OAPEN-UK ITT

"JISC Collections invites publishers of scholarly monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) to tender to participate in a new project entitled OAPEN-UK. Publishers are invited to submit ‘matched pairs’ of HSS scholarly monograph titles for inclusion in the Noah experiment. Total funding of £250,000 is available and for each ‘matched pair’ selected, publishers will receive funding of £6,000....The aim of OAPEN-UK is to experiment with scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences to find out if open access as a model is feasible, and what impacts open access scholarly monographs have on print and e-book sales, reach and readership. Central to OAPEN-UK is the Noah experiment which will measure the impact an open access edition of a humanities or social science scholarly monograph on the sales of print and e-book editions and the comparison between OA, print and e-book editions in terms of usage, costs, reach and readership....Following selection, each title in the ‘matched pair’ will be randomly assigned into either the Experimental Group or the Control Group. Titles in the Experimental Group will be made available in Open Access and titles in the Control Group will be made available as e-books for purchase. Data will be collected to evaluate the impacts of the titles on print and e-book sales as well as the impact on reach and readership. The Noah experiment will run from May 2011 until April 2014...."