neh-grant-to-study-open-access-impact/

About the Author

Peter Potter, Publishing Director | Virginia Tech

Peter joined Virginia Tech’s University Libraries in 2016 after many years in university press publishing. He guides the library’s long-term planning in the area of publishing services, consults with faculty, staff, and students on their publishing needs, and advises prospective authors on all aspects of the scholarly publishing process. During most of the TOME pilot, he served as ARL Visiting Program Officer overseeing the initiative.

The post TOME sheds light on sustainable open access book publishing appeared first on Digital Science.

Bringing humanistic research into the digital environment – and supporting new and diverse voices and perspectives – is one of the great benefits of Open Access, write the authors of the latest in our OA books series.

How research is generated and shared can drive meaningful change across disciplines, organizations, and communities. Consider digital scholarship. Emerging tools and methodologies prompt new questions; resultant hypotheses and argumentation call for innovative presentations; interactivity and other enhanced user experiences bring about heightened awareness and agency; increased inclusivity leads to new, diverse perspectives. Combining digital scholarship with open access (OA) publishing models expands significantly the possibilities for impact by offering more equitable access to research, alongside new and powerful ways for authors to articulate complex arguments. In sum, the intersection between innovative forms of scholarship and revolutionary dissemination processes can benefit multiple stakeholders the world over.

Creating multimodal digital monographs, for many authors, is about making the humanities relevant and accessible to wider audiences who can both benefit from and contribute to scholarly production in tangible, meaningful ways. At the same, open access publication provides not only wide distribution but also a mechanism by which digital scholarship may undergo formal development and evaluation with a university press. But the ability to create open multimodal publications is itself fraught with inequity, requiring collaboration partners, expertise, and funding not yet widely available to all scholars or to their publishers.

In an effort to take stock of the wide range of innovative practices and system-changing interventions that characterize a growing body of digital scholarly publications, Brown University and Emory University co-hosted a summit in spring 2021. The intention from the start was to call attention to the faculty-led experimentation that was taking place across a number of libraries and humanities centers, some of which already involved university presses. Shifting the focus away from tools and technology, as important as those discussions remain to the larger scholarly communications ecosystem, the summit emphasized author and audience needs and opportunities. As such, it highlighted the importance of investing in a people-centric, content-driven infrastructure.

“How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship?”

Case studies of eight recently published or in-development OA works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions among scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses: What models for publishing enhanced and interactive scholarly projects are emerging? What are the common challenges that remain and how do we address them? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship among the wider scholarly communications community?

While each of the projects, representing a broad disciplinary range and span of subject matter, offers a different perspective, when taken together they reveal lessons learned and clarify key priorities. All the projects demonstrate in myriad ways how digital content and affordances can enrich and deepen a scholarly argument. Some works provide distinct opportunities to examine the ethical implications of humanities research and to consider the new ways in which digital publication engages with audiences beyond the academy. Others foreground the powerful outcomes of collaborations between university presses and universities, modeling how such partnerships leverage resources and expertise to strengthen the humanities infrastructure and allow for innovation within it.

Although the summit focused on a selection of projects supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monographs Initiative, the presentations and generative discussions that followed raised important concerns and opportunities that extend well beyond the featured projects. These findings were released in July 2022 at the Association of University Presses 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. A key objective of the report, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community,” is to promote greater inclusion and equitable access of diverse voices as the development, validation, and dissemination of digital scholarship continues to unfold.

That digital scholarship developed and distributed as an OA monograph can transform how and where research is carried out and whom it reaches is undeniable. In the case of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2021), four project editors compiled the contributions of more than 100 scientists, humanists, artists, designers, programmers, and coders. The atlas contains 330,000 words and 600+ media assets, and had attracted 60,000 unique visitors in the six months between its publication and the date of the summit. The publication As I Remember It: Teachings from the Life of a Sliammon Elder (University of British Columbia Press, 2019), published on the RavenSpace platform, offers a model for including Indigenous communities in the creation of scholarship, while also addressing the needs of both public and academic audiences through a thoughtful interplay of text and multimedia.

“We need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public.”

