Exploring open access to save monographs, the question is – how? | Jisc

" ... In the last ten years, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9% of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4% in 2009 (RIN, 2010). The average number of sales of monographs to libraries has declined from around 2,000 in 1980 to around 200 in the early years of this century (Willinsky, 2009) This creates two problems for researchers. First, it decreases the number of readers with access to individual monographs, meaning that the flow of knowledge that underpins research is compromised. Second, it means that many scholarly monographs become economically unviable, leading to concerns that publishers may select titles based primarily upon the potential for sales rather than scholarly worth. So how do we... a) Keep the monograph alive to allow humanities and social science researchers to present considered arguments b) Help increase readership to foster new connections and research, and c) Find an economic model to sustain the publishing and dissemination of monographs – in both electronic and print. These are some of the questions we are trying to answer in our open access monograph project –  OAPEN-UK being managed by Jisc Collections. What if your monograph was available online for free for everyone to read as a PDF or in HTML and in addition libraries and academics could still purchase print (60% of academics still prefer print) or e-book editions if they wanted them? There would be no limits on who can read your book - discoverable to all through online search engines and the sales of the print could support the sustainability of the Open Access version. And of course each book is put through the same peer review processes that normal print books are - you could even experiment with open peer review - or get input from fellow colleagues as you write. This is the model we are exploring in OAPEN-UK with 58 monographs matched into pairs - half available in OA and half available through standard methods. We are gathering sales, usage and citation data to assess performance – do the OA titles get more usages and sales than the control group titles? ... "