Publishing in Open Access increases usage and has no effect on book sales
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Publishing in Open Access increases usage and has no effect on book sales
Utrecht 23 Oct. 2013 - Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably. This is one of the conclusions of OAPEN-NL, a project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands. OAPEN-NL’s final report, published yesterday, gives recommendations for research funders, libraries, publishers and authors.
OAPEN-NL
OAPEN-NL builds on the European OAPEN-project which was set up to gain experience with Open Access publishing of academic books. OAPEN-NL was supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and the Ministry of OCW via the National PRIMA-subsidy program. The project was conducted by OAPEN Foundation, in collaboration with NWO, SURF and nine academic publishers.
Sales, use and impact of Open Access books
In total 50 academic books were published in Open Access with subsidy from NWO. For every Open Access title, the publishers provided a similar title that was published in the conventional way for comparison. Research showed that publishing in Open Access had no effect whatever on the sale of books. The publisher’s fear that book sales would decline if publications would be available in Open Access, was unfounded. However, online usage of books in Open Access increased considerably as did online discovery of these books. Although online usage increased, this did not (yet) lead to an increase of citations in the research timeframe.
The final report contains a large amount of recommendations to improve Open Access for monographs, aimed at all stakeholders in academic book publishing. OAPEN-NL’s research report was presented during OAPEN’s final seminar ‘Open Access for academic books in the Netherlands’.
Costs of Open Access books
OAPEN-NL also gathered data of all 50 books to get an insight in the costs related to publishing academic books. Based on this research, publishing a monograph in the Netherlands costs an average of € 12,000. Roughly half of these costs are for the Open Access edition. Remaining costs regard printing and disseminating the paper version. These results are important for the funding of Open Access monographs in the Netherlands.
Open Access publishing model
It has become increasingly difficult for researchers in the humanities and social sciences to publish monographs. Libraries worldwide struggle with diminishing budgets for acquiring monographs, which has led to a steady decline of book sales. In the Open Access publishing model publishers receive a refund for making an Open Access version freely available online. In addition the book can still be sold in other editions. In the OAPEN-NL project NWO paid for the costs of the Open Access edition. By paying for Open Access publication charges research funders can improve the dissemination of research results.
More information
You can download the report ‘OAPEN-NL A project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands’ from the web sites of OAPEN and SURF.
OAPEN-NL project documentation is available at www.oapen.nl. All books can be found in OAPEN Library www.oapen.org.
For more information please contact Eelco Ferwerda:
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OAPEN and KU partner to deliver new Open Access books
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OAPEN and KU partner to deliver new Open Access books
Knowledge Unlatched and OAPEN are pleased to announce that they are partnering to deliver the KU Pilot Collection.
The collection includes 28 new books from 13 recognized scholarly publishers: Amsterdam University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Brill, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Duke University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press, Purdue University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press and University of Michigan Press.
The Pilot is the first step in creating a sustainable route to open access for large numbers of scholarly books.
The KU model is based on libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single ‘Title Fee’ to publishers, in return for books being made available as a fully downloadable PDF via OAPEN on a CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND license immediately upon publication.
Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each book declines.
More information about the KU pilot can be found by visiting: www.knowledgeunlatched.org
Newsletter September 2013
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A new collaboration to strengthen OA monograph publishing
OAPEN and OpenEdition, two European projects dedicated to Open Access publishing in the humanities and social sciences, are pleased to announce their collaboration to strengthen Open Access monograph publishing.
Services for Open Access books
OpenEdition is a publishing platform developing a sustainable model for Open Access publishing: OpenEdition Freemium. OAPEN offers deposit and discovery services to Open Access monographs, through the OAPEN Library and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). OAPEN and OpenEdition now work together to provide their members with the benefits of each other’s services.
Joint stand at Frankfurt Book Fair
Meet us at the Frankfurt Book Fair, october 8-12 2013. OpenEdition and OAPEN share the stand F91 in Hall 4.2 S.
