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OA Week 2020 Interview: the Dutch Research Council (NWO) funding for Open Access Books

The OAPEN Library is a partner of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and provides a quality hosting environment for all peer-reviewed academic books, book chapters and collected volumes which are the result of or report on research funded partly or in whole by NWO and are primarily aimed at an academic reading audience.

The interview below discusses the new funding scheme for Open Access books introduced by the NWO in June 2020. The first two books financed through this new funding scheme can be found on the OAPEN Library:

Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down : Revolutions and Labour Relations in Global Historical Perspective; Brill; https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42483

The Journeys of a Taymiyyan Sufi : Sufism through the Eyes of ʿImād al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Wāsiṭī (d. 711/1311); Brill; https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42527

An overview of all 89 NWO-funded Open Access books can be found here.

This interview is a cross-post from the interview posted on the Open Access Books Network on October 21st 2020 which can be found here.

 

Start of interview

Amidst a year filled with turmoil and change, the International Open Access Week makes it annual return (19-26 October). Its theme is ‘Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity & Inclusion’. As part of Open Access week the Open Access Books Network (OABN) would like to zoom in on a few developments in the open access books world through a series of interviews. As part of this second interview Agata Morka (OABN) spoke with Hans de Jonge (Dutch Research Council, NWO) to learn more about their recently announced funding scheme for open access books.

Agata Morka (OABN), Hans de Jonge (Dutch Research Council, NWO), October 2020

As part of the OA week we want to focus on developments in OA books; could you give us a short overview of your initiative in 2-3 sentences as an introduction?

At the Dutch Research Council NWO we have recently launched a dedicated funding scheme for Open Access Books. It is part of our strategy to step up our efforts for Open Access and Open Science in general.

How would you describe your initiative to someone who knew nothing about it?

At NWO we are deeply committed to making sure the results of our funding are made openly available. Open Access to journal articles have over the years become an established practice. For NWO in 2019 around 68% of all scholarly papers are openly available. The transition to Open Access for academic books has been much slower, which carries the risk of leaving disciplines behind for which the book is (and hopefully will remain) an essential means of scholarly communication. In the Netherlands around 40% of scholarly output in social sciences and humanities has a “bookish” format. NWO wants to contribute to making sure that at least the part of those books that are the result of NWO research funding will become available in Open Access. That’s why we have launched a new funding scheme for Open Access books.

What is the main goal/ambition of the project and why?

It is becoming increasingly clear that Open Access has the same benefits for scholarly books and monographs as for scientific papers. Open Access books are more findable, are downloaded more, are cited more and have a much wider readership than non-OA books. Unlike in countries such as the UK, where we have seen a series of very inspiring reports, there has not been much debate about Open Access books in the Netherlands. Only recently it was stated in the National Plan on Open Science (NPOS) that the aim is to extend Open Access to academic books and other formats. Together with colleagues Eelco Ferwerda, Jeroen Sondervan and Astrid van Wesenbeek we prepared a note for the NPOS. In our view the reason why Open Access books are lagging behind is: (1) a lack of policies (it is not clear whether books are in or out of scope of existing OA policies in the Netherlands), (2) a lack of funding and (3) persistent misconceptions about Open Access and a clear need to communicate about the benefits of Open Access for books. With the new Open Access book fund, NWO wants to contribute to help solve the funding problem. But we also updated our OA policies with regard to books as part of our new Plan S compliant OA policy. It is now crystal clear that we expect books that are the result of project funding by NWO awarded from January 1 2021 onwards to be made Open Access, either by publishing in Open Access or by taking the repository route (also known as ‘Green’ OA). We have partnered with the OAPEN-library so that it will become our dedicated Open Access book repository for this purpose.

What is the biggest problem you are trying to solve and how?

NWO has always allowed its grantees to use (part of) their grant money to pay for open access fees. This also includes possible book processing fees charged by publishers. The problem, however, is that very often books are long in the making and often will only get published a significant period of time after the NWO research project has ended. This effectively makes it impossible to use our grant money. The new Open Access book fund wants to solve that problem by providing post-project funding for books that are the result of NWO funding.

What one thing would best help you achieve your goal?

In developing this new funding instrument I have been very fortunate to have received the help and advice of many in the Open Access book community. Experts from the Netherlands like Eelco Ferwerda and Jeroen Sondervan, but also from sister councils in Austria (FWF) and Switzerland (SNSF) where similar funding instruments have been developed in recent years. And also the contacts with some of the commercial book publishers in preparing this funding instrument have been very inspiring.

As an organization how do you respond to this year’s OA week theme, ‘Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion’?

Last year I attended the OASPA conference in Copenhagen where these issues were brought forward very prominently by Professor Sarita Albagli. Her presentation has made a big impression on me. Also, as members of cOAlition S NWO is of course very well aware of the critique around the APC-based business models that have come up in the West. And although I think cOAlition S has genuinely tried to be as agnostic as possible as regards business models, I do understand the critique from parts of the world where alternative, very well-functioning and most probably also more equitable models have been developed. I am glad that, together with Science Europe, cOAlition S has now taken the step to commission a study on these alternative Diamond business models. I hope this will lead to a better understanding and ultimately to more equitable and inclusive OA business models.

What question do you wish we had asked but didn’t, and why

Where does your passion for Open Access come from?

One of the things that made the biggest impact on me when I graduated and started my working life outside of the university some 20 years ago was the inability to access scholarly literature. From one day to the other suddenly my library pass was blocked and I couldn’t access the vast digital (and physical) collections to which I had become accustomed. Frustration about this grew over time as I worked as policy advisor at several organisations that just couldn’t afford access. It’s simply absurd working as a policy advisor in higher education but not being able to access the most recent papers on the topic you are working on. I found my way around it obviously, as we all do. But I am very thankful from my current position to be able to contribute towards opening up all the research that is being done in the Netherlands!