For all the successes noted in the report, we need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public. Such scholarship has the potential to offer powerful counterpoints and alternatives to the disinformation that pervades current discourse on the web, and to bridge the gap between scholarly and public discourses. 

As the pathways for humanities scholarship expand in the digital era, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community” serves as an invitation for all its practitioners to engage in conversation about the evolution of content itself, as well as with the authors who create it and the audiences whom they seek to engage. The importance of sharing and learning together as a community, for finding innovative and productive ways to share expertise and resources through collaborative models, emerges from the summit and cannot be underestimated in these still early and formative days. We further hope that more universities will seek ways to support their own faculty, as well as the publishers of their faculty’s work, in efforts to bring vital humanistic research into the digital environment and to welcome new and diverse voices and perspectives throughout that process.

About the Authors

Allison Levy, Director | Brown University Digital Publications

Allison Levy, PhD, brings together key organizational, academic, and technological resources across Brown University to support new forms of faculty-driven scholarship. She spearheads efforts at the industry level to advance the conversation around the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarship in the humanities. @AllisonMLevy

Sarah McKee, Sr. Associate Director for Publishing | Digital Publishing in the Humanities, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University

Sarah McKee supports faculty in the development of open access and digital monographs. She previously served as managing editor for the New Georgia Encyclopedia at the University of Georgia Press. On November 1 she will join the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), working to support a healthy ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of humanistic scholarship.

The post Open Access Monographs: Digital Scholarship as Catalyst appeared first on Digital Science.

Understanding how many times an open access (OA) book has been viewed or downloaded is only part of the story – what you then do with the data is when the tale really unfolds…

Note: This blog post includes excerpts from the OA eBook Usage Data Analytics and Reporting Use-cases by Stakeholder report by Drummond and Hawkins.

While the term “usage data” most often refers to webpage views and downloads associated with a given book or book chapter, scholarly communications stakeholders have identified a near future where linked open access (OA) scholarship usage data analytics could directly inform publishing, discovery, and collections development in addition to impact reporting. 

In the 2020-2022 Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage research project supported by the Mellon Foundation, publisher and library representatives expressed their interests in using OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data analytics to inform overall OA program investment, strategy and fundraising. A report summarizing a year of virtual focus groups noted multiple operational use cases for OA book usage analytics, spanning book marketing, sales, and editorial strategy; collections development and hosting; institutional OA program strategy, reporting, and investment; and OA impact reporting for institutions and authors to support reporting to their funding agencies, donors, and policy-makers.

Evidence-based decision-making depends on comprehensive, quality data. The tale of an OA book or author’s impact depends upon marrying usage data created by a plethora of publisher platforms, digital libraries, and OA repositories with linked citation information from scholarship, syllabi, gray literature and policy proceedings. As Laura Ricci and Michael Clarke elegantly documented, OA book usage data is created at multiple points across the book supply chain, to be ultimately curated and collated by each library, publisher, and library management system working with OA titles.

The work required to produce cross-platform, contextual usage-related OA reports and analytics is significant. Such data aggregation and reporting requires the processing and curation of numerous COUNTER-compliant and non-compliant reports, APIs, dashboards, and spreadsheets.This resource-intensive exercise requires specialized expertise to understand which metrics can (and cannot) be combined while annotating bot traffic, avoiding data quality issues, and reporting on publicly available data alongside information that’s accessible per data-use agreements. While larger operations have access to such expertise, smaller presses, publishers, and start-ups risk being unable to do so, thereby missing out on derived strategic insights.  

OAeBU data can inform service relationships as publishers and libraries seek to understand online book distribution niches or evaluate book hosting and dissemination offerings. Similarly, publishing platforms and services can leverage usage data to improve and target their own offerings for the scholarly communications community. Yet context is key. As illustrated through pilot OA monograph usage data dashboards developed by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, innovation is occurring around usage data dashboards and analytics services to meet the specialized needs of publishers, libraries, funding agencies, and scholars.

