Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow - highlights

The SPARC Europe road show in Lower College Hall 26 November was a great success attracting interested University staff and students from St Andrews and beyond. It was good to see a number of postgraduate students attending. What unites them is a shared interest in Open Access (OA) and enthusiasm for the possibilities of making research more accessible and to discover new ways of engaging in and with research.

Eelco Ferwerda (OAPEN and DOAB)
Eelco gave an excellent introduction to Open Access for those new to the area and expanded this to talk about particular issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences:

• Two thirds of research outputs are book chapters compared to one third journal articles
• Less than 15% of publishers in humanities ask for an APC 
• There is a traditional and continuing preference for print. Even when e-book formats are provided there is still an expectation that there will be a print version to help cover costs
• He also dispelled several standard myths about OA publishing, reassuring the audience that OA is compatible with peer review, Creative Commons is compatible with copyright, CC-BY does not endorse plagiarism, and OA does not endanger academic freedom.

Guy Rowlands (St Andrews)
Guy gave an interesting and entertaining talk on his path to online publishing and Open Access. Charting the ups and downs of trying to find a publisher for a 25-50K word long essay (between a journal article and a monograph) he eventually decided to "stuff it" and publish works of this length in a new format dubbed the "midigraph" by his four year-old son. Guy is now the Editor-in-Chief of a series published by the Centre for French History and Culture. It has proved an effective way to disseminate research, e.g. Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War in the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series has received 250 page views and been downloaded 120 times just this year. As there is no way of telling where the digital copies have gone it is probably safe to factor in another 50% of readers for the downloads. Guy has had very positive responses from publishers agreeing to review his upcoming titles. This kind of attention is good for the School of History and the University in terms of esteem measures. He concluded by questioning why the long essay form, of which the noted historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had been a master, had died out.

Rupert Gatti (OpenBook Publishers and Cambridge)
Rupert agreed with Guy that "stuff it" is often the starting point for researchers to take an interest in Open Access. He introduced the idea of legacy publishing, i.e. publication in printed books as the primary means of dissemination. Limited print runs of these books make it difficult for researchers in HSS fields to justify relevance to funders leading to the "crisis of dissemination". He suggested that Open Access is part of the solution to this. He explained that legacy publishers have typically missed IT opportunities to change and improve publishing models although he emphasised that traditional rigorous peer review is still in place. He gave a demonstration of an amazing electronic translation of Diderot that included recordings of contemporary music by the Paris Conservatoire embedded in the footnotes (the printed book has QR codes that point to the same recordings on the internet). The recordings are licensed CC-BY by the Conservatoire. This offers new opportunities to develop scholarship and criticism not currently available under the legacy publishing model.

The talks were followed by a lively Q&A session with the speakers as panelists and Lily Neal of SPARC Europe was a warm and gracious guide throughout.

From left: Dr Rupert Gatti, Janet Aucock, Eelco Ferwerda, Lily Neal, Dr Guy Rowlands

Open Access award 2014

IFLA and Brill recently announced that Knowledge Unlatched are the winner of this year's IFLA/Brill Open Access Award. This year the jury reached a unanimous decision to name Knowledge Unlatched describing the organisation as "game-changing".

"The jury of the IFLA/Brill award is deeply impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the original concept, with the daring scope of the project, bringing together libraries, publishers and other organizations from around the world, and with the highly successful outcome of the pilot phase that tested the concept."(IFLA 2014)

The Knowledge Unlatched publishing model sees many libraries coming together and sharing the publishing costs for electronic books. Basically this means that a book can be made fully Open Access for only a small investment of under a hundred pounds in some cases.

  

 St Andrews University Library took part in the first round of the pilot project and currently has 22 ebooks on the library catalogue purchased through the system. More information can be found here.

Composing the Party Line

Ebooks such as this offer users a unique experience differing from normal ebooks due to the way they can be reused and distributed. All the ebooks created through the Knowledge Unlatched platform carry Creative Commons licenses which permit copying, redistribution, and adaptation into different forms. This is a far more attractive proposition than the sometimes very restrictive ebook policies offered by some publishers.








From everyone here, well done Knowledge Unlatched and keep up the good work.

The future of books: what do researchers want?

Please help a major research project to understand how you use books.             

OAPEN-UK, an AHRC and Jisc-funded project on open access monographs, is currently running a survey to understand how researchers in the humanities and social sciences use books, and especially monographs.

The survey design has been informed by a range of funders including HEFCE and Jisc, and the findings will help build an evidence base for future policies to support monograph publishing in the UK.  

No identifiable data will be made public or shared beyond the OAPEN-UK project team. All respondents to the survey can enter a prize draw to win up to £100 of Amazon vouchers.

