How important are open access books to academic authors? - Research in progress blog
ab1630's bookmarks 2018-06-07
Summary:
"To kick off Academic Book Week in April, Springer Nature held a free event for researchers exploring open access (OA) books, discussing topics such as why academics publish OA books, how the impact of their research can be tracked, and the future of OA book funding. Researchers in the hard sciences are more familiar with the concept of open access article publishing, but we were interested in talking to researchers across various disciplines, including the Humanities and Social Sciences, specifically about OA books. You can read what the event speakers had to say in our recent LSE Impact blog but we wanted to share with you here what researchers who attended the event think about open access books....
Setting the scene
More than 30 researchers attended from a variety of subject areas from the Humanities and Social Sciences to Physics, Engineering and Computer Science. From pre-event registration information, we knew that 56% had previously authored an academic book before, but none had experience with publishing an OA book, whereas two authors had previously published an OA article. Researchers came from institutions such as Imperial College London, LSE and Coventry University as well as from industry.
We discussed the benefits of OA books, asked authors about their opinions and experiences, and looked at the challenge of finding funding for OA books....
According to Hannah Hope, Open Research Coordinator at the Wellcome Trust, she would like to see OA become more affordable for all, and to support a wider transition to OA: “We would like more funders to support their researchers with the costs of making research available. We would like more publishers and institutions to work together as a community to share costs and reduce them for researchers. There is funding within the research ecosystem but we need to repurpose budgets. We all have to change the ecosystem.”
Springer Nature is committed to helping researchers from all over the world make their research freely available as we see the rise of open research in all its manifestations as one of the major forces reshaping the way that researchers communicate and collaborate to advance the pace and quality of discovery. To help authors discover and apply for open access funding, they can get in touch with our free Funding Support Service.
After conducting author interviews for ‘The OA Effect’ we recognised that wider engagement with researchers was key to increasing understanding of OA and we were delighted with the interest in this event. We would love to hear from institutions who would be interested in hosting presentations on OA books as a continuation of this direct outreach. We learned that researchers are interested in OA books, and we would like to put out a call to the community for publishers and institutions alike to talk to the academic community more...."