End of interview

Scholar-led open access book publishing in Linguistics – an interview with Language Science Press

Language Science Press (LangSci) is a scholarly-led open access book publisher in Linguistics. Initiated in 2012 by academics for academics, the press fully embraces new publishing possibilities and offers open access book publishing to its authors, free of any charges. Rooted within the field and with an active and involved researcher community, LangSci has published well over 120 open access books thus far and continues to publish around 30 books per annum. To learn more about the press and its approach to open access book publishing, we spoke with Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff.

Tom Mosterd (OAPEN), Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff (Language Science Press), September 2020

 

Where did the idea of starting an own press come from?

A couple of linguists connected to the Freie Universität Berlin (Stefan Müller, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Adele Goldberg, Thomas Herbst) met in 2012 and discussed that scholarly books were absurdly expensive and that things could not continue like that any longer. Everyone had their own share of ludicrous experiences with legacy publishers. This fell in the same time as the call to action by Tim Gower in “The cost of knowledge”.

So the idea of setting up a scholar-led press was born. At the same time, Martin Haspelmath at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was thinking about the same issues, and so Stefan Müller and Martin Haspelmath jointly submitted a proposal to the German Research Foundation (DFG). That proposal was granted, and the rest is history.

 

It has been 8 years since the initial idea and 6 since it has been put in practice, how is the response from Linguistics communities?

Linguists are very enthusiastic about open access in general, as is shown by the Lingua->Glossa transition for instance. As a publisher, we do not have to convince authors that open access is a good thing; the authors demand open access. I suspect that this has to do with many linguists working with languages from economically disadvantaged regions in the Global South or elsewhere, and they have first hand experience of the prohibitive prices for accessing scholarly literature.

We started with 7 series in 2014 (phonology, typology, syntax, …) and have now grown to 25 series, extending to more and more subfields of linguistics, such as phraseology or Romance linguistics. For all of these series, the initiatives came from resarchers from those fields, not from the publisher.

We have a list of public endorsers, which stands at 1068 as of today, and we have around 400 volunteers who help with proofreading. Uptake varies between subfields, but for certain subfields, LangSci is on its way to becoming the publisher of choice, and the question is no longer “Why should I publish with LangSci?”, but rather “How could I not publish with LangSci?”

Our latest title ”Syntactic architecture and its consequences” is a three-volume collection of 62 papers by over 80 scholars in generative syntax, basically the all-time all-star team of that field, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Jonathan Bobaljik and Artemis Alexiadou. So, to answer the question: it seems fair to say that the response from the community has been overwhelming.

 

How does Language Science Press differ from a non-scholarly led press?

We do things researchers need, and we do not do things they do not need.

Researchers sometimes need only one chapter of a book, sometimes they need the whole book, so we provide PDF files both for chapters and for the whole book. This is something which sounds completely trivial, yet the legacy publishers somehow have not managed to cater to this need – and don’t get me started on embedded pdf viewers!

We have a very lean setup. We have no marketing department, no invoicing department and no storage since we don’t have to do any marketing, invoicing or storage. Since we do not charge readers, we can have very lean IT, no paywalls and no legal department. We do not have acquisition editors who are jet-setting across the world to visit all conferences in order to attract new authors since the authors are from within our very own community anyways.

People often ask:
“How many people are working for LangSci to produce 30 books a year?”

This is an interesting question. The bulk of the work is obviously being done by the researchers, so that is 30+, but this would be true for all other publishers as well, so let’s discount that. Then, we have 2 salaried positions at 50%, so that is 1.0 full-time equivalent. But then we also have 57 series editors, over 400 editorial board members and close to 400 volunteer proofreaders who also contribute their time as a service to the community.

This involvement of the community, the fact that linguists got their act together and got organized, is really what sets LangSci apart from other publishers.

 

What is the business model and how do you financially sustain the press?

We have no charges for readers and we have no charges for authors. We are financed by a network of 100+ institutions worldwide, ranging from the University of Stockholm to MIT. These institutions jointly finance LangSci as a platform. They commit to giving 1000 EUR per year for a period of three years. If we fulfill their expectations, they are likely to renew, otherwise they will most likely not participate in the next funding round.

We disclose our business data as far as possible. This means our revenues and our expenses are detailed in a blog post, normally in January, so that people can see where the money comes from and where it goes. LangSci is a “gemeinnützige UG”, ie a non-profit, so our profit margin has to be 0% by law. We do not have to satisfy the demands of shareholders for return on investment, we only have to satisfy the needs of the scientists.

 

Is there anything you would like to share with like-minded people who may be contemplating starting a similar initiative?

Aim high. Signal prestige.
Make clear that you will not just publish anything, only the very best content. Quality begets quality. If you start low, you will get shoddy submissions; if you start high, you will get great submissions

KEEP THE BRAND.
Make sure to get legal counsel on how you can protect the scholar-owned brand you will create. There are numerous cases of scholar-led projects where the brand rights ended up in the commercial sector because the academics couldn’t care less about this issue. This is the most important thing. DO NOT GIVE AWAY THE BRAND YOU ESTABLISH.

 

Where is LangSci headed within the next couple of years?

We are in the renewals phase for the next funding round 2021-23. We need 115 institutions until November, of which we have about two thirds right now. We think that we should be able to convince all those institutions of the quality of our initiative, but it will still require some work, by us and by our supporters.

