Project explores open-access books in the humanities and social sciences - Research Information

" ... In the last 10 years, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9 per cent of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4 per cent 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). If fewer monographs are being sold and consequently read, does this have a detrimental effect on the humanities and social-science research environment? Does it also mean that publishers, facing the challenge of lower revenue and higher costs, decide to focus on publishing only the monographs that are deemed economically viable – or in other words – crowd pleasers? What impact does this have on those researchers who are producing manuscripts of high scholarly worth but that are not likely to produce high sales? Might the monograph as a format fade away? These are some of the questions and concerns being raised by academics that need to be addressed. So how can the monograph be kept alive to allow humanities and social science researchers to present considered arguments, how can readership be increased to foster new connections and research and what economic model will sustain a fair publishing and dissemination process for monographs – in both electronic and print. Our open-access monograph project OAPEN-UK, funded by the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) and JISC, is exploring all these issues and working collaboratively with publishers, academics, learned societies, research funders and libraries to see if open access could be the key to increasing readership, research and a healthy economic future for the monograph. We are piloting a model whereby the publisher is paid an upfront fee to make the monograph available online - free for everyone to read as a PDF or in HTML. The publisher is then able to generate revenue through sales of print (60 per cent of academics still prefer print) or e-book editions (EPUB). The idea is to see if this is an economically-viable model and work out how much the upfront fee might be, if indeed it is needed at all. We have 58 monographs matched into pairs - 29 available in OA and 29 available through standard methods. Over three years (2011 – 2014) we are gathering sales, usage and citation data to assess performance ... In addition, we are gathering data on perceptions, attitudes and priorities and processes to help us work out how a move to OA publishing may work and what needs to be addressed in the move. Focus groups with various stakeholders and our 2012 survey of 690 humanities and social-science academics provided some fascinating and sometimes surprising information...