Open-access books are downloaded, cited, and mentioned more than non-OA books* – utsepressblog

"This UTS ePRESS blog post republishes the text of a CC BY licensed blog post by Carrie Calder who is Business Development and Policy Director, Open Research at Springer Nature. The original blog post of the same title appeared first in the LSE Impact Blog at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/11/22/open-access-books-are-downloaded-cited-and-mentioned-more-than-non-oa-books/

Open-access journal articles have been found, to some extent, to be downloaded and cited more than non-OA articles. But could the same be true for books? Carrie Calder reports on recent research into how open access affects the usage of scholarly books, including the findings that OA books are, on average, downloaded seven times more, cited 50% more, and mentioned online ten times more. A number of accompanying interviews reveal that authors are choosing open access routes to publish their books not only because of wider dissemination and easier access but also for ethical reasons.

Carrie Calder writes:

From crowdfunding to book publishing charges (BPCs), funders, institutions, and publishers continue to experiment with different open access models for books. Limited funding in disciplines which traditionally use monographs as a form of scholarly communication means that while open access in journal publishing has been around since 2000, it’s only in the last five years that we’ve seen real progress in introducing open access for books. Likewise, open-access journals in the humanities and social sciences have seen limited progress in comparison to their STEM counterparts. So are there any real benefits for authors and funders who take the leap to publish via open access models? Increased downloads and, to some extent, citations have been shown for open-access journal articles – could the same be true for monographs? Springer Nature has published more than 400 open access books on SpringerLink, from monographs to shorter or mid-form research such as Palgrave Pivot and SpringerBriefs. This provides us with a solid and growing dataset from which to investigate this issue, the so-called “OA effect”. Our report, “The OA effect: how does open access affect the usage of scholarly books?”, published last week, shows that open-access books are:..."