To fully analyze the impacts of Open Access on society, scholarly communications stakeholders must improve OAEBU data quality, processing, and reliability. Federated national or regional data infrastructure efforts already suggest ways to facilitate data processing and exchange across public and private organizations big and small. The US-based National COVID Cohort Collaborative is simplifying the controlled, ethical data sharing, aggregation, and use of COVID trial data across public and commercial research labs. European industry-based collaboratives are applying International Data Space (IDS) standards and certifications to facilitate public and private data exchange for mobility, logistics, and healthcare. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, a team led by PIs at the University of North Texas, OPERAS, OpenAIRE, and Johns Hopkins University is working to build upon past efforts to: a) host community consultations to create a multilateral data-processing and stewardship rule book for OA book usage data, b) quantify data trust participation benefits for book publishing stakeholders, and c) understand the full operational costs related to an international data space for OA book usage. If successful, this OA Book Usage Data Trust effort could make usage data management and reporting less costly and more accessible for all open monograph stakeholders.

While the use of data space infrastructure will drive economies of scale – and therefore cost savings – for book publishing stakeholders, in order to realize the full benefits of OA data usage we must create an ecosystem that operates according to open data sharing, security, and use principles. By fostering trusted, responsible, direct data exchange, our researchers, publishers, libraries, funders and the wider community will all stand to gain.

About the Author

Christina Drummond, Executive Director | OA Book Usage Data Trust

For over 20 years, Christina has worked at the intersection of data analytics, strategy, and policy. As the Executive Director for the OA eBook Usage Data Trust effort, Christina is helping to improve the quality, completeness, and timeliness of OA impact data while reducing reporting costs through better global usage data exchange, aggregation and governance.

The post Taking Open Access book usage from reports to operational strategy appeared first on Digital Science.

To judge from the progress of Open Access (OA) journal articles, you could be mistaken for thinking OA was the new paradigm for all research: a swift look at the charts below tells you everything you need to know.

According to Unpaywall and Dimensions, one by one the disciplines have tipped from majority-closed to majority-open. Life Sciences was the first to tip in 2013; Medical and Health Sciences followed in 2016; then the Social Sciences and Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 2017. The Humanities joined the majority open in 2020; and Engineering and Technology were at parity in 2021.

So what of books? While we can say with confidence that rates of OA publishing for both monographs and collected works have doubled over the last 10 years, the proportion of OA books remains very low, barely troubling the dominance of the traditional pay model. It’s possible to see a small increase in the last two years – which could be a consequence of more publishers making books ‘freely available’ during COVID (but, lacking a CC- licence not matching the formal status of being ‘Open Access’). Whether or not this trend continues, in a post-pandemic world, is a question that we’ll need to return to in 2024…

Books are more complex, of course. The business models are more challenging, they’re slower to write, slower to gain impact – and are considerably more diverse than journals – in language, discipline, country and publisher. Some contributors might be in receipt of mandatory OA publishing, others may be unfunded. As long as paper book sales remain strong, ‘hybridity’ will need to be baked into the model.

The success of OA journal articles isn’t accidental. Rather it’s the consequence of policy: the graphs below make this clear. In the UK and the Netherlands, for example, several funders have taken dramatic steps to implement Gold OA – and this can be seen in the graphs below. The European Commission, in contrast, favours universal OA, without mandating any particular model, and tends to have strong Green / self-archiving policy. The consequences of funding policy are self-evident. Other funders have softer policies, and their data has followed suit.

To understand how funders are addressing this, we spoke to three funders who are shaping the way we think about OA books, about their experiences and of their hopes for the future.

For Victoria Tsoukala at the European Commission, the reasons for books’ slow adoption of Open Access is clear: books are considerably more complex than journals, and fulfil a different role in the minds (and hearts) of scholars. The EC’s policy is clear: OA is mandatory, of whatever type works. Practically speaking, this is more challenging for books than journals. As Tsoukala says, the paper product isn’t going away, “not for us, not for our children, perhaps for our grandchildren?”, and as a consequence, she doesn’t think we’re likely to see much more progress than organic growth – hopefully reaching 50% in the next few years. ”‘But while there’s paper, there will always be hybrid,” she adds, noting that scholars will always want to keep books, read them, refer to them, be inspired by them, note them, and treasure them on their shelves. Books clearly have an emotional value that goes beyond that of the journal article.

