Étiquette : open access monographs

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Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?

Author : Ronald Snijder

In April 2020, the OAPEN Library moved to a new platform, based on DSpace 6. During the same period, IRUS-UK started working on the deployment of Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice (R5). This is, therefore, a good moment to compare two widely used usage metrics – R5 and Google Analytics (GA).

This article discusses the download data of close to 11,000 books and chapters from the OAPEN Library, from the period 15 April 2020 to 31 July 2020. When a book or chapter is downloaded, it is logged by GA and at the same time a signal is sent to IRUS-UK.

This results in two datasets: the monthly downloads measured in GA and the usage reported by R5, also clustered by month. The number of downloads reported by GA is considerably larger than R5. The total number of downloads in GA for the period is over 3.6 million.

In contrast, the amount reported by R5 is 1.5 million, around 400,000 downloads per month. Contrasting R5 and GA data on a country-by-country basis shows significant differences. GA lists more than five times the number of downloads for several countries, although the totals for other countries are about the same.

When looking at individual tiles, of the 500 highest ranked titles in GA that are also part of the 1,000 highest ranked titles in R5, only 6% of the titles are relatively close together. The choice of metric service has considerable consequences on what is reported.

Thus, drawing conclusions about the results should be done with care. One metric is not better than the other, but we should be open about the choices made. After all, open access book metrics are complicated, and we can only benefit from clarity.

URL : Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.539

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Open Academic Book Publishing during COVID-19 Pandemic: A View on Romanian University Presses

Authors : Mariana Cernicova-Buca, Katalin Luzan

In the context of the 2020 public health crisis that discourages exchanges of physical objects in society, university-led publishing needed to rethink its operations. Worldwide the opening of quality scholarly content proved to be a solution.

University presses reacted rapidly and offered books according to the open access model. The present research aimed to map the editorial landscape of Romanian university presses, to identify the main features displayed online by the university presses parented by public universities and to highlight the readiness of these players to further open access academic books, especially in the time of the COVID-19 crisis.

The quantitative approach investigated the availability of e-books in the university presses’ portfolios, including the alignment to the open access scholarship movement, the use of social media accounts to promote the presses and the response of the presses to the challenges of the health crisis.

Out of the 46 active university presses, only six had open book titles in their portfolios and only one genuinely responded actively to the challenges posed by the need for electronic formats in 2020. Unless Romanian university presses modernize and restructure their modus operandi, they can prove irrelevant in the post-crisis period.

URL : Open Academic Book Publishing during COVID-19 Pandemic: A View on Romanian University Presses

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8040049

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Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage

Author : Michael Taylor

The last decade has seen two significant phenomena emerge in research communication: the rise of open access (OA) publishing, and evidence of online sharing in the form of altmetrics. There has been limited examination of the effect of OA on online sharing for journal articles, and little for books.

This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley.

Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact.

URL  : https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442

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Analysing the Usage Data of Open Access Scholarly Books: What Can Data Tell Us?

Author : Alkim Ozaygen

This study explores data captured on the Internet related to OA scholarly books to provide a detailed overall picture of the dissemination of these books beginning from the point they were made OA.

To uncover the factors that impact on the digital uses of OA books, it explores relationships between book characteristics and the characteristics and motivations of the groups using and sharing books in digital landscapes.

URI : http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/79585

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How Can We Use Social Media Data Related to OA Monographs

Authors : Alkim Ozaygen, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Katie Wilson, RichardHosking, Karl Huang

This paper reports on a study of social media events relating to 28 Open Access (OA) monographs, published between 2014 and 2015. As with citations (Cronin 1981) social media events represent the frozen footprints of the journey that monographs take as they move through digital landscapes.

The study captured mentions of the study-set of monographs via Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and online blogs; as well as user ratings on Google Books, Amazon and Goodreads.

Information relating to the ways in which the books were bookmarked and cited was captured via the online reference managing platform Mendeley. The benefits and limitations of different altmetrics approaches to capturing and analyzing this data are discussed.

Practical suggestions for researchers interested in the application of Altmetrics approaches to studies of monographs are also provided.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02544911

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The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

Authors : Alexandra Jobmann, Nina Schönfelder

The strategic goal of the project “National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE” is to create the conditions for a large-scale open-access transformation in accordance with the Alliance of German Science Organizations.

In close collaboration with the publisher transcript, we developed a business model that strengthens the transformation process for e-books in the humanities and social sciences.

It largely addresses the drawbacks of existing models. Moreover, it is manageable, sustainable, transparent, and scalable for both publishers and libraries. This case report describes the setup of the model, its successful implementation for the branch “political science” of transcript in 2019, and provides a Strengths–Weaknesses–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) analysis.

We believe that it has the potential to become one of the major open-access business models for research monographs and anthologies in the humanities and social sciences, especially for non-English e-books.

URL : The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030055

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Bibliodiversity in Practice: Developing Community-Owned, Open Infrastructures to Unleash Open Access Publishing

Authors : Lucy Barnes, Rupert Gatti

Academic publishing is changing. The drive towards open access publishing, which is being powered in the UK by funding bodies (SHERPA Juliet), the requirements of REFs 2021 (UKRI) and 2027 (Hill 2018), and Europe-wide movements such as the recently-announced Plan S (‘About Plan S’), has the potential to shake up established ways of publishing academic research.

Within book publishing, the traditional print formats and the conventional ways of disseminating research, which are protected and promoted by a small number of powerful incumbents, are being challenged.

Academic publishing, and academic book publishing, is at a crossroads: will it find ways to accommodate open access distribution within its existing structures?

Or will new systems of research dissemination be developed? And what might those new systems look like?In this article we look at the main features of the existing monograph publication and distribution ecosystem, and question the suitability of this for open access monographs.

We look specifically at some of the key economic characteristics of the monograph publishing market and consider their implications for new infrastructures designed specifically to support open access titles.

The key observations are that the production of monographs displays constant returns to scale, and so can (and does) support large numbers of publishing initiatives; at the same time the distribution and discovery systems for monographs display increasing returns to scale and so naturally leads to the emergence of a few large providers.

We argue that in order to protect the diversity of players and outputs within the monograph publishing industry in the transition to open access it is important to create open and community-managed infrastructures and revenue flows that both cater for different business models and production workflows and are resistant to take over or control by a single (or small number) of players.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02175276/