We will probably get a couple more series, and we might go from 30 books to 40 books per year or so. How growth can be managed within a non-profit scholar-led initiative is a very interesting question, where a very vibrant discussion is still ongoing.

End of interview

In 2018 Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff published a ‘’Cookbook for Open Access books’’, describing the experiences of setting up a community-based publisher. The book can be accessed here.

To learn more about Language Science Press, their titles, or the current renewal campaign have a look at https://langsci-press.org, https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/language-science-press or contact Dr. Sebastian Nordhoff at sebastian.nordhoff@langsci-press.org

OAPEN open access books toolkit

 

In June 2020 OAPEN announced the development of an open access books toolkit: an open and easy to use toolkit to help authors better understand and trust open access book publishing.

 

Editorial Advisory Board

Over the past months, work on a community-built open access books toolkit continued and we are pleased to introduce the Editorial Advisory Board. This Board is a global and multi-stakeholder group, including authors, publishers, research support staff, funders and other key stakeholders:

 

Editorial Advisory Board Members

Andrew Joseph, Digital Publisher, Wits University Press

Christina Emery, Open Access Books Marketing Manager, Springer Nature

Claire Redhead, Executive Director, OASPA

Dylan Law, Head of Cultural Value and Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, UKRI AHRC

Eelco Ferwerda, Director, DOAB Foundation & OAPEN Foundation

Graham Stone, Senior Programme Manager Open Access Monographs, Jisc

Hannah Hope, Open Research Coordinator, Wellcome Trust

Jan Bergstra, Guest Researcher, University of Amsterdam

Jeroen Sondervan, Project Leader Open Access & Open Science Programme, Utrecht University

Kevin Hawkins, Assistant Dean Scholarly Communications & Interim Head, University of North Texas

Koen Leurs, Assistant Professor Media & Culture, Utrecht University

Lucy Barnes, Editor, Open Book Publishers

Lucy Montgomery, Assistant Professor Internet Studies, Curtin University

Margo Bargheer, Head of Electronic Publishing, Göttingen University Press

Mithu Lucraft, Marketing Director Open Research, Springer Nature

Ros Pyne, Director Open Access Books, Springer Nature

Sotiria Psoma, University Lecturer BioScience and Technology, The Open University

Tom Mosterd, Community Manager, DOAB Foundation & OAPEN Foundation

Valerie McCutcheon, Research Information Manager, Glasgow University

 

Schedule & launch

By now, the Editorial Advisory Board has collectively written 42 articles, as the collaborative writing phase for the toolkit is coming to a close.

Over the summer, the toolkit website will be further developed and additional reviews shall take place for the toolkit and its contents. We look forward to sharing this new public resource with you shortly after the summer. 

If you would like to stay informed and receive project updates about the toolkit, please sign up to the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit newsletter here.

OAPEN-Springer Nature Interview on the occasion of reaching 1000 OA books: Part 2

This is the second part of this interview, to read the first part please click here .

Eelco Ferwerda, Ros Pyne, May 2020

Looking back over the last ten years or so, what have been the important developments for books to become OA?

I expect the answer to this could take up a whole interview in itself!

To name just a few – the early experiments coordinated by OAPEN in the Netherlands, the UK, and Switzerland were important in encouraging publishers to experiment with OA for books, and in providing early insights into OA book models. OAPEN and the DOAB continue to play a crucial role both as a central point of discovery for open access books, and, through their peer review requirement, in helping to maintain standards and provide reassurance as to the quality of OA books.

The Wellcome Trust was one of the first big funders to explicitly support and fund OA for books, and their policy and related advocacy has, I’m sure, been influential in persuading many publishers to offer OA book options. The TOME initiative to fund OA monographs in the US has also been important in raising awareness in a region in which authors tend to be more cautious about OA.

I think we at Springer Nature have also played a part here, through our sustained commitment to OA books over the last nine years and our growing programme, and through our research into the benefits of OA for books.

So, now let’s try to look into the future…

First of all, do you think academic books will remain an important part of scholarly output in certain disciplines? Do you think our perception of academic books are changing, or likely to change in the next few years? Why is open access for books important?

I’m convinced that scholarly books will continue to be the pre-eminent mode of communicating research and thought for many disciplines. The world is multifaceted and interconnected, and increasingly globalised. Books allow complexity and depth for solutions: a monograph allows the space to fully explore and contextualize a topic that short-form outputs can’t provide, and that won’t change. Opening up access to monographs allows many more readers worldwide to access the important research published in them.

Looking at the portfolio of Springer Nature, can you give us an idea of the relative importance of books? Is it changing?

At Springer Nature, we are strongly committed to books: they have always been the backbone of the company, and this will not change. What has already changed, though, is our interpretation of what is essential about a book and how we can develop it further to benefit authors and readers. We use our innovation and expertise to help shape the future of books.

What is the current growth rate of OA books, how does that compare to articles, do you see books catching up? Where do you see the growth coming from, in terms of types of books, funding sources?

We’re certainly seeing strong growth in OA books – we published 30% more OA books in 2019 compared with 2018. It’s difficult to meaningfully compare growth rates, given that books start from a much lower base than journals and that, as your question suggests, we see very different trends and growth by region and by country.

Funder policies influence the trends: we’ve seen a big increase in the number of OA books we published by authors based in Switzerland since the SNSF introduced their funding programme, for example. Authors from countries whose national funders already have OA books policies and a strong history of leading in the OA arena, such as the Netherlands and Austria, also feature prominently in our OA books programme. In the last couple of years there’s also been increasing interest from China and India.

