International Open Access Week interview: NWO-funded book editor Karène Sanchez-Summerer

Since the start of our collaboration with NWO – The Dutch Research Council, the OAPEN Library has seen the NWO collection grow, now containing almost 200 titles. To celebrate Open Access Week, OAPEN asked authors/editors of books arising from NWO-funding to share their experiences and views, the second interview is with Karène Sanchez-Summerer:

Karène Sanchez-Summerer, Professor and Chair Middle East Studies, Faculty of Arts at Groningen University. She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris Sorbonne). Her research considers the interactions between European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in Palestine.  Currently, she is the PI of the research project CrossRoads: European cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine. A connected history during the formative years of the Middle East (1920-1950) funded by The Netherlands National Research Agency (NWO). Five books by Karène Sanchez-Summerer are included in the OAPEN Library.

Just recently you published a book titled The House of the Priest. An Orthodox Palestinian Life (1885-1954) which is included in the OAPEN Library collection. This book is the result of the CrossRoads project funded by NWO. Could you tell us some more about your motivations for conducting this research project?

This project aims to revisit the relationship between the European cultural agenda and the local identity formation process, and social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine, when the British ruled (1918-1948). When we started, our main questions were: what was the role of culture in European policies regarding the Arabs of Palestine; how did Arab Christians use culture to define their place in the proto-national and religious configuration between 1920 and 1950? Eighteen months after the beginning of the project, we found in Lebanon (Beirut) so far unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. This amazing manuscript discusses the complex relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. We wanted to share an annotated translation of this precious and significant manuscript to explain Khoury’s memoirs and their significance for the social, political and religious histories of twentieth-century Palestine and Arab relations with the Greek Orthodox church. Khoury played a major role in these dynamics as a leading member of the fight for Arab presence in the Greek-dominated clergy, and for an independent Palestine, travelling in 1937 to Eastern Europe and the League of Nations on behalf of the national movement.

This is one of two books, available in the OAPEN Library, from the new peer-reviewed series, Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies, published by Brill. Previously you have also published your work with Springer (now SpringerNature). What was your experience with these publishers?

I’ve published several volumes in OA the last years, with Brill, and, though different with Springer (an extended book proposal is evaluated), the process went rather smoothly. The publishers wanted to know whether the book was going to be open access before starting the editing process. In addition, you can apply for NWO’s Open access books fund only after the book has been accepted for publication by the publisher (which was my case for the House of the Priest). As for the NWO Open books grant is concerned, I thought it was a very easy process, so I recommend it to anyone who would like their book to reach out to a bigger audience. Open access might cause some delay in the publication, but the advantages are worth it. 

Your recent books are published under an open license, CC-BY, making it freely available and granting others a certain level of re-use, what was your motivation for publishing the book openly and under this license?

First of all, I believe any academic endeavour should be open to the public. Since this book is the result of an NWO project, which was paid for by public funds, open access is now required.  Furthermore, working as a scholar on Middle Eastern studies, I’ve seen various academic settings and open access is essential in regions where many do not have access to print copies, fewer institutions can afford subscriptions.

How do you think academia and society at large can benefit from your book being available open access?

Scholars working on the Middle East can now easily prescribe parts of the book to their students, it gives them an easy access to a source translated from Arabic, all the more relevant that it is a critical edition. They can also prescribe only some of the chapters, so that students get an idea of certain aspects only (for example the Arabs in Europe and their political representation during the interwar period). The fact that institutions/individuals don’t have to purchase the book makes it easier to prescribe only some parts of it. 

It has been a while since you have published these books. Did unrestricted access in any way help you to reach new audiences? In new, unexpected ways or in any way different compared to traditional publishing? If yes, how do you know this?

The creative commons engage audiences beyond the traditional readers, broadening and diversifying the audiences who get access to the book, anyone can access it. We were contacted by various types of readers, in Europe and from the Middle East – we even received a message with photos of the persons mentioned in the manuscripts (1920’s and 1930’s). The book The House of the Priest has been published just before the summer; we are eager to receive more reactions in the future.

Looking at your own publishing journey, have your views on open access book publishing, its benefits or limitations in any way changed over the years?

I was always convinced by the necessity to share widely publications, to make them available to various audiences, and that all students and scholars, all the more so when they are from/in Middle Eastern countries, in my particular case, should easily and immediately access them. Over the years, this opinion was only reinforced.  

