Tracking the Magnificent Seven: Who do scholars want to read their Open Access books? And how do we know if they do? – IO: In The Open

"As part of an initiative to explore the potential benefits of open access modes for disseminating academic monographs, we have found ourselves returning to basic questions about how we want to measure and understand what it is we do when we send a monograph out into the world. Every book is created from our basic scholarly impulse to enrich some aspect of the complex world we share. Yet when we seek to tell the story of its impact, we too often rely on narrow, dull, and/or inadequate measures — citation counts; print runs; downloads.

One way to shift this tendency to narrow and flatten the scope of scholarly impact is to give it more texture by identifying a wider range of possible audiences capable of creating transformative public communities. To that end, we have proposed a taxonomy of reading publics for the academic monograph who would particularly benefit from an open access approach. We believe that indicators of engagement with these seven types of readers could be used to tell a much richer story about a book’s influence that could be persuasive to authors and funders. And we think the data sources to tell this story already exist."