The majority of our OA books are monographs and edited collections. This makes sense, as historically OA movements have focused on access to primary research. However, one of our aims is to offer an OA option for all types of scholarly book, and we continue to expand the options we offer our authors: earlier this year we started offering OA for major reference works for the first time.

In your opinion, what are the things that need to change, or happen, for OA books to become the mainstream model?

We know from our 2019 survey that authors are positive about an OA future for books. That’s a good start. We can still do more, though, to increase awareness and understanding of OA, especially amongst groups that are currently more sceptical, such as senior scholars and those based in North America. We also need to keep combatting misconceptions about quality and peer review; organisations like DOAB and OAPEN that set standards for acceptance play an important role here.

Research funders’ policies can be hugely influential in changing behaviours, so it’s good to see more of them turning their attention to OA for books: I’m sure the UKRI consultation and policy will have an impact. Alongside this, we know funding is a barrier, so from funders we will need not just mandates, but also the financial support to enable OA.

Finally, as OA for books becomes more mainstream, we will need better solutions for enabling authors based in low-income and lower-middle-income countries to publish open access.

We’ve seen for journals that making OA mainstream has required cooperation between publishers, institutions, funding bodies, and governments. I think ultimately the same will prove true for books.

What do you think the effect will be of the current pandemic? In terms of reading habits and the transition to OA?

The pandemic demonstrates the importance and benefits of open access to the research literature. Along with many other publishers, we have made all our research on SARS-CoV2, Covid-19, and related topics, including work in the humanities and social sciences, books as well as journals, freely available via our own website and the PubMed portal.

It will also be interesting to see if reading habits start to change as a result of scholars and students not having access to physical libraries for a long period of time. While journals have almost completely moved online, print books are still widely used and purchased alongside ebooks. But of course, right now few people can access those print books, and that could continue for months. In order to support learning for students who are away from libraries, we also made a set of Springer Nature textbooks freely available for several months, and we’ve seen great engagement. But all our OA books are already freely available to download and re-use in perpetuity. It seems likely there will be a faster transition to use of ebooks as a result of the current situation. Given that OA is inherently a digital concept, that move to e might also help with the move to OA.

Is it fun to work in this area?

I love it! It’s a good feeling to know that, in whatever small way, I’m contributing to making the world’s knowledge more accessible. I have a humanities background and I began my career in humanities and social sciences publishing; enabling open access for books supports those disciplines most of all, and that’s also important to me. Finally, there is a very special community of people working on open access books and that makes it an even more enjoyable area to work in.

OAPEN-Springer Nature Interview on the occasion of reaching 1000 OA books – Part 1

This interview will be published in two parts, we hope you enjoy reading the first part of this interview part 2 of this interview can be found here

Eelco Ferwerda, Ros Pyne, May 2020

Let’s start with taking a look at these first 1000 OA books. When did Springer Nature publish its first OA book?

Our first OA book was the conference proceedings Future Internet Assembly, published in 2011. At the same time Palgrave Macmillan participated in OAPEN-UK’s Matched Pairs Pilot, an early attempt to understand the impact of OA for books, in which we made some backlist titles available OA.

Both publishers – at that time still two separate companies – rolled out OA options across their monograph programmes in the following two years. In 2013, Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000, Palgrave’s first official OA book, was also the first OA book to be funded by the Wellcome Trust under their expanded OA policy.

What were the early challenges in setting up the OA books programme?

We had to look at every part of the book publishing process and consider how open access might affect it – and it did affect most of them! In the early days this meant publishing OA books required a lot of manual intervention.

To give a couple of examples of specific issues… Many authors early on had concerns that the APC/BPC model was tantamount to pay-to-publish; this misconception was particularly resonant amongst book authors because of the associations with ‘vanity publishing’. We had to demonstrate to authors that we were applying the same high standards and rigorous peer review to our OA books as we did for the rest of our books programme. We wanted to ensure that authors’ interest in OA would not prejudice reviewers’ expectations, so we put in place a guideline (which exists to this day) that external reviewers should not be informed if a book was to publish OA.

It’s always been fundamental to our approach to make our OA books as open and accessible as possible. One way in which we do this for our OA books is that we make every format of ebook that we offer (HTML, ePub, PDF, and MOBI for Kindle) available OA under a CC licence, in order to increase the opportunities for those books to be downloaded, shared, and re-used. I remember it being particularly complex to arrange free download of Amazon Kindle versions. We also realized we would have to mention open access in the blurb of the book, as Amazon and many other third-party providers did not have a place for us to indicate if a book was available OA.

Can you tell us something about your expectations when you started publishing OA books?

As a leading academic publisher, we always strive to be an innovative partner for our partners and authors. We launched our OA book programmes very much in the spirit of experimentation. We wanted to understand and learn from the reaction amongst the scholarly community, and start to seed interest in this new way of publishing.

Did you develop a long term plan for OA books?

We first started to seriously plan for the future of our OA books programme back in 2016. OA was starting to take off in the journals world in response to OA policies from major funders, Springer Nature had already signed its first transformative deals, and it was clear that academic publishing was on a trajectory towards open access. We wanted to play a part in ensuring that scholarly book authors could also benefit from this innovative publishing model and be part of the OA movement. We encouraged our commissioning editors to actively focus on signing more OA books, we invested in automating our internal OA books workflows so that we could scale up, and we started to think about how we could contribute to the policy discussions about OA books.

Over the years, Springer Nature has put a lot of effort in the OA books programme, doing research around usage, holding surveys among authors, introducing book metrics and retroactively adding DOIs to references. Can you tell us a bit about your motivations and goals?