International Open Access Week interview: NWO-funded book editor Janneke van Bergen

Since the start of our collaboration with NWO – The Dutch Research Council, the OAPEN Library has seen the NWO collection grow, now containing almost 200 titles. To celebrate Open Access Week, OAPEN asked authors/editors of books arising from NWO-funding to share their experiences and views, kicking off with Janneke van Bergen.

Janneke van Bergen is a landscape architect and PhD researcher at the TU Delft. Over the past decade she worked in the field of water and infrastructure, including Room for the River, the National Coastal Delta Program and Studio Coastal Quality. She currently works for the ShoreScape research, funded by NWO Top Sector Water Program, to investigate Building with Nature and coastal design.

Building with Nature is a concept where nature is used to cope with climate change risks, such as floods, waves, and sea level rise. You have recently published a book on Building with Nature perspectives which is included in the OAPEN Library collection. Could you tell us some more about this concept and your research project?

Within the ShoreScape project we combine research from coastal engineering and landscape architecture to promote Building with Nature (BwN) along urbanized sandy shores. In this research we develop design principles to stimulate dune formation after nourishment and reduce the negative effects of beach urbanization. The collaboration promoted new joint insights on BwN, and gave incentive to a publication on this topic: Building with Nature perspectives. This publication was funded by NWO and DIMI, a fund focusing on interfaculty research.

You published your work in TU Delft Open Publishing which follows a diamond business model. What was your experience with the publisher?

We collaborated with Research in Urbanism Series (RIUS), a scientific journal, that took well care of the publication process within TU Delft Open Publishing.

Your book is published under an open license, CC-BY, making it freely available and granting others a certain level of re-use, what was your motivation for publishing the book openly and under this license?

I think it is important for emerging fields of science, such as Building with Nature, to share scientific perspectives and work towards an overarching agenda, besides more specialist, mono-disciplinary publications. This will help to build new layers of innovative, joint knowledge.

It has been more than a year since you have published this book. Did unrestricted access in any way help you to reach new audiences? In new, unexpected ways or in any way different compared to traditional publishing? If yes, how do you know this?

It was a good way to reach a hybrid audience of both coastal engineers, spatial designers and even social sciences to cross the bridge to other disciplines working on the concept of Building with Nature. It has increased the interest for our ShoreScape publications from both disciplines (documented by ResearchGate), that otherwise would have been limited to our own disciplines only.

This year’s theme for the International Open Access Week is “open for climate justice’’. How do you think society at large can benefit from climate research being openly available, and your book being OA (Open Access)?

Certainly, I think climate adaptation is urgent, therefore is not just an academic, but public matter where all parties should be involved in. It will help academics to open up their specialisms to the social perspective, and the public to making conscious choices for climate-proof evolution.

Providing transparency and building trust: the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) 

In the summer of 2021, DOAB started a new service in beta phase: PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs). PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process that applies to the books in DOAB. Services such as PRISM can support research integrity and help build trust in open access academic book publishing. 

From beta to launch 

DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. PRISM, provided by the DOAB Foundation as part of the OPERAS Service Catalogue, was tested in 2021. Several open access academic book publishers participated in the testing phase. We are very grateful for their feedback, which resulted in fine-tuning of the service, and preparing the aimed launch of PRISM in the last quarter of 2022. 

How does PRISM serve our different stakeholders (publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers)? 

PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information on DOAB about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. At the publisher level, all their peer review processes are visible (as they may have more than one process in use across all their series and titles). At the level of an individual publication, the peer review process applied to that work is displayed. 

  • If you’re a publisher, PRISM helps you display the peer review process that has been applied to works in your collection. This helps you showcase how you apply best practices in peer review.  
  • If you’re a librarian, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you confidence in recommending the work as a reliable source to your researchers and students.  
  • If you’re a funder, PRISM gives you fuller information about the research outputs you’ve funded.
  • If you’re a researcher or a general reader, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you more information about the publisher. 

How to participate in PRISM 

Currently, we are preparing the launch of PRISM. This launch will be phased, where we will gradually invite publishers of open access academic books to join us. Stay tuned for more details.  

