Survey reveals researchers' views on monographs - Research Information

"Academic monographs have been getting a lot of attention in policy circles of late. In the UK, HEFCE, Jisc and the AHRC have all been running projects on the subject, while international research funders such as the Mellon Foundation in the USA and DfG in Germany are supporting experiments to try to build a more stable future for the monograph. A perception that monographs are in trouble underpins this sudden upsurge in interest ... The traditional narrative about the decline of the monograph tends to focus upon book sales. Library budgets, which are shrinking, are further pressurised by locked-in price increases on journal ‘big deals’, where libraries commit to buying large bundles of journals for a certain number of years with (in most cases) annual price rises. The amount of money available to buy books is declining. Publishers argue that fewer copies of each book are being sold, driving up the price per copy and (of course) making it even harder for librarians and researchers to buy books ... Data to test these hypotheses can be difficult to come by. However, a new surveyfrom the Jisc and AHRC-funded project, OAPEN-UK, run in association with HEFCE’sOpen Access and Monographs project, reveals some interesting perspectives from researchers themselves. With over 2,200 responses from UK-based humanities and social science researchers, the survey gives a unique insight into how academics perceive the monograph and its role in scholarly life.  The survey confirms that humanities and social-science researchers remain keen to read and to publish monographs. Overall, 94 per cent of respondents (2, 056 people) said it was important or very important to access monographs, while 84 per cent (1,882 people) said it was important or very important to publish monographs. In neither case were monographs the most important type of research output – that position is held by journal articles – but they are clearly valued by researchers ... It also seems that researchers find it harder to publish monographs than to access them. 50 per cent of respondents said that it was both important and difficult to publish monographs, but only 10 per cent said it was both important and difficult to access them. There’s an important message here for publishers, research funders and universities: the publishing system may well be failing researchers who want to share their findings, but there’s less evidence that researchers have the kinds of problem that open access was originally intended to solve in the journals environment – that is to say, the problem of researchers not being able to get at the high-quality published content that they needed to do their work ..."