Catégories
EN

Collective funding models for open access books: Librarians’ experiences and barriers to participation across six European contexts

Authors : Judith Fathallah, Joe Deville, Izabella Penier, Francesca Corazza

This report seeks to understand librarians’ experiences of collective funding models for open access books, especially barriers to joining organisations like the Open Book Collective (OBC).

The OBC is one of an increasing number of organisations that are using a collective ‘Diamond’ funding model for open access, wherein libraries commit to financially support open access book publishers, and/or open infrastructure providers for a set period of time to fund their work.

The report aims to learn from differing experiences in countries with different open access policies and institutional contexts. It focuses its research on six countries in continental Europe: Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. The research includes interviews with 20 participants. Most are librarians, alongside a selection of publishers and open access experts.

It provides particular insight into how librarians understand collective funding models and their ability to become involved in them, within their national and institutional settings. This is supplemented by an analysis of existing research on collective funding models and a profile of each country’s current open access publishing context, based on an extensive literature review.

The report will be of interest to librarians seeking to build further capacity to support collective Diamond open access funding models within their institutions, as well as publishers, infrastructure providers and collaborative endeavours seeking to build collective support for the development of open access programmes.

URL : Collective funding models for open access books: Librarians’ experiences and barriers to participation across six European contexts

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17339946

Catégories
EN

The Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard: A Tool for Increasing Publisher Transparency for Authors, Librarians, and the Scholarly Community

Authors : Holly Limbert, Dan DeSanto

Introduction: The Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard is introduced as a pioneering tool aimed at fostering transparency and clarity in the realm of open access book publishing. In response to the growing need for accessible information for authors, librarians, and stakeholders, this dashboard aggregates data from a multitude of publishers into a centralized platform.

Description of Program/Service: Employing a comprehensive set of criteria, including pricing for book processing charges (BPCs), licensing options, editorial quality statements, and self-archiving policies, the Dashboard evaluates publisher transparency. Through a color-coded system, it visually represents the degree of openness exhibited by each publisher, empowering authors to make informed decisions about where to publish their work.

Next Steps: Looking ahead, the Dashboard’s dynamic nature allows for continuous updates, facilitating its role as an agent for positive change within the scholarly publishing community. As a versatile resource, the OBE Dashboard holds promise in enhancing efficiency, transparency, and accountability in open access book publishing.

Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard: https://bit.ly/OBEdashboard
OBE Additions and Edits Form: https://bit.ly/OBEdashboardform
Zenodo Link: https://zenodo.org/records/13366056

URL : The Open Book Environment (OBE) Dashboard: A Tool for Increasing Publisher Transparency for Authors, Librarians, and the Scholarly Community

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18112

Catégories
FR

Politiques documentaires et de médiation des livres numériques en bibliothèque académique

Autrice/Author : Mathilde Gourret

Il y a encore une dizaine d’années, en France, le livre numérique pouvait être qualifié de ressource « émergente » en bibliothèque académique. Les politiques documentaires des établissements peinaient à se saisir de cet objet nouveau. Depuis, le paysage éditorial du livre numérique s’est considérablement transformé.

L’offre éditoriale s’est diversifiée et l’essor des monographies numériques en accès ouvert entraîne une nouvelle donne pour les bibliothèques. Dans ce nouveau contexte, comment les bibliothèques académiques peuvent-elles intégrer les livres numériques dans leurs collections ?

Comment articuler les monographies numériques et imprimées dans une offre répondant aux besoins des usagers ? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, on s’intéressera aux politiques et pratiques documentaires mises en œuvre au sein des bibliothèques académiques françaises, en s’interrogeant en particulier sur les organisations, outils et processus qui sous-tendent ces pratiques.

URL : Politiques documentaires et de médiation des livres numériques en bibliothèque académique

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/71195-politiques-documentaires-et-de-mediation-des-livres-numeriques-en-bibliotheque-academique

Catégories
EN

The Landscape of Scholarly Book Publishing in Croatia: Finding Pathways for Viable Open Access Models

Author : Iva Melinščak Zlodi

1) Background: Open access to scholarly works is globally recognized as a goal to be achieved as soon as possible; however, there is not yet a general understanding of how to achieve open access for books. In considering the most appropriate models of transition, an accurate and detailed insight into national and regional specifics can be of great importance.

The aim of this research is to show the current state of scholarly book publishing in Croatia: recognising the key stakeholders, their characteristics, and the current level of open access to scholarly books.

(2) Methods: The existing data from two different sources were used: the data about the public subsidies for book publishers by the Ministry of Science and Education and the data on published books from the Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI, both for the period from 2018 to 2021.

(3) Results: In the four-year period, 224 Croatian publishers were awarded subsidies to publish 2359 book titles. The majority of the publishers received support for only a small number of titles and relatively low amounts of subsidies. More than half of the titles are published by small private commercial publishers.

However, the uptake of digital publishing among commercial publishers is very modest. Open access to scholarly books is almost entirely in the domain of non-commercial publishers. Most open access titles are available on the websites of their publishers.

(4) Conclusions: The analysis of the data from these two sources have resulted in an overview of the current state of book publishing in Croatia. Such an overview provides a good basis for designing future measures and creating a national open science plan and can also be a useful contribution to international discussions.

URL : The Landscape of Scholarly Book Publishing in Croatia: Finding Pathways for Viable Open Access Models

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11010017

Catégories
EN

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/

 

Catégories
EN

Unlocking the digital potential of scholarly monographs in 21st century research

Authors : Margo Bargheer, Zeki Mustafa Dogan, Wolfram Horstmann, Mike Mertens, Andrea Rapp

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format “journal article”.

The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS).

In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options.

We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph.

URL  : Unlocking the digital potential of scholarly monographs in 21st century research

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10174

 

Catégories
Non classé

Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs

« Introduction :  Open Access and licenses are closely intertwined. Both Creative Commons (CC) and Open Access seek to restore the balance between the owners of creative works and prospective users. Apart from the legal issues around CC licenses, we could look at role of intermediaries whose work is enabled through CC licenses. Does licensing documents under Creative Commons increase access and reuse in a direct way, or is access and reuse amplified by intermediaries?

OAPEN Library and DOAB The OAPEN Library contains books available under both open licenses, for example Creative Commons, as well as books that are published under terms that only allow for personal use. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) functions as an intermediary, offering aggregation services exclusively focused on books with an open license.

Methods: Downloads are used as a proxy for the use of books in the OAPEN Library. The data set that this paper analyses data that was captured over a period of 33 months. During this time, 1734 different books were made available through the OAPEN Library: 855 books under a Creative Commons license and 879 books under a more restrictive regime. The influence of open licenses, aggregation in DOAB, and subject and language are evaluated.

Results :  Once the effects of subject and language are taken into account, there is no evidence that making books available under open licenses results in more downloads than making books available under licenses that only allow for personal use. Yet, additional aggregation in the DOAB has a large positive effect on the number of times a book is downloaded.

Conclusion : The application of open licenses to books does not, on its own, lead to more downloads. However, open licenses pave the way for intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. These services play an important role by amplifying the impacts of open access licensing in the case of scholarly books. »

URL : Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1187