In anticipation of the launch, publishers can prepare by gathering information about their peer review process(es), as this information will needed to create a PRISM record: 

  • The title for the peer review (in order to differentiate between peer reviews) 
  • Is the document peer reviewed? Yes/No  
  • What is being reviewed? Proposal/Full text/Section  
  • What is the level of openness/anonymity between author(s) and reviewer(s)? Double-anonymised/Single-anonymised/All identities known
  • Who conducts the review? Internal editor/Editorial board member/External peer reviewer/Crowd or open review  
  • At what stage is the peer review being conducted? Pre-publication/Post-publication 
  • Are the review comments published? Yes/No  
  • Who takes the decision to publish? Publisher/Books or series editor/Scientific or Editorial Board 

Keep up-to-date with the development of the PRISM service by subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Twitter: @DOABooks (and look out for #DOABPRISM!). 

By Laura J. Wilkinson, Tom Mosterd and Lotte Kruijt

The OAPEN Dashboard – a new partner service 

During the UKSG 2022 Annual Conference held from May 30th to June 2nd in Telford UK we officially launched the OAPEN Dashboard1 – a new analytics service for our library members, publishers and funder partners to help them gain a deeper understanding of the usage of open access books.  

Over 179 publishers, libraries and funders are using the dashboard today and we expect to welcome more users over the coming months. The dashboard service includes data for the entire OAPEN Library which is home to over 24,000 open access books that see over 1 million COUNTER-conformant downloads per month.  

The OAPEN Dashboard, includes unique features and functionalities that allow its users to gain a better sense of the uptake of open access books globally, regionally and locally. Next to this users can also look at usage by discipline or apply other filters – here we take a closer look at the perspective of a library user.  

Figure 1 – Library dashboard: title view 

As shown in figure 1 – from a library perspective, users can apply filters to change the ‘ending month’ for which they’d like to access the data, filter by specific funders, publishers, or item type (full book or book chapter). This allows library users to gain usage insights and run reports on subsets of the full collection of 24,000+ books.  

Figure 2 – Library dashboard: geolocational usage 

For libraries, the dashboard can be used to gain insights into both institutional usage (based on IP-ranges) and geolocational usage. While libraries are accustomed to measuring usage based on their IP-ranges, insights into geolocational usage offers another unique functionality helpful for understanding the uptake of open access books. Open access books, due to their free nature, do not require users to register and authenticate themselves prior to accessing these books. This enables students, researchers, and readers generally to use these books from home, a local coffee place, or a coworking environment. With this dashboard, a library user can gain insights into the regional usage of open access books, capturing on- and off-campus usage – setting their preferred radius ranging from 20 to 500 kilometres.  

To view the OAPEN Dashboard in action, have a look at one of these two-minute demonstration videos for publishers, funders or libraries

Share your thoughts on the dashboard and next steps 

Throughout this year, we will be presenting the OAPEN Dashboard service at conferences around the world. We invite our stakeholders to provide feedback and to learn more about how insights into open access book usage may help them. Next to this, we are excited to start working with colleagues at Educopia and Curtin University on the recently introduced Book Analytics Dashboard project, with more news on this becoming available soon. 

To learn more about the OAPEN Dashboard service please contact Ronald Snijder (r.snijder[@]oapen.org). 

  1. Developed by Trilobiet (https://www.trilobiet.nl/)  

Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – global reach and national preferences for open access books

To many the internationalisation of academic publishing may mean: a strong focus on global issues, written in English only. However, many academic books are written in other languages than English. We tend to link non-English publications to regional issues, so there is a tension between English as the ‘lingua franca’ enabling a global reach, versus local languages that provide a better cultural ‘fit’.

M. Adiputra, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Now from theory to practice: if you give a global audience free access to (nearly) 20,000 freely accessible books and chapters in several languages, spanning many subjects, will they all choose books in English?

In a newly published paper, we have systematically researched the preferences of readers originating from one hundred countries. By looking at the ten most downloaded books from each country, we can measure the focus on regional topics by counting the books written in languages other than English.

Books, popular in multiple countries

The outcomes of this study do not fit in a story of English language publications as the only or the main source of scholarly communication. There is a demand for regionally focused titles, countering the narrative of the dominance of English as the language of scholarly communication. Instead, this study supports the value of bibliodiversity.

Read the paper here:

Snijder, Ronald. 2022. “Big in Japan, Zimbabwe or Brazil – Global Reach and National Preferences for Open Access Books”. Insights 35: 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.580

Tour de Bibliothèque: The OAPEN Library SCOAP³ for Books collection

The OAPEN Library is a growing virtual library of open access books. Researchers and curious readers find their way to the OAPEN Library via a number of entrances. As they browse, land upon or virtually stroll through the OAPEN Library, what unique books may one discover on its bookshelves? Today we’ll take a tour through the high energy physics section, where we’ll find the latest collection added to the OAPEN Library: the SCOAP³ for Books collection.