I hope you’ll spare 10-15 minutes to participate, and to help the researchers understand what you want as both authors and readers of books.

The survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/K96XZD5 (closes 6 June 2014)

If you have any questions, please contact the survey researcher, Ellen Collins, on ellen.collins@researchinfonet.org


The survey will form an important input into the HEFCE Monographs and Open Access Project. This study aims to examine the difficulties facing open access publishing for monographs. HEFCE has set up an Expert Reference Group to establish what evidence is needed to inform understanding in this area, and to provide advice on an appropriate programme of work to gather this evidence.

Knowledge Unlatched pilot exceeds 200 sign-ups

The Knowledge Unlatched team are delighted to inform us that they have reached (and exceeded) the target of 200 libraries joining their pilot project to share the costs of ‘unlatching’ a collection 28 front-list titles from 13 recognised scholarly publishers.

With sign-ups from 19 countries in 4 continents the pilot has revealed the interest in Libraries worldwide in examining new business models that help to decrease the cost of monograph acquisitions. St Andrews signed up at the start of the pilot as we were also very keen to support this new model for OA publishing.

Here’s a brief explanation of how the model works:

The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF.

The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines. For example:

Access to the Title Fee allows publishers to feel confident that they will not make a loss on a title if it is made Open Access. Publishers are willing to provide libraries with discounts and make books available on Open Access licences if they can be assured that their core costs will be covered.

Due to the success of the pilot, the Knowledge Unlatched team anticipate that the number of sign-ups will continue to increase as will the scope and range of monographs made available for ‘unlatching’. The model is also expected to be financially self-sustaining as the costs of operating the project will be covered by a small percentage of each Title Fee.

Open Access monograph - Wellcome Trust OA funding in action

Just a few weeks after the Wellcome Trust strengthened their open access policy to include monographs, the first OA monograph funded by the Trust has been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000, by Dr Aya Homei and Professor Michael Worboys, is now available as a free ebook. See the full details, and download under a Creative Commons licence from http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137377029

In an LSE blog post, the author stated:

We are delighted that our book is being published open access and feel that it will ensure that our subject, the history of fungal disease, will enjoy a much wider audience than would otherwise have been the case.

Professor Worboys goes on to describe the process as being the same as it would be for a print version, other than a little extra work on obtaining image permissions - none of which were refused. Sam Burridge of Palgrave Macmillan describes their approach to publishing open access across all their formats, and hopes this book will be the first of many.

Blog post: The Wellcome Trust funds its first open access monograph, helping medical humanities reach wider audiences

To build on the theme of this OA book, we took a look in Research@StAndrews:FullText and found this thesis - rather different in scope but of interest locally:

Patterson, Stephen (1989) The control of infectious diseases in Fife, c. 1855-1950

and via our Research@StAndrews portal we found this article, partially funded by Wellcome, and available free from Europe PMC:

Telford, J. C., Yeung, J. H. F., Xu, G., Kiefel, M. J., Watts, A. G., Hader, S., Chan, J., Bennet, A. J., Moore, M. M., & Taylor, G. L. (2011). The Aspergillus fumigatus sialidase is a KDNase: structural and mechanistic insights. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 286(12), 10783-10792

We hope it won't be long before we can add a Wellcome Trust-funded open access monograph to our collection!

Information about open access books added to libguide

To start this year's Open Access Week, the Library has added to its Libguide on open access with a page about open access monographs.

In addition to developments in journal publishing, there are many exciting things happening with book publishing. We have provided some basic information, with links to details on recent developments including new business models. You can also find information about projects and publishers, and how to search for open access books.

See the new guide at http://libguides.st-andrews.ac.uk/oabooks

Publisher extends open access choice to monographs

Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences now have an opportunity to publish open access monographs with Brill’s new initiative:

“As a major publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Biology and International Law, Brill is committed to enhancing access to academic content in any sustainable way. Since its academic book publications are a cornerstone of the program, it is extending Brill Open to include monographs and edited volumes.”

Under Brill's OA option, authors retain copyright and can choose from 2 Creative Commons licences (CC-BY / CC-BY-NC), determining whether commercial re-use is allowed and the cost of the Book Publication Charge. At EUR 5000 for a 350-page book under the CC-BY-NC licence, this ties in with the typical production costs mentioned by Open Book Publishers of £3,500-£5,000, and suggests that a business model for open access book publishing is achievable and affordable.

With the Wellcome Trust extending their open access policy to include scholarly monographs and book chapters* from October 2013 we are likely to see more publishers announcing their options for authors soon.

Previous blog post on examples of OA books and new publishing models

*Wellcome Trust's Monograph and Book Chapter FAQ