The Wellcome Trust – long recognized as Open Access leaders – have taken a different view of OA book publishing, with OA policies evolving since 2003. According to Aki MacFarlane and Hannah Hope of the Wellcome Trust, their mission is to reduce the friction for OA book publishing to the lowest possible level. Their policy is a masterpiece of clarity, and as well as clear instructions, they’ve implemented a tool to support book publishers to make their content available and compliant.

Neither the EC or Wellcome Trust publish a fixed Book Processing Charge for OA books. In contrast, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) does: $5500, to be paid directly to the publisher, with $500 of that to go to the author. Brett Bobley of the NEH shared more details of their “Fellowships Open Book Program”, a project referred to as their ‘flagship program’. Curiously, their policy takes a different view of the payoff between sales and access: US-based publishers are welcome to ‘OA’ their books, and apply for the money, at any stage. The implication is that publishers are able to sell their books, and when they’re ready, make them available OA – as long as it’s through a recognised platform. The NEH has a good track record of working with publishers and scholars to develop policies, with several university presses being consulted with.

All three of the funders acknowledge a number of core issues: the complexity (and consequent friction) of the socio-economic role that books play, and the issue of discoverability.

This blog has previously reported the challenges of visibility and discoverability experienced by the scholarly monograph, estimating that approximately half of published output takes advantage of the open scholarly infrastructure systems, such as DOIs and ORCIDs.

Even organisations that mandate OA – and report strong compliance – have been known to struggle with discoverability. The EC’s metadata policy mandates use of DOIs and ORCIDs; the NEP mandates publishers to make their books available on at least two major digital distribution services; Wellcome mandates the use of NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC. Nevertheless, their aggregated percent of OA books from the last five years has not yet reached 2/3rds of funded books, these numbers falling short of what we estimate as being eligible.

The world of scholarly publishers is considerably more diverse than that of the journals world, with many hundred small and university presses producing a considerable percentage of the world’s academic book output. And this area is getting more complex, with many new business models being developed.

All three of the funders interviewed emphasised their support for publishers, and the development of new business models: a point that came up in all three was the need to ‘assuage their fears’, ‘to reassure them…’, ‘to lower the bar…’ Publishers play an essential role in the development and distribution of the scholarly book, and OA or not, no-one sees them going away.

For me, it’s gratifying that three such important funders take the book seriously, and acknowledge this final fact. Much work still needs to be done to encourage the growth in OA publishing for books – as we’ve previously covered, OA books get far higher uses and achieve much higher rates of sharing and readership than non-OA books, while not noticeably having reduced sales – and these three funders are certainly playing a strong role in changing the environment.

As we have seen: policy drives change. In Figure 2, we can compare the change in OA for three countries with (respectively) strong, moderate and weak OA policies for journals – without similar clarity of purpose and policy, OA book growth is likely to continue in its current state. We hope that the next 10 years sees a similar change for books, as the last decade has seen for journals, while preserving the cultural and social role of the scholarly book.

This will not happen without clear policies.

About the Author

Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights & Customer Analytics | Digital Science

Mike is an innovator in scholarly metrics and social impact. Prior to the development of altmetrics, he was working to understand how researchers were using emerging social media networks and other platforms to exchange information. He has been involved in many open initiatives during his career, most notably contributing to the architecture of the ORCID repository and API prior to its launch.

The post Open Access Books: Do we need a Plan S moment? appeared first on Digital Science.

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.

The State of Open Monographs report addresses the question of how we integrate and value monographs in the increasingly open digital scholarly network.

Analysis from industry experts looks at the open monograph landscape in 2019, the impact and role of monographs in the scholarly record, the move towards open access and the nuances in funding.

The set of contributions, which includes a foreword from Michael Elliott, Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, carefully outline the critical challenges that must be met if the open monograph is going to thrive and expand in the scholarly landscape.

Download Now

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Originally, developed for use within scholarly books, the technology works with a book’s ISBN and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) at the chapter level. It provides a collated and real-time record of mentions from a wide range of online sources, including the mainstream media, blogs, social media, public policy documents, online reference managers, Wikipedia and post-publication peer review platforms.