Open access books in high energy physics

The SCOAP³ for Books collection currently includes over 20 open access books in high energy physics and will, as part of this pilot initiative, grow to include a set of over 100 important texts within the discipline. 

This collection includes titles such as “The Standard Model and Beyond’’ written by Paul Langacker, part of the High Energy Physics, Cosmology, and Gravitation series published by Taylor and Francis (2017). This open access book provides an advanced introduction to the physics and formalism of the standard model and other non-abelian gauge theories. It provides a solid background for understanding supersymmetry, string theory, extra dimensions, dynamical symmetry breaking, and cosmology.

Next to this readers may encounter the open access book Challenges And Goals For Accelerators In The XXI Century’’, edited by Stephen Myers & Oliver Brüning and published by World Scientific Publishing Company (2016). This book describes the past 100 years of accelerator development with a special focus on the technological advancements in the field, the connection of the various accelerator projects to key developments and discoveries in the Standard Model, how accelerator technologies open the door to other applications in medicine and industry, and finally presents an outlook of future accelerator projects for the coming decades.

The role of books for SCOAP³ 

These open access books are made available thanks to the work of SCOAP³ – the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. SCOAP³ enables open dissemination of global research outputs in high energy physics and was first introduced in 2012, with the support of the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).

So what is the role of the academic book for SCOAP³ and within high energy physics more generally?

The overall objective for SCOAP3 is to enable global, equitable open access for research in the discipline of high energy physics. Having successfully converted the majority of the journal literature in the discipline to open, the Consortium decided to expand the scope of the initiative to include academic books in high energy physics and related disciplines (such as accelerator physics and instrumentation).

“Through the support of members of the consortium and partnerships with key publishers, we are making important texts in our domain completely free for students, faculty and researchers around the world. The COVID19 pandemic demonstrated how important it is for content to be widely and seamlessly accessible, and we are committed to a future where research and academic texts are available openly to anyone who might need them.”  – Dr. Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science, CERN

OAPEN Library collection services 

Thanks to the partnership between SCOAP³ for Books and the OAPEN Library, the SCOAP³ for Books collection benefits from the various OAPEN Library collection services. These include hosting, digital preservation, dissemination and usage reporting.

The OAPEN Library includes these books as part of its metadata feeds, API schema and OAI-PMH harvesting protocol. This enables a wide range of organisations such as academic libraries, library intermediaries, research institutions, and discovery services (including Google Scholar) to provide visibility for these open access books around the world.

In the course of the next few months, more titles can be expected to be added to this unique collection of open access books.

The OAPEN Library and the origin of downloads – libraries & academic institutions

On a regular basis, we look at the download data of the OAPEN Library and where it comes from. While examining the data from January to August 2021, we focused on the usage originating from libraries and academic institutions. Happily, we found that more than 1,100 academic institutions and libraries have used the OAPEN Library.

Of course, we do not actively track individual users. Instead we use a more general approach: we look at the website from which the download from the OAPEN Library originated. How does that work? For instance, when someone in the library of the University of Leipzig clicks on the download link of a book in the OAPEN library, two things happen: first, the book is directly available on the computer that person is working on, and second, the OAPEN server notes the ‘return address’: https://katalog.ub.uni-leipzig.de/. We have no way of knowing who the person is that started the download, we just know the request originated from the Leipzig University Library. Furthermore, some organisations choose to suppress sending their ‘return address’, making them anonymous.

What is helpful to us, is the fact that aggregators such as ExLibris, EBSCO or SerialSolutions use a specific return address. Examples are “west-sydney-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com” – pointing to the library of the Western Sydney University – or “sfx.unibo.it”– coming from the library of the Università di Bologna. And in this way, many academic libraries can also be identified from their web address. Some academic institutions only display their ‘general’ address.

Academic libraries and institutions, sorted by type
Academic libraries and institutions

As mentioned before, our analysis delivered over 1,100 – 1,121 to be exact – different addresses. The chart displays those addresses divided by type, and we see that many academic libraries not just rely on aggregators such as ExLibris, but also directly give access to the OAPEN Library through their catalogs. The metadata of the OAPEN Library is freely available under a CC0 license, and can be downloaded as a MARCXML file to ensure easy library integration.