Some of these developments, like our providing usage and citation stats for books and our inclusion of DOIs in references, are offered across our books programme and are not specific to our OA books. At Springer Nature we are firm advocates for the scholarly book and are always looking to improve our service to authors and readers and add value in the publication process.

We have run a number of research projects on OA books. These include our 2017 report The OA Effect, which found that our OA books achieve 7x more downloads, 50% more citations, and 10x more online mentions than our non OA books, and our 2019 survey, The Future of OA Books, which was the first to focus on the views of scholarly book authors on open access. We found that the majority of book authors think all scholarly books should be available OA, and that gold OA is their preferred model. We also have some exciting new research coming out later this year, developed with the COARD team at Curtin University, exploring the geographic usage of OA books.

Our core motivation in running these projects has been to increase the take-up of OA for books. When talking with researchers and policymakers about OA, it’s hugely powerful to be able to point to the download and citation benefits. Having a better understanding of researchers’ views about OA in the context of books helps us to shape our conversations with potential authors and also helps us understand what changes in the publishing and policy landscape might be needed to encourage more book authors to choose OA.

In keeping with the spirit of OA, it’s also been important to us that we’ve made our research freely available under a CC BY licence so that others in the OA books community can also benefit from it.

Which OA books are best represented in the list of 1000, and can you explain why? Can you see emerging trends in the OA books programme?

We publish OA books across a wide range of subject areas in both the humanities and social sciences (HSS) and science, technology and medicine (STM). We do see differences in the OA books portfolio: social sciences disciplines, as well as education, energy, environment and economics are particularly prominent there. Delving a bit deeper, we find topics and sub-disciplines aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) – development economics, sustainable development, climate change, renewable and green energy, migration and demography – are strongly represented in our OA books portfolio. Our 1000th OA book, which explores climate change as a public health emergency, is a great example.

Several of the OA books we’ve published on SDG topics have been very high-profile. Some recent highlights include The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment, which defines nine mountain priorities with a particular focus on climate change; Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement Goals, which was published in association with the Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation and explores the critical question of how we can achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050; and Climate-Smart Food, which follows an average day’s worth of food and drink to see where it comes from, how far it travels, and the carbon price we all pay for it, to help us make better decisions about the food we eat.

Can you see a change in authors’ attitudes towards OA books?

Absolutely. It’s often said that open access humanities and social science researchers, and therefore scholarly book authors, don’t understand or engage much with open access. But I’m not convinced this still holds. Our 2019 Future of OA Books survey found that the majority of book authors agreed that all future scholarly books (monographs or edited collections) should be made available via OA. I don’t think that would have been the case five years ago.

In our survey we also found that junior researchers, researchers based in Europe and Asia, and previous OA authors had a more positive attitude towards OA. This might point to generational change, and to the positive impact of funders’ OA policies (which have so far been concentrated in Europe).

Authors do still have concerns. One interesting finding was that authors were concerned about the perception of quality of OA books – that is, even if authors are themselves convinced that OA books can be of high quality, they are concerned that OA books might be perceived more negatively by others, and that it might affect promotion and tenure.

Overall, though, I’m very encouraged by the shift in attitudes that we’ve seen over the years. I think all of us in the scholarly communications community can play a role in helping to normalize OA for books and changing perceptions. At Springer Nature, we’ve tried to put out clear advice to authors – a recent blog explaining the basics of CC licences was a big hit – and of course our commissioning editors worldwide play a hugely important role in talking to book authors of the benefits of OA.

End of part 1, to continue reading part 2 please click here

‘Scaling small: the story behind ScholarLed’ – Part 2

Roundtable Conversation with ScholarLed – Part 2 of 2.
To read part 1 of this interview please click here

ScholarLed is a consortium of five scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers that was formed in 2018, consisting of Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. OAPEN recently added ScholarLed as a new collection of the OAPEN Library. Together, these 5 presses have already published 517 OA books, which makes it our second largest multi-publisher collection (Knowledge Unlatched being the largest). We invited the members of ScholarLed to join us for an online discussion about their collaboration.

 

Eelco: What are you after as a collective?

Gary (Open Humanities Press): For me this question raises a larger issue. What would success be for us? What would it look like?

The fields in which many of us work (critical theory, digital culture, networked media, STS etc.) have their roots in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). And while it’s certainly true we operate in different countries, one thing many of us have in common is that our respective political systems do not especially value work in HSS, much preferring STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) research, seeing it as being more in line with society’s requirements.

Let’s take as one of the many possible UK examples we can use to illustrate this, the infamous ‘Weirdos and Misfits’ blog/recruitment ad of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser and humanities graduate, Dominic Cummings. Here we find an explicit rejection of ‘English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties’ – a phrase we can read as being shorthand for those who are interested in abstract ideas to do with language, interpretation and critique. Instead, Cummings prioritizes supposedly more concrete subjects such as the kind of computer modeling and super-forecasting that is made possible by big data and artificial intelligence. Or, if a further example is needed, there’s this from Philip Augar (of the Theresa-May-commissioned Augar report fame). It’s taken from a piece published in the May-June 2020 issue of the Times Higher Education titled ‘It is Time to Face Up to the Reality of the Market’:

The Exchequer loses money on a third of all subjects studied by women and a quarter by men. The state writes off more on social studies subjects than on maths, computer science or engineering; more on communications and media studies than on agriculture and veterinary science; and more on creative arts than on any other subject…. Without challenging the intrinsic worth of any subject… there is a misalignment between the state subsidy and the economy’s needs.

