Conveners
Session 4: New Initiatives and Studies in Open Access Book Publishing
- Tyler Walters (Virginia Tech)
Description
Open Access and the Monograph: Surveying the Current Landscape
Open Access is gradually gaining momentum in monograph publishing, thanks to developments on a number of fronts. Groups such as the Knowledge Exchange, the Mellon Foundation, and the OPERAS program have commissioned studies that have bettered our understanding of the special challenges and issues facing the widespread adoption of Open Access in monograph publishing. Meanwhile, realtime OA book publishing initiatives in Europe, the UK, and North America are providing the kind of on-the-ground experimentation that is necessary if new frameworks and business models are to emerge. One example in the US is TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), which is sponsored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of University Presses (AUPresses), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Yet another initiative is looking at developing a framework for OA book usage. Speakers in this session will discuss these initiatives and related OA book publishing trends and issues in an international context.
Monograph publishing in North America operates in a less centralized funding environment than in Europe and the UK, but higher education institutions and funding bodies are nonetheless paying careful attention to international trends while beginning to experiment with new funding models. This presentation will survey current efforts to introduce OA into monograph publishing in North America....
A recent research project led by the Book Industry Study Group in collaboration with KU Research, the Educopia Institute, and researchers from the University of Michigan and University of North Texas Libraries identified the challenges in understanding the usage of open-access (OA) scholarly ebooks, suggested some opportunities for resolving them, and created a framework for future action...
Europe has a long-standing commitment to the development of open monographs. In the continent many initiatives, platforms and projects have been blossoming in the last decade. More recent is the shared feeling across the academic community that the many separate efforts need to be coordinated in some way. That's why the topic highlighted during the OPERAS conference last year in Athens was the...