Which libraries and institutions are the biggest users of the OAPEN Library according to this data? The most downloads come from MediaLibraryOnLine, the first Italian network of public, academic and scholastic libraries for digital lending; the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford; and Universidad Peruana de Ciencas Aplicados.

We are happy to see that our collection is finding its way to libraries and academic institutions all over the world!

Guest post: Overcoming the challenges of open access books – part 2/2

We are pleased to share the second part of this guest blogpost by one of our DOAB Gold Sponsors, written by Leila Moore, Taylor and Francis. Part one is available here.

Leila Moore is Open Access Books Lead at Taylor & Francis. After graduating from the University of Reading with a BA honours in English Leila went on to a career in publishing, working across a variety of disciplines and publishing formats. A keen interest in the emergence of the open access model encouraged Leila to take the leap into open access publishing. Leila now specialises in open access books.

Overcoming the challenges of open access books – part 2/2

In part one of this series, we explored some of the challenges around policies and funding for OA books, that were highlighted by authors and editors who were kind enough to participate in interviews about their experiences with OA publishing.

In part two we will explore how we can better support researchers during the OA publication process and how the wider OA books community are collaborating to tackle the wider issues.

‘It was a bit weird that we had to do all the work for this OA publishing then as editors we would lose out on royalties.’

Although it was clear from speaking to authors and editors that financial incentives are not high on the list when it comes to the benefits of publishing monographs, the majority of the authors and editors I interviewed did mention the reduction in royalty payments as a negative outcome from OA publishing. It is worth noting that if print copies of OA books are available authors will receive royalties from these sales and studies have shown that there is minimal effect on print sales for OA books. For example, the OAPEN-CH report[1] published in 2018 indicates that making books available open access does not significantly affect print sales, these results are also in line with the OAPEN-NL report[2] published in 2013. Many authors believe the benefits of OA publishing far outweigh the financial incentives of keeping monographs behind a paywall, but for the OA community this raises some key questions about what can be done to incentivise authors to publish OA if the incentives are not financial. How are authors being recognised and rewarded for publishing OA by their academic institutions? Can publishing OA have a positive impact on academic career progression? How can publishers track and convey the impact of OA publications to better support researchers?

‘The overall situation with permissions and understanding how things go is still very complicated for all of the authors.’

Authors noted that the permissions process is complex even before you bring OA into the picture. There was a consensus that standardising the permissions process to reduce complexity and confusion would be very well received. Publishers and funding bodies need clear policies in place for managing third party material in OA books to ensure that authors can effectively comply with funder mandates and permissions rules set by third parties. This was a particularly relevant issue for authors and editors working in certain Arts, Humanities and Social Science subject areas where third party content can play an important role in the context and understanding of the work. Having to leave third party content out due to complex and expensive permissions issues can have a detrimental effect on the quality of the work.

‘I would have liked the Publisher to be more active in promoting the volumes as freely available.’

Authors noted that often OA books content is difficult to find on publisher websites and publishers could do more to make OA content more discoverable.  They were also unsure about where their OA content would be available, which repositories their work would be added to and whether their work would be discoverable via the major retailers’ websites.  Authors felt that sometimes they were lacking the key information that would enable them to proactively promote their work.

Working together to overcome the challenges of OA book

To overcome these obstacles, we need to work together as a community; academic institutions, research funding bodies and publishers all play an integral role in shaping the future of OA books. Book authors are looking for more consistent OA policies from academic institutions and research funding bodies. There is a need for a shared infrastructure and simpler processes that remove some of the confusion and complexity from the OA process and reduce the administrative burden on authors and editors.  Authors would benefit from more consistent guidelines around how to navigate the permissions process, ensuring authors of books with a large amount of third-party content are not prohibited from publishing OA. Clear and transparent explanations about the benefits of OA publishing backed up by impact metrics from publishers and incentives from academic institutions would help to remove some of the uncertainty around OA publishing, as would providing a central place to help authors find funding and navigate the complex funding ecosystem. Open access publishing should be an option for all, irrespective of geographical location or circumstance.

The good news is that as a community we are already responding to these needs and we have been able to begin creating some shared infrastructures for OA books, such as the Directory of Open Access Books which serves as a central hub for OA books and helps to improve discoverability, the OA Switchboard which has been created to remove some of the administrative burden around APC and BPC funding and the OA eBooks Usage Data Trust project is working to improve the measurement and analysis of OA books. We may not have solved all of the problems yet, but these initiatives show that we can come together as a community to ensure the sustainability of OA books.

