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To date, Oxford University Press (OUP) has published 115 OA books and that number increases year on year, partly through an increasing range of funder initiatives and partly through opportunities to experiment.
Increasingly, the policy conversation recognises that the drivers for OA are as applicable to books as they are to research articles, and research funders and policy makers are looking for ways to increase the volume of OA book publishing, but how simple is it to apply the accelerator?...
A book is not a journal
It sounds obvious but there are significant differences in what books are, and how they develop from a period of research with practical consequences for the extent to which processes that have been applied to open access journals can be made to apply to open access books.
There are several reasons for this:..
While we don’t have all of the answers and cannot do this alone, we do have some important questions that must be tackled if we are to move the discussion forwards:
- What is an effective funding model for OA book publishing which takes into account both the time spent by the author in researching and producing the work and the time spent by the publisher in helping to shape and disseminate it?
- What timeframes are appropriate for dissemination for a long-form piece of research like a monograph which has a long life of citation and discovery?
- How can we ensure scholars are not closed out of the move towards OA because the current models do not fit their research areas or funding opportunities?
As we reach the end of International Open Access Week for another year, these are the questions that we will be taking forward in our conversations with policy makers and funders alongside our own publishing models as we look to support our authors and readers through the transition to a more open world for research.
Source: OUPblog (blog)
