Spotlight On Open Access Books At COASP 2012

For the first time, 2012 saw the 4th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) feature an afternoon of sessions entirely dedicated to Open Access books. In his introduction, OAPEN’s Eelco Ferwerda highlighted that with this year’s milestones – the launch of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), PKP’s Open Monograph Press, and Springer’s announcement of SpringerOpen books – the time for Open Access monograph publishing has arrived, culminating in Open Access books being made part of the program at COASP.

Things are speeding up for books, Ferwerda remarked. However, there are still a lot of unknowns: What will be the main business model for Open Access books? Under what license should they be published? What do the stakeholders in scholarly communication—the authors, libraries, funders and publishers—think about Open Access monographs? The afternoon thus set out to explore emerging business and publishing models for Open Access books, and current research on user and stakeholder needs.

After the introduction, Lars Bjørnshauge, SPARC Europe Director of European Library Relations, chaired the first session on funding and publication Models for OA Books. In the first of 3 funding models, Marin Dacos presented OpenEdition Freemium in which the basic services are free (i.e. basic access to books) and advanced premium subscription services (i.e. freemium = free + premium) finance the entire platform. This offer, Dacos exlains, guarantees maximum distribution of academic texts via free-access, while financing the publication activity through the premium services. The model has been recently proposed to libraries, who, according to Dacos, have been positive in their feedback. OpenEdition books will be launched at the end of the year. More than 50% of the books on this platform will be available Open Access where the remaining 50% will be available for different forms of unlocking (e.g. unglue.it or Knowledge Unlatched)...