My thanks go out to the authors and editors who took the time to speak to me about their OA publishing experiences. Particular thanks go to:

 

Dr Ir Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek is an associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology,Netherlands.

Dr. Sc. Vitalija Danivska is a lecturer and researcher in the Academy for Hotel and Facility at Breda University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands.

 

 

Rianne and Vitalija are co-editors of the OA book

A Handbook of Theories on Designing Alignment Between People and the Office Environment

 

 

Rick Szostak is a professor at the University of Alberta, Canada.

 

 

 

Rick is the author of the OA textbook Making Sense of World History and the forthcoming OA title Making Sense of the Future

 

 

 

 

Jürgen Runge is a Professor of Physical Geography and Geoecology at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. He is the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies (ZIAF).

 

 

 

Jürgen is series-editor for the OA book Quaternary Vegetation Dynamics: The African Pollen Database

 

 

 

 

Joshua C. Gellers is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Florida, Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, and former Fulbright Scholar to Sri Lanka.

 

 

 

Joshua is the author of the OA book Rights for Robots: Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law

 

 

 

 

Kirsten Drotner is Professor of media studies at the University of Southern Denmark and director of two national R&D programmes DREAM and Our Museum.

 Kirsten is the co-editor of the OA book Experimental Museology: Institutions, Representations, Users

 

Discover open access books from Taylor and Francis here

[1] OAPEN-CH – The impact of open access on scientific monographs in Switzerland: A project conducted by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2018) https://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/OAPEN-CH_schlussbericht_en.pdf

[2] OAPEN-NL – A project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands (2013) https://oapen.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/0cdef1a177b6470ea5257240682b38e3.pdf

Guest post: Overcoming the challenges of open access books – part 1/2

We are pleased to share this guest post (published in two parts) by our latest DOAB Gold Sponsor, written by Leila Moore Open Access Book Lead at Taylor & Francis.

Overcoming the challenges of open access books – part 1/2

Leila Moore is Open Access Books Lead at Taylor & Francis. After graduating from the University of Reading with a BA honours in English Leila went on to a career in publishing, working across a variety of disciplines and publishing formats. A keen interest in the emergence of the open access model encouraged Leila to take the leap into open access publishing. Leila now specialises in open access books.

Benefits versus challenges

When I first started thinking about this article my aim was to focus on the benefits of open access (OA) books, but as I had more conversations with book authors and editors, the focus began to shift. One thing became clear to me; the benefits of OA publishing are obvious, but the challenges are more complex and varied and need to be tackled before any real progress can be made.

In part one of this two-part series, we’ll explore some of the challenges around policies and funding for OA books that were highlighted by authors and editors who were kind enough to participate in interviews about their experiences with OA publishing.

Each of the authors and editors I interviewed named wider dissemination and a more equitable research ecosystem as the main benefits of OA publishing. But they also highlighted a number of challenges which we will delve into below.

‘Dealing with different academic institutions, what are their requirements for books/book chapters/journal articles. Everybody is trying to understand the policy at their own academic institution, can they get funding or not. I think that was very complicated.’

Many of the researchers that I spoke with noted that it was not always easy to understand their own academic institution’s OA policy. It was not clear where enquiries to find out this information should be directed, or if it was at all likely that they would be able to get funding, particularly when it came to OA funding for book projects. For edited collections or multi-authored projects this is even more complex to navigate. There are differing rules for what constitutes lead author status, payments may need to be split between different academic institutions, and there may be different rules and processes to follow. For those authors who did manage to secure funding from their academic institutions the processes varied dramatically; some even varied for different book projects within the same academic institution.

‘Because authors would be expected to pay a certain amount of money for the ability to publish OA it does limit who could potentially serve as an author.’

Equitability for published authors was highlighted as an issue in OA publishing. Are the opportunities to publish OA limited to the chosen few? If an author is at a well-funded academic institution with a clear and robust OA policy, they are far more likely to apply for OA funding.  How do we ensure that authors without grants or funding still have the option to publish OA? Authors and editors did note that there are policies in place to try to combat this inequality, for example, book publishing charge (BPC) waivers for authors in low and lower middle-income economies are available, but there is still a clear inequality in OA outputs from authors in these regions that needs to be addressed. Who can afford to pay the OA fee is not something that authors or editors want to consider when making their publishing decisions.

‘The money. For most arts and humanities scholars, it is much too expensive to publish a new volume OA from the start. Our programme, which is the world’s largest of its kind, only had the option because of COVID. Our funders would probably not agree to the amounts spent under normal circumstances.’