Given this kind of political context – which is by no means untypical – we could say that one measure of success for us in ScholarLed is to be (still) doing what we’re doing. (At a time when Covid-19 is having a disproportionate impact on BAME communities, with black people four times more likely to die in England and Wales than white people according to the Office of National Statistics, and when there are protests across the world over the death in US police custody of George Floyd, and what all THAT says about reality and the economy’s needs, God forbid more people should have access to critical humanities and social science subjects.) But I’m aware that at Open Humanities Press we’ve long thought success would also be to get to a stage where, actually, we don’t need to do what we’re doing anymore. It would be to arrive at a point where enough other people are publishing open access books and journals of critical theory on a non-profit, scholar-led basis for us to be able to turn our attention elsewhere. That’s what we’re after as a collective: our own redundancy or obsolescence. (Just so long as it comes after that of Cummings and Augar.)

Vincent (Punctum Books): I think we are very much still discovering what we are after, but I think some contours are already becoming clear. We have no intention to grow or merge in any usual sense of the word. We are interested in finding ways in which we can share resources, knowledges, and infrastructures in such a way that everyone can keep doing their thing at their own pace.

Lucy (Open Book Publishers): Yes – the idea behind the collective isn’t to homogenise; it’s to preserve our different ways of working but finding ways to support each other in what we do. I think we also share the goal of making academic-led, non-profit publishers a more powerful voice within the academic and para-academic communities. It’s very frustrating to see many researchers look at the legacy presses and assume that is the only way to publish OA books, when we do it differently (and, we think, better!)

Julien (Mattering Press): Again, I think Janneke’s notion of scaling small encapsulates our aim beautifully. There is this idea in publishing and publicly-funded infrastructure projects that scale is crucial. Emphasising scale justifies homogenisation and in many cases, monopolisation. The latter is especially evident in attempts to establish one-stop platforms. Drawing on an ecological metaphor, we advocate for the diverse publishing landscapes that we believe are necessary to develop desirable knowledge infrastructures in response to radically uncertain futures. From a technological perspective, this requires a shift from platforms, that homogenise, to open infrastructures that enable small initiatives to operate effectively.

 

Eelco: Do you share a business model?

Vincent: Because we operate from different countries, the legal structures of the different presses are different. However, we all are public benefit corporations in a broad sense of the word: for each of us, making profit is subordinated to providing a public good.

Lucy: I think I’m right in saying that we all have a mixed funding model – for example, OBP’s primary sources of revenue are sales (of print and ebook editions), grants and donations, and our Library Membership programme.

Andreas (meson press): During our time at the Hybrid Publishing Lab, we researched various business models for the monograph publishing area. And although we gained some significant insights from this, at some point it was more important for us to get started and remain flexible. In a way, the decision to establish meson press as a cooperative was more important than a perfectly elaborated business model. With its principles such as democratic membership control, autonomy, independence, and the concern for community, the co-op perfectly fits our approach of building a network of scholars around the press(es).

Julien: Of course, we all strive to sustain ourselves. Still, there is also space for the question if business models are necessarily the right, never mind the only way to model infrastructure futures that primarily provide public goods. All academic publishers, after all, exploit the labour provided by public institutions such as libraries and universities. And the seemingly common-sense idea that we can model business at all is a relatively new notion that implies politics we might well choose to interrogate.

Eelco: What is the relationship with COPIM and OPERAS?

Lucy: So we are key partners in the COPIM project, with several of us leading different work packages. We will also be adopting the infrastructures COPIM will build, and so we’ll act as test cases or guinea pigs for COPIM builds. As part of COPIM, there is a formal link between us and OPERAS-P, since Agata Morka is the liaison between the two projects. And we’re open to working with organisations like OPERAS, Invest in Open Infrastructure, etc – any organisation that shares our goals and broad ethos, really – if opportunities present themselves.

Eelco: Will you expand? Are you open for new members?

Vincent: Actually, the idea to incorporate was partially spurred on by several requests from other presses to become ScholarLed members. This made us think about how we can define ourselves and how we can facilitate our expansion without sacrificing our idea of “scaling small.”

Lucy: Yes exactly as Vincent says, those conversations are ongoing amongst ourselves at the moment. We’re working out what the next phase of ScholarLed will look like, while still maintaining our publishing activities and our work on COPIM – and amid the convulsions the world is currently experiencing, which are affecting us all in different ways.

Eelco: Will you provide services to other presses?

Vincent: We will for now concentrate on providing services to member presses. There is always a risk, when providing services to third parties, that the profit motive and concerns for “customers” take over the core mission of the organization. We want to be very cautious about replicating economical models that may prove detrimental to our goals in the long term.

Rupert (Open Book Publishers): Having said that, we are committed to being open and transparent in our operations, and ensuring that the software we create is open source and is available for others to download and utilise (e.g. https://github.com/scholarled). So we hope that other publishers and presses will be able to directly benefit from our activities, even if they are not formal members of ScholarLed.

Eelco: I presume you didn’t expect ScholarLed to take off as it has, or did you?

Vincent: To be honest, it does not come as a surprise. We are 5 presses, all led by scholars with an active career in the humanities, social sciences, or the arts. We all chose publishing as one of our main creative and intellectual outlets. So when the synergy is right, of course it takes off.

Julien: Uhhh, I still gain hope from the experience that working this way can generate such momentum. The collaboration is dynamic, productive and inventive, more so indeed, than most of the many commercial or institutionalised projects I have worked on.

Eelco: So where are you heading?

Vincent: We have no intention to become “the model” for scholarly publishing. It is our modest goal to provide a viable, long-term alternative to the predatory publishing models that currently dominate the market. We have no illusions that these will always exist, but scholars should at least have a fair choice.

