Publishers slower than librarians to address OA monographs market | Publishing Technology

"In this week’s blog we turn our attention to scholarly publishers and a very different picture emerges. This is surprising to some extent, since the drive towards OA monographs seems to have been led by a small section of publishers alive to the possibilities of using OA business models to publish content that might otherwise be uneconomic. Yet according to PCG’s research the enthusiasm that some larger publishers such as Palgrave Macmillan or university presses like Manchester University Press have shown towards developing a new monograph publishing model is not uniform across the scholarly publishing industry. PCG’s research indicated that only 35% of publishers currently published OA monographs. Of those publishers who did publish OA books, 34% said that it was a fast growing area for them, though two thirds said that it was a stable market or only growing very slowly. And of those who didn’t publish OA monographs it also appeared that this was unlikely to change in the near future. When asked how likely it was that their organisation would start OA monograph publishing, 54% of publishers said it was very or somewhat unlikely. Only 8% of those respondents said that it was very likely that the publisher they worked for would experiment with long form OA content."

Read full text of article to view statistics and figures on marketing of OA books by publishers and libraries.