All of the authors and editors that I spoke to mentioned funding as a major obstacle for OA books. Many of the authors received funding as a one off or acquired funding due to exceptional circumstances. For example, because of COVID authors were able to divert funds that may have been spent on conference attendance. Some authors resorted to crowd funding or donations from corporations to cover the cost of OA. Innovative and new approaches are underway that seek to address, in part, the issue of funding for OA books such as the COPIM project, and publishers such as Taylor & Francis are actively engaging with innovative new approaches such the Knowledge Unlatched initiative to enable more authors to publish OA books. However, there is still work to be done to address a funding ecosystem for OA books that is not yet fully fit for purpose. Much of the additional work that is taken on by authors/editors relates to funding; trying to find funding and trying to navigate complex and diverse processes and requirements. Some of the authors that I spoke to talked about article publishing charges (APCs) and how, particularly in the Science, Technology and Mathematics subjects, it is becoming the norm for researchers to request OA funding as part of their initial research grant application, making it much easier to manage when they do eventually get an article accepted in a journal. When we talk about Humanities and Social Sciences subjects and monograph publishing, it is not that simple. A large proportion of this research isn’t funded, so who picks up the book processing charge (BPC) bill? If it is the author’s academic institution, then we need to see a more robust approach to OA policies and for OA funding for books to be more widely available.

Coming up in part two we will explore how we can better support researchers during the OA books publication process and how the wider OA books community are collaborating to tackle the wider issues.

 

Finding relevant books without sacrificing your privacy

Web retailers such as Amazon.com are able to find just the right book for you. This is a great feature, but it comes at a cost: its recommendations work because it is storing information about you. The better it knows you, the better its recommendations.

At OAPEN, we do not track people. Instead, we used the full text of the open access books and chapters in our collection. In an experiment – based on over 10,000 titles – we took the complete text of a book, cut it up in blocks of three consecutive words (called trigrams) and filtered out all the common phrases. This leaves you with a small group of terms that are unique for that particular book. The next phase is finding other titles that share the same terms. The more terms they share, the more they are connected.

Using this algorithm helps to find books that are very similar: if you are interested in a certain book, you should also download these books as well. However, it can also find books that are a little less similar: you might use this to expand your research, or to create a collection of books. Surprisingly enough, this algorithm can also find translations; it even works across languages.

Finding related titles in this way does not have to be confined to the OAPEN Library. The same method can be applied to other collections of open access books or even open access journal articles.

More information can be found in this article:

Snijder, R. (2021). Words Algorithm Collection—Finding  closely related open access books using text mining techniques. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 31(1). https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10938

The Holy Grail does not exist: OPERAS-P and OASPA’s workshops for publishers on innovative business models for books

The Holy Grail does not exist: OPERAS-P and OASPA’s workshops for publishers on innovative business models for books

workshop 1 business models

By Agata Morka & Tom Mosterd

In May 2021, together with the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), OPERAS hosted a series of three European workshops on business models for open access books targeted specifically at small and medium-sized academic book publishers1. As part of the OPERAS-P project work package 6 (Innovation) OPERAS was looking into innovative, non-BPC business models. The feedback gathered in the course of these three workshops informed a report The Future of scholarly communications, published at the end of June 2021 as an OPERAS-P project deliverable.

We have heard you

The first workshop in the mini-series was informative in nature, not only for the audience, but also for us, as organizers. Participants had a chance to familiarize themselves with six different models for OA books, ranging from these based on BPCs, national subsidies, to those relying on collaborative funding from libraries (see a short report on the first session here). From the organizers perspective, the event gave us a chance to understand which of the presented models were of particular interest for the gathered participants. The following two workshops were therefore shaped by what we heard in this first one. It became clear that the community sought to explore non-BPC approaches, these based on collaborative funding in particular, in more depth.

Following this desire, we invited Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, from Punctum books (see his presentation here) and Rupert Gatti from Open Book Publishers to talk about mixed collaborative funding models for the first session. Martin Paul Eve and Tom Grady graced the second one (see their presentation here) discussing their Opening the Future idea (now nominated for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing). In these focused workshops thirty small and medium-sized academic book publishers came together to ask questions, express their doubts, and discuss challenges they encounter when it comes to OA books.

