The deliverance of open access books : Examining usage and dissemination

Abstract

In many scholarly disciplines, books – not articles – are the norm. As print runs become smaller, the question arises whether publishing monographs in open access helps to make their contents globally accessible. To answer this question, the results of multiple studies on the usage of open access books are presented.The research focuses on three areas: economic viability; optimization of open access monographs infrastructure and measuring the effects of open access in terms of scholarly impact and societal influence. Each chapter reviews a di?ferent aspect: book sales, digital dissemination, open licenses, user communities, measuring usage, developing countries and the effects on citations and social media.

The significant difference in impact: An exploratory study about the meaning and value of metrics for open access monographs

“…Equally, sales and library usage data do not indicate that the book has been read, they simply provide a number indicating an intention to read. Download statistics are not only relative to the number of readers, but also to the format in which the book is offered and how easy it is to find the book in different databases or for readers to recommend it to peers for further reading (Snijder 2019).…”

Philosophers' perceptions of pay to publish and open access in Spain: Books versus journals, more than a financial dilemma

“…Other analysts have also documented huge disparities among BPC fees (Jubb, 2017;Ferwerda, Pinter & Stern, 2017). Finally, other initiatives and studies have explored alternative funding formats to stimulate open books, both in general (Reinsfelder & Pike, 2018;Barnes & Gatti, 2019) and in the humanities (Snijder, 2019;Jobmann & Schönfelder, 2019;Eve et al, 2017).…”