‘Scaling small: the story behind ScholarLed’ – Part 1

This Roundtable Conversation with ScholarLed will be published in two parts, we hope you enjoy  part 1 of 2:

ScholarLed is a consortium of five scholar-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers that was formed in 2018, consisting of Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. OAPEN recently added ScholarLed as a new collection of the OAPEN Library. Together, these 5 presses have already published 517 OA books, which makes it our second largest multi-publisher collection (Knowledge Unlatched being the largest). We invited the members of ScholarLed to join us for an online discussion about their collaboration.

 

Eelco: What prompts/prompted academics to start their own press?

Vincent (Punctum Books): I started my first press in grad school, and is rooted in the DIY culture in which I grew up. There were so many friends and colleagues whose work I admired but who couldn’t get their work published, so I thought, why not do this ourselves?

Andreas (meson press): With me it was quite similar to Vincent. I started my first press together with fellow students in a shared flat. The press still exists and I still support it with matters relating to OA. With meson press, the story was quite different: It grew out of the Hybrid Publishing Lab at Leuphana University of Lüneburg that looked into the effects of digitization on academic communication and publishing. However, research and practice are two fundamentally different things! At meson press we dedicate ourselves to the research areas that interest us most – digital cultures and networked media. It is also an experimental attempt to rethink and revive the format of the scholarly book in a digital environment.

Julien (Mattering Press): Mattering Press is run by a collective of seven editors. We set up Mattering Press because there was no dedicated Open Access press in our field of science and technology studies. As science and technology scholars, we also felt that it was strange, that despite all the critical studies of knowledge infrastructures and practices that shaped our field, there was very little critical engagement and experimentation with scholarly publishing infrastructures and politics. We still understand Mattering Press as both an experiment in publishing and as political intervention in publishing practices, which leads us to ScholarLed.

Alessandra (Open Book Publishers): Open Book Publishers was founded in part out of frustration with the legacy publisher of my first book – the process was expensive, slow, restrictive, exclusive and completely cut off audiences outside exclusive western institutions.

Janneke (Open Humanities Press): It’s also worth reading some of the responses to the interviews I did for a 2017 landscape study of academic-led presses (ALPs) and new university presses (NUPs), which discuss this question in some detail. All our presses are represented there, along with several other ALPs and NUPs.

 

Eelco: How did ScholarLed happen?

Vincent: ScholarLed developed out of the Radical Open Access Collective, a much broader coalition of Open Access initiatives. We came together because we share many of the same challenges and opportunities, and pooling our knowledge and expertise was a productive way forward.

Lucy (Open Book Publishers): The presses all came together to work on an OpenAire project in 2017, looking for ways to fund OA books without the Book Processing Charge (BPC).

Julien: That’s right. My colleague Joe and I spearheaded the funding application for the OpenAire project that later led to ScholarLed. For us, as a relatively small and new press, it was so exciting to finally collaborate directly with many of the people and publishers we had thus far mainly followed from a distance. The drive and collective spirit of the first meetings were terrific. Meeting all these people, who shared many of the same commitments and practices, opened a new world to us.

Lucy: From that experience, we realised we could work together effectively. We also realised that we all saw Open Access as something that should be value-driven, and we shared some common ideas about what it would take to develop OA book publishing in a way that embodied those values: disseminating scholarship in a way that serves authors and readers, dismantling global barriers to access, and enabling smaller publishers to thrive independently, rather than having to grow bigger or to rely on unaccountable, commercially-owned platforms and systems.

Janneke: We formally formed at a meeting after the 2nd Radical Open Access Conference in June 2018, during which we first trialled the ScholarLed bookstand.

Eelco: What kind of collaboration is it? Is there a structure in place?

Vincent: The collaboration started out informally, but we are currently investigating our incorporation as an association in the Netherlands. This should allow us to formalize some basic relations and lay out the blueprint for further collaboration.

Julien: There is a strong commitment to this collaboration and to non-hierarchical, non-competitive ways of relating. As we continue more formalisation will probably become necessary but for the moment this way of working is, to me at least, incredibly valuable.

Lucy: We’ve achieved a lot for such a young group. We have established some collaborative tools, like the ScholarLed bookstand, which allows us to represent the collective when any of us is at an event. But the biggest thing we have done together is to drive the formation of COPIM, in which we are key partners

Eelco: What are the common elements?

Vincent: We are all fully Open Access, without any mandatory author-facing fees. We are all led by scholars, operational both inside and outside the academy.
Lucy: We are all non-profit, too – any money we make goes back into the presses, and helps to fund the publication of more books.

Andreas: We’re also open to experimentation in all areas of publishing – from trying out new financing models and collective writing/reviewing/editing to the development of new formats and distribution channels.

Julien: We share an understanding of publishing as a profoundly political enterprise, and there is a strong sense of mutual support and learning that is respectful of our differences. This provides a different mode of working to frameworks of competition or even best practice. Janneke captured this very well in the notion of ‘scaling small.’

End of part 1.

The 2nd part of this Roundtable Conversation can be found here

Google Scholar and the OAPEN Library

Since October 2015, the contents of the OAPEN Library have been indexed by Google Scholar; which was proudly announced by Francis Pinter. Today, Google Scholar lists over 36,000 books and chapters that can be found in the OAPEN Library. In the last year alone, over 2,800 titles were added. This is a huge success.

This number is so large because Google Scholar not just indexes books, it also identifies separate chapters published in edited volumes in the OAPEN Library. For instance, clicking on the chapter “De-globalisation, value chains and reshoring” or clicking on the chapter “Transformative paths, multi-scalarity of knowledge bases and Industry 4.0” both link to the same book in the OAPEN Library: http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37355.