About OAPEN
OAPEN Foundation is dedicated to Open Access for peer reviewed books. OAPEN Library (www.oapen.org) is a deposit service for the full text dissemination of Open Access books and provides services to publishers and libraries regarding quality control, deposit and discovery. In addition, OAPEN manages the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, www.doabooks.org), a discovery service for OA books modelled after the DOAJ.
About OpenEdition
OpenEdition (www.openedition.org) serves the humanities and social sciences research communities through four publication and information platforms: OpenEdition Books (books series), Revues.org (scientific journals), Hypotheses (research blogs), Calenda (academic announcements). Since 2011, OpenEdition is complemented by a Freemium programme addressing libraries’ specific needs in a variety of formats and services. OpenEdition is developed by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing (CLEO), a non-profit public initiative promoting Open Access academic publishing, with the support of the main French research institutions: the Bibliothèque scientifique numérique (BSN), the Centre National de la Recherche scientifique (CNRS), Aix-Marseille University (AMU), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Avignon University.
Oxford University Press joins the OAPEN-UK pilot
Oxford University Press (OUP) is participating in OAPEN-UK, a pilot funded by JISC Collections and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to gather evidence on the viability of OA monographs in the humanities and social sciences. OUP is taking part in the final year of the trial, from September 2013 – September 2014.
How the pilot works
OAPEN-UK works by matching pairs of monographs which are similar in subject area, predicted sales, extent and publication date, and then publishing one open access and the other in the conventional manner, as a control. The titles randomly selected to be open access have been made freely available as PDF on Oxford Scholarship Online, the OAPEN Library, and on Google Books. These PDFs are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence (CC-BY-NC-ND). In addition, these titles continue to be sold and marketed in the normal way (customers can still purchase print copies or ebooks, for example). The control titles are not made open access and are simply sold, marketed and distributed in the traditional manner.
You can find the titles in the OAPEN Library here. More information can be found here.
Dutch seminar "Open Access voor wetenschappelijke boeken in Nederland - Praktijkervaringen in het kader van het project OAPEN-NL"
OAPEN and SURF invite you to the seminar Open Access voor wetenschappelijke boeken in Nederland, held on Tuesday 22 October, during the Open Access Week 2013.
- Where: SURF: Hojel City Center, gebouw D, Graadt van Roggenweg 340, Utrecht
- When: Tuesday 22 October, 13.00 to 17.30
In this - Dutch spoken - seminar, the latest experiences with publishing monographs in Open Access will be discussed. Proessor Dr. Wiljan van den Akker - Dean of Utrecht University - will speak about his experiences, the results of the OAPEN-NL project will be presented plus a panel discussion on the future of Open Access publishing of Open Access monographs.
OAPEN-NL project
The OAPEN-NL project was set up to learn about Open Access publishing of monographs in the Netherlands. Supported by NWO and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the pilot funded the publishing of 50 OA monographs by nine publishers. These titles were compared to a control group of similar scholarly books, published in a conventional manner. This has given insight into rhe effect of Open Access publishing on sales and usage. During the seminar, the results will be discussed in further detail and the final report will be presented.
Registration
To join the seminar, please use the registration form.
ONIX 3.0 metadata available
The ONIX for Books Product Information Message is the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form. Release 3.0 is a major new version of the ONIX for Books standard, the first since 2001 that is not backwards-compatible with its predecessors. To enable sharing information with all partners, the OAPEN Library now also contains a metadata feed in ONIX 3.0. Also, the older version - ONIX 2.1 - remains available.
All OAPEN metadata feeds are available under a CC0 1.0 license.
You can access the metadata feed here.
More Articles...
- OAPEN Newsletter - June 2013
- OAPEN Newsletter - May 2013
- Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference
- OAPEN Newsletter - March 2013
- OAPEN Newsletter - January 2013
- OAPEN Newsletter - December 2012
- OAPEN Newsletter - September 2012
- OAPEN Newsletter - May 2012
- DOAB is launched
- DOAB Press release