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”.

A commitment to finding new ways of sharing monographs drives the development of Path to Open.”

Sarah McKee

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

The post New path opens up support for humanities in OA publishing appeared first on Digital Science.

To celebrate the world of books, colleagues at Digital Science have shared their recommendations and reviews of books that have interested and inspired them over summer.

Currently reading The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan, which takes a sweeping look at the ways humanity and climate change have impacted each other (leading to development and demise) over time.

—Heather Luciano

Review: Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age by Susie Alegre.

Strolling through St Pancras Station, London waiting on my train, I popped into a bookshop looking for a specific title. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t have the obscure book I wanted, so I perused a bit more. Two addictions consume my life: tea and books. If I go into either type of store, I never walk out empty handed. I left with Freedom to Think.

“Human rights law guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, belief and opinion….” This book lays out the laws to the educated reader giving us the words to understand and speak about our most sacred freedom.

Alegre illuminates the art of mind control by what is and is not done to people. Like learning to paint – you must think as much about what is there as what is not – the negative space created to poignantly focus the observer. Through human-developed algorithms and strategize investments with little legal oversight, humanity is threatened as much by what we see as what we are excluded from seeing.

“Freedom of thought is about the space to think before you share.” We need that space. But no one will give it to us; it must be claimed for ourselves.

Give this book a think.

—Leslie McIntosh

If you’re looking for creepy but not gruesome, I recommend T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places. I also just finished her book A House with Good Bones but didn’t find it as hauntingly bizarre.

—Sara Gonzalez

I read Munroe Bergdorf’s autobiography, Transitional. Bergdorf is one of the very few transgender PoC fashion models (among many other things she does). She has been the campaign face for L’Oreal (before they sacked her for political posts on Instagram in 2017). The book is less about being transgender and more about what she learned on her journey. About racism, equality, being in the spotlight of public attention and finally purpose in life: “Nowhere feels like home when it’s you that you’re running from.”

—Sasha Gӧbbels

Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean.

I started a book club with other East Asian women to explore Asian history and Asian authors. My favorite this year is The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, who is a biracial autistic woman. It features Devon, a member of a secretive humanoid species/society that subsists on physically consuming books, while retaining the knowledge within. However, she gives birth to a son who has a mutation that makes him prefer human brains instead of books. We follow her struggle to help and protect him. The result is a riveting mashup of science fiction, fantasy, horror with an undercurrent of Margaret Atwood.

—Jamie Liu

Review: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

Great book for puzzle and mystery fans, this is a compelling story within a story. An editor receives a famous author’s latest manuscript and she expects all will be the same as his previous award winning books. But all is not the same in the book, nor in her life, after receiving the manuscript minus the last chapter. What happened to the last chapter? The book weaves in and out of the first story and the ‘book within the book’, and although the story in the manuscript is a traditional British Manor Murder Mystery, reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, the detective Atticus Pünd solves mysteries in his own unique way.

This is a clever book with great twists and a beautiful voice. Best of all, the ending is completely unexpected. Great fun.

—Carola Blackwood

Currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass. Beautifully written nonfiction which explores the intersections of Indigenous knowledge and plant science. Lots of food for thought for those interested in the culture of science!

Also recommend The Priory of the Orange Tree if you like things with dragons.

—Emily Alagha

I recently finished bell hooks’ The Will to Change, which I recommend to anybody wanting a more complete critical approach to understanding patriarchy and its effects. That it is a book written with love and care, and is in hooks’ unique and inviting colloquial style, makes her argument all the more impactful: though men have clear rewards in patriarchy, we are all ultimately its victims and must attend to the role we all play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture.

—Adrien De Sutter

Review: The Colony by Audrey Magee.

I was fascinated by the premise of this book, which on the one hand was a slightly odd tale of two outsiders spending the summer on a remote Irish island, but was also intertwined with the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s as well as offering an allegory of the impact of colonial rule. Not only does the author create fascinating narratives on all these levels, she also manages to build tension through a slow burn of a plot, portraying very real characters as well as a wicked dark humour. All this combined to offer a very rich reading experience with a heartbreaking ending to boot. Very highly recommended.

—Simon Linacre

Currently in the middle of two books – first is Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns. I’m “In the middle of” because the dead tree edition hasn’t arrived yet, but can’t help but read ahead in the ePub. Picked this up ‘cos I’ve been following Heather’s engaging posts on the birdsite. Nearly finished The Malevolent Seven by Sebastien de Castell ‘cos I’m a sucker for catchy titles – it’s (absolutely not!) beardy wizard fantasy stuff, but needed something to while away the hours as a recent guest at the Royal Infirmary. A fun read!

