Open Access Book Publishing: Case Studies | Against-the-Grain.com

Charles Watkinson from  Purdue University, moderator, introduced this session by noting that Open Access (OA) books are the next frontier in publishing.  How different are they from journals?  We need to develop our positions, but there are few published studies.  The 3 studies presented here are therefore particularly important.  However, we must be careful not  to generalize too much from these studies because books are so varied.  Eelco Ferwerda, Director, OAPEN Foundation, described 2 pilot projects underway in the Netherlands and UK.  First, he described the OAPEN Foundation and some of its work ...  Can OA be an effective model for books?  Books are having a difficult time in the marketplace, so OA could have some significant impacts. It could improve discovery, usage, and impact.  It might reduce costs but may not impact sales.  Two projects are looking at these issues.  OAPEN-UK is managed by JISC, and OAPEN-NL is managed by the OAPEN Foundation. The UK project has 5 publishers, and the Netherlands project has 8.  OAPEN-NL is measuring the effect of OA on books using Google Books.  Books that are fully open had about 90 visits month. Discovery had 3 times the discovery and 8 times the usage.   Compared with a control group,      downloads were 6.5 times higher, showing that there is no indication that OA is harming sales, and a significant additional usage results... In making a transition to OA monographs, we need to have agreement on what constitutes an OA book, shared infrastructure and services, and, most importantly, sustainable business models.  Here are some possible business models: ...  Richard Clement, Dean of Libraries at Utah State University, where the university press (part of the library) has put its backlist into the Hathi Trust, described  the effect that OA has on book sales.  The pattern is similar for all books:  sales are low and flat (except when a book is required for a course), but once OA is introduced, usage strongly increases.  International usage becomes significant.  The pattern for this book is typical ... MPublishing is a new publishing organization that is part of the University of Michigan library.  Shana Kimball noted that MPublishing was created because a viable imprint for authors was needed.  The first project was Digital Culture Booksin which books were published traditionally and as OA monographs.  So far, 27 titles have been published.  In every case, the books performed as well as expected, and some of them exceeded expectations.  An average of 750 sales/title were made, and the OA edition did not seem to impact the sales..."