These colourful visualisations will offer insight into how people are responding to new titles, and help readers, publishers and authors to identify which chapters are generating the most attention online.

The technology has real implications for the way in which we currently share, understand and evaluate literature. For the first time readers will have the opportunity to easily access an extensive and immediate summary of the shares and discussion relating to a particular title or chapter. They’ll be able to see how their opinions with a book align with broader public reactions, and even engage in discussion and debate on a global scale.

Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric says:

“Social commentary and public opinion are now firmly ensconced in our online world. Yet many of these interactions, even where they relate to something specific like a particular book, remain dispersed and time-consuming to identify. We see the release of Badges for Books as a great opportunity to apply our technology to enable reading to be a more interactive and social experience, not just in the academic sphere, but increasingly in everyday life as well. Imagine a world where you can not only share your immediate reactions from reading, but understand how they resonate within a wider conversation. It’s fascinating.”

To find out more about this news, you can follow the Altmetric team on Twitter.

The post Announcing Badges for Books from Altmetric: New Technology Opening up Reading as a Social and Sharable Experience appeared first on Digital Science.

Overleaf and Bookmetrix, the joint project between Altmetric and Springer, have both been announced as finalists in the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2015!

The ALPSP awards are open to any new development, product, service, launch or project which is both innovative and of significant value to the scholarly communication arena. In order to win finalists must demonstrate excellence in terms of originality and innovation, significance and value to the community, utility and long-term viability.

Overleaf is the new collaborative writing and publishing system from the team behind writeLaTeX. Bookmetrix is essentially “altmetrics for books” and has been rolled out across Springer’s entire library, offering authors and publishers new insights into how their books are being discussed, cited, and used.

The full list of finalists is as follows:

• Bookmetrix
• CHORUS
• eLife Lens
• Impact Vizor
• JSTOR Daily
• Kudos
• Overleaf
• RightFind XML for Mining
• The Xvolution board game

Chair of the judging panel, Richard Gedye, observed:

‘Scholarly publishing provides an increasingly complex service and this was reflected in the quality of this year’s submissions.  After careful consideration, the panel has selected a shortlist which they believe includes some of the most innovative projects and services today.’

Audrey McCulloch, Chief Executive of ALPSP noted:

‘The ALPSP Awards allow us to shine the spotlight on some of the best new initiatives in our industry and demonstrate how rapidly publishing is evolving in line with the needs of today’s scholarly community.’

The finalists will be given the opportunity to showcase their products in a rapid fire session at the ALPSP Conference on Wednesday 9 September. The winners will then be announced at the Conference Awards Dinner on Thursday 10 September.

Good luck to all those nominated!

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Altmetric has developed an exciting new platform, Bookmetrix, to provide title and chapter level metrics for all of Springer‘s books, nearly 180,000 titles in total. The Bookmetrix data is displayed on SpringerLink’s book pages and reports how often an individual book or chapter is mentioned, shared, reviewed or read online. Updated in real-time, the data aims to provide valuable insights into the broader impacts and dissemination of Springer’s books and their individual chapters.

“We’re very researcher focused and soon found that Springer was too, which made it easy to work together on Bookmetrix. It’s a unique platform and we’re keen to set a new standard for following a book’s progress after publication.” – Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric

Bookmetrix, which is also available via Papers, the reference manager, provides a detailed book overview page, made up of 5 tabs: citations, online mentions, readers, reviews, downloads.

• The Citations tab shows the number of citations on both book and chapter level, based on CrossRef data.
• The Mentions tab uses Altmetric data to show users how the book/chapter has been discussed, mentioned or shared in online sources including public policy documents, mainstream news outlets, blogs, and a variety of social networks.
• The Readers tab offers information on how many people have saved the book/chapter in their Reference Manager, including their country of origin and occupation.
• The Reviews tab displays excerpts of book reviews known to Springer.
• The Downloads tab displays both the monthly and total download figures for the book/chapter as recorded via Springerlink.

“Bookmetrix will change the way we look at books. We really wanted to create a place for our authors and editors that collates all possible book metrics in one place.” – Martijn Roelandse, Manager Publishing Innovation at Springer

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