What have we done to optimize the OAPEN Library for Google Scholar? Starting November 2019 we had several discussions with colleagues at Google Scholar, resulting in updated specification for the metadata to be used in our new DSpace environment. Each landing page – which describes a book or a chapter – also contains machine-readable metadata. This metadata is read by the Google Scholar crawler. 

It’s nice to see how this has worked out. For example, in the last 7 days (8 to 14 May) almost 17,500 people visited the OAPEN Library through Google Scholar. A result we are very happy with, and we plan to continue working with Google Scholar to optimise indexing.

Next, we will focus on optimizing Google Scholar setups for monographs versus edited volumes, which are handled differently by the indexing system.

Think.Check.Submit – books

New resource for books added to Think. Check. Submit.

Further to their announcement in October, the Steering Committee of Think. Check. Submit. is delighted to announce a new addition to its resources: a checklist for authors wishing to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of a book or monograph publisher.

Drawing on existing expertise from within the group and from experiences of their newest partner, OAPEN, the checklist for books offers sound advice along the lines of the recommendations already offered by the journal checklist.

The rest of the Think. Check. Submit. website has also been updated to make it more relevant for both books and journals.

Eelco Ferwerda, Director of OAPEN, said: “It is clear that the same issues confronted by authors looking to publish in journals, also confront authors seeking to publish a book or a chapter. What should an author look for when considering the submission of a manuscript of a book or chapter? It is very common for a journal to have its own homepage whereas, for chapter publishing, more careful scrutiny is needed of the publishing entity producing the books. I am sure that the addition of this new checklist will provide a much needed and welcome resource to authors publishing this way.”

Sofie Wennström of LIBER said: “Librarians are often asked for advice about trustworthy publishing outlets. This extension of the Think. Check. Submit. checklist includes solid recommendations for how to choose a publisher for books. It is a welcome addition to the resources a librarian can use when giving advice as it is evident that the book publishing market may offer as many, if not more, pitfalls as journal publishing. We are happy that Think. Check. Submit. offers an opportunity to avoid some of those obstacles.”

About Think. Check. Submit.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research. Through a range of tools and practical resources, this international, cross-sector initiative aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

Think. Check. Submit. provides a checklist that guides researchers through the process of deciding which journals and now books are best for their research. The process is intended to go beyond individual journal decisions to help researchers build up their journal evaluation skills. The checklist is now available in nearly 40 languages.

Think. Check. Submit. is run, and funded, by a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing. Details of the organizations contributing can be found at https://thinkchecksubmit.org/about/. The current Think. Check. Submit. committee can be found at http://thinkchecksubmit.org/faq/committee/

OAPEN launches on new platform

Announcement

In these deeply troubling times, we are nonetheless happy to announce that the OAPEN Library has moved to a new platform, based on DSpace, the open source repository system. Together with the move to DSpace, we have renewed the website and implemented a new content management system. The move to DSpace is part of our mission to develop as an open, community-driven infrastructure service to support open access to monographs and edited volumes. The need for open infrastructures and global, open knowledge exchange in all scientific fields has never been more apparent. 

OPERAS, DOAB and SCOSS

The move to DSpace is part of a wider project, OPERAS-P, to support the development of OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities), which is funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 framework. The redevelopment also involves DOAB (the Directory of Open Access Books), to secure both OAPEN and DOAB as open infrastructures, and DOAB as a central service for OPERAS. OAPEN and DOAB have also jointly been selected by SCOSS (the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) to be supported by the open science community in its second funding cycle.

The new platform 

The new platform is developed with open source software, using DSpace for hosting the OAPEN Library collection and Strapi for the content management system (CMS). Strapi is a CMS licensed under the MIT License. DSpace is typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly digital content, and is supported by a large and global user base. Our development partners are Atmire in Belgium (for DSpace) and Trilobiet in the Netherlands (for the website and CMS). Our hosting partner is Huma-Num, the French national research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.

New features

With the migration to a new platform, we were able to introduce several new features and improve existing ones. We introduced new browsing options based on license or publication type (book or chapter), and improved our metadata offerings in MARCXML and MARC 21, based on feedback from libraries. We added a REST search API for systems to search the OAPEN Library.

A custom feature that we will make available as an open source addition to DSpace is ONIX import. Publishers use the ONIX XML standard to exchange information about their titles. We created an import script that converts ONIX XML to new records for the OAPEN Library in DSpace. The ONIX metadata now also contains chapter descriptions linked to books.

New features are being planned, and we hope to work with the community of DSpace users to develop more open source components going forward.

The first 10 years 

The OAPEN Library launched almost 10 years ago as the first international platform dedicated to open access books. The original system was developed by the University Library of the University of Amsterdam, as part of a European project coordinated by Amsterdam University Press and co-funded by the European Commission. At the launch in September 2010, the Library contained around 700 OA books from 10 publishers. Today, the Library contains over 12,000 OA books and chapters, from more than 300 publishers from all parts of the world. Last December we reached the milestone of 10 million downloads since 2013, when we introduced COUNTER reporting in collaboration with IRUS-UK.

OAPEN – open access for books

The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books.

OAPEN operates three platforms:

We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books, and provide services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.

OAPEN’s goals are:
* to build a branded collection of open access peer-reviewed titles ;
* to increase the visibility and retrievability of high-quality publications ;
* to promote open access book publishing.

This blog highlights new developments taking place at OAPEN or at the field of open access books.