The Holy Grail of OA book publishing

Recent studies on OA book business models has shown that there is no one model that will suit all cases. Both the OPERAS white paper from 2018, and the 2020 COPIM report came to this conclusion and our workshops further proved it. Publishers in both workshops stressed the importance of circumstances in which every single one of them operates: different approaches might apply for OA born publishers than to those seeking a full or partial transition to OA. Regional context, with existing publishing traditions, also comes into play as a factor affecting the choice of the pursued model: while publishers from Germany were less reluctant about applying BPC-based models given the fact that their researchers are used to paying for publication under traditional models, others found OBP and Punctum’s approaches more appealing.

University presses looking into transitioning towards OA expressed interest in applying the Opening the Future model, although some doubts about its scalability were also voiced. The discussion showed that while the Holy Grail of OA book publishing does not exist, what does exist however, is a strong will to experiment with various approaches, spearheaded by small and medium sized academic book publishers.

Do you speak digital?

Among challenges raised by the workshop participants two stood out as the most common: these of production and distribution processes. Some publishers expressed a certain anxiety when it comes to dealing with “all things digital”, starting from offering formats other than PDF, to assigning DOIs and creating high quality metadata. A certain lack of technical expertise was found troubling and, in some cases, resulted in production and distribution parts of the publishing process being outsourced or simply neglected. Distribution of digital copies proved to be somewhat of a terra incognita, and navigating between the DOAB, Google Books and Amazon proved to be no trivial endeavor, especially for non-OA born publishers. Some participants found learning digital intimidating and saw it as a substantial hurdle to overcome. It became clear that strong support is needed in this area. In this context COPIM-originated Thoth, an open bibliographic metadata management and dissemination system, gained a lot of interest among the participants. Discussion about its features dominated the second workshop with Rupert Gatti and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, both engaged in the development of this project.

Let’s collaborate on collaboration

One of the most important takeaways of the two workshops was perhaps the realization that events of this type are found truly helpful by the community. We received several emails following the workshops stressing their relevance and usefulness. The opportunity to discuss a particular model with colleagues who are practicing it, in the spirit of openness and sharing, might be a powerful tool to encourage a larger uptake in OA book publishing initiatives. We would like to continue this best practice exchange to enable interested publishers to pick and choose from existing models and create their own, tailored solutions that would be most suitable for their needs. As the first step in this direction, we will be launching a publishers’ database with case studies of different models, open to everyone to use and contribute their own cases. We are looking forward to officially launch the project in the autumn 2021. For now, mark the database link and stay tuned for further developments.

  1. While these three workshops focus on innovative business models and approaches used within Europe, we would like to emphasise similar innovative business models have been implemented outside of Europe too. []

It’s the system that counts

You would expect it to be simple: when somebody downloads a book from the OAPEN Library, the system adds one to the total number of downloads. After a while you put the numbers in a report, and share it with the world. Sadly, the reality is more complex. All the books and chapters can be downloaded by everybody, including automated processes (bots). Also, if you think as downloads as a measure of impact, it becomes tempting to inflate it by downloading a certain book again and again.

So, the raw download numbers need to be filtered, in order to give a more realistic indication of the true impact. Many libraries use the COUNTER Code of Practice as standard, which enables them to compare the data from different sources. However, many online platforms measure their visitors using Google Analytics. The OAPEN Library uses both (but we only report the COUNTER data). Together with the migration to a new platform, a new version of the COUNTER reporting (Release 5) was introduced. A good moment to compare Google Analytics (GA) with COUNTER Release 5 (R5).

Comparing the amounts of monthly downloads is simple: where GA reports over 1 million downloads per month, R5 stricter filter lets it report around 400,000 downloads. Again, when we look at the details, the reality is more complex. For instance, comparing the number of downloads per country shows large differences for the USA, France, China and Russia. In contrast, the numbers for Australia, Canada and Austria are virtually the same. When we compare the usage data of each title, the differences are even less simple to explain. You would expect that both GA an R5 more or less agree about the order of books: which book was downloaded the most, which one comes after that etc. But that is very much not the case.

GA and R5 have made their own choices on what is reported and what not. One metric is not better than the other, but we should be open about the choices made. After all, open access book metrics are complicated and we can only benefit from clarity.

More details about usage data and the two systems can be found in:

Ronald Snijder, “Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?,” Insights 34 (1): 9. (2021), https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.539.
Submitted on 11 November 2020 and published by UKSG in association with Ubiquity Press on 28 April 2021

You might also be interested in the OAeBU DataTrust Pilot or this OBP blog. Things get even more complex when you try to compare different platforms…

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