Where’s the policy and financial support for OA books? | Research Information

"Being able to demonstrate the benefits of OA for books can be powerful in changing attitudes. For authors who are considering whether to publish their books OA, the possibility of reaching a broader and more diverse readership is often an important factor. For funders, too, who are considering whether to expand OA policies and funding to books, understanding the effect of OA can be critical. The challenge – there is limited research on this topic  and as such, while anecdotally we often hear of OA books achieving a broad readership, the evidence base to demonstrate this is still somewhat limited. 

Earlier this year, we commissioned Collaborative Open Access Research & Development (COARD) to explore the effects of OA on the geographic reach of scholarly books.  Collectively, we were interested in understanding where OA books were being read, and how patterns of usage between OA and non-OA books differed between countries and regions. In particular, was OA publication leading to increased readership in countries that are traditionally underrepresented in the production and use of scholarly research?

The findings are compelling. COARD’s analysis shows that OA has a robust effect on the number of downloads, geographical diversity of downloads, and citations of books. The effect was seen for all disciplinary groupings, in HSS and STM, across all three years of publication in the dataset, for all types of book (monographs, contributed volumes, and mid-length books) and for every month after publication. OA is, in other words, making a substantial difference to the reach of books and their authors. 

Downloads of OA books in the study were on average 10 times higher than those of non-OA books, and citations of OA books were 2.4 times higher on average - an even larger OA effect than we found in our previous research in this area. In our new analysis, downloads of OA books from the open web were generally around double those from institutional network points, suggesting that OA may also be helping books to reach a more diverse readership. ..."