—Jamie MacIsaac

Review: Lark Ascending by Silas House.

In Lark Ascending, Silas House strikes a poignant balance between hope and grief over the state of the world (present and future). It’s a dystopian tale but not a sci-fi one, featuring a heartbreaking queer love story and one of the best dog characters ever written. Left me with lots of feelings and lots to think about – as have House’s other novels. I‘ve been reading a lot of what might loosely fall into the genre of ‘climate fiction’ over the past few years, and this one really stands out.

—Lisa Curtin

On my list (for a very summer-fiction entry) is the recently published Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo.

—Tyler Ruse

Having also watched (and survived) Oppenheimer, Eve of Destruction is on my list. Might be grim summer reading though!

—Niall Cunniffe

For a lighter read this summer I went with The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. A great book for the beach or downtime during the summer.

—Shannon Davis

The post What are YOU reading? Top recommendations and reviews from Digital Science appeared first on Digital Science.

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.

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.

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.”

Christina Drummond

OA Book Usage Data Trust

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.

…while there’s paper, there will always be hybrid.”

Victoria Tsoukala

European Commission

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.

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.”

Mike Taylor

Head of Data Insights & Customer Analytics | Digital Science

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.

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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

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The State of Open Monographs looks at the open monograph landscape in 2019. Analysis from industry experts includes how we value and understand the monograph, their impact and role 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.

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 recognise the value that monographs contribute to scholarship, and that they fund the move towards open access at an appropriately sustainable rate.

Mike Taylor, Head of Metrics Development, 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.”

The report contributions include:

Foreword

Michael Elliott, Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University

Main Authors

Sara Grimme, Cathy Holland, Peter Potter, Mike Taylor, Charles Watkinson

Download the full report here

Notes for editors:

About Digital Science

Digital Science is a technology company working to make research more efficient. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open and effective. Our portfolio includes admired brands including Altmetric, Anywhere Access, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI Claims, GRID, Overleaf, CC Technology, Writefull, Gigantum and Ripeta. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Visit www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.

Media contact

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: Mobile +61 447 783 023, d.ellis@digital-science.com

The post The State of Open Monographs 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

The post The state of open monographs: Impact, challenges & opportunities appeared first on Digital Science.

25 April 2016, London, UK — Altmetric today announce the launch of Altmetric Badges for Books, enabling publishers to provide an at-a-glance summary of the online attention a published book and it’s individual chapters have received.

Now available on content that is identified by ISBN (International Standard Book Number), the distinctive Altmetric donut badges and associated details page provide authors, editors and readers with a real-time record of mentions from mainstream media, public policy documents, online reference managers, blogs, social media, and post-publication peer review platforms.

Designed to be embedded in book and chapter pages on publisher websites and other content-hosting platforms, readers are able to click on the badges to view the Altmetric details page, which provides a collated record of all of the online mentions. The service will launch on the Taylor & Francis Routledge Handbooks Online platform.

Routledge Handbooks Online brings together the world’s leading scholars to provide a cutting-edge overview of classic and current research and future trends in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Covering topics as disparate as archaeology, law, climate change, politics, religion and tourism, the handbooks span an exceptional list of books by many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last 100 years.

David Cox, Director of Digital Products at Taylor & Francis, says “Altmetric badges for book content is something I’m really excited about. Users are telling us that traditional scholarly measures of impact are not enough any more, and Badges for Books will mean that we are able to address that need by exposing more of the attention and engagement that content of all types gets. With the display of badges for books and chapters, we believe the users of Routledge Handbooks Online will find it easier to make informed decisions about what to read.”

Altmetric Founder Euan Adie adds “We see the release of Badges for Books as a great opportunity to apply our technology to help authors, editors and readers to more easily discover how a book is being received, to get credit for their work, and to better engage with a wider audience. Imagine a world where you can not only see immediate reactions from readers, but understand how their responses resonate amongst the global community. It’s fascinating.”

Altmetric badges for books are now available to all publishers, and the badges will be live on the Taylor & Francis platform in May.

About Altmetric

Altmetric was founded in 2011 and has made it a mission to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature. Altmetric tracks what people are saying about research outputs online and works with some of the biggest publishers, funders, and institutions around the world to deliver this data in an accessible and reliable format. Altmetric is supported by Digital Science. Visit https://www.altmetric.com for more information.

About Taylor & Francis Group

Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine.

From our network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues. Visit Taylor & Francis Group for more information.

Media contact

David Ellis, Press, PR & Social Manager, Digital Science: Mobile +61 447 783 023, d.ellis@digital-science.com

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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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