The Open Access Books Network is a space for passionate conversations about OA books. Researchers, publishers, librarians, infrastructure providers — indeed, anyone who is interested — can discuss any aspect of OA books here. This group was begun by members of OAPEN, OPERAS, ScholarLed and SPARC Europe.
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DISCUSSION — contribute to any of the discussion threads, or start your own!
SITE — check out our latest blog posts, and get in touch (info@oabooksnetwork.org) to propose a post on any aspect of OA books.
FROM CORE / FILES — add any publications or documents related to Open Access books.
DOCS — go here for collaborative documents on OA book projects and resources.
CONTACT: info@oabooksnetwork.org
TWITTER: @oabooksnetwork
Header photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash.
Profile image by Ronald Snijder.
Files List
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Michael Taylor, "Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage" preprint on arxiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442
" This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley. Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact. "
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DIVERSIFYING READERSHIP THROUGH OPEN ACCESS: A USAGE ANALYSIS FOR OA BOOKS - white paper
By Ros Pyne, Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Alkim Özaygen, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon
Open access (OA) books are reaching more countries and have greater usage and higher citation numbers than non-OA books. A new analysis collaboratively produced by Springer Nature and COARD (Collaborative Open Access Research & Development) presents these and other key findings in a new white paper that explores how OA affects the geographical diversity of readers.
It shows that OA books have substantially more readers in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and that OA also helps to increase attention to scholarship about these countries. The study is to date the largest and most comprehensive of its kind; the underlying dataset is based on 3,934 books published by Springer Nature, including 281 OA books.
Confirming previous research looking at the potential usage benefits of OA, this analysis shows more downloads and more citations for every type of book, in every discipline, in each of the three years of publication (2015, 2016, 2017) included in the sample. The report finds that OA books on average achieve ten times more downloads and 2.4 times more citations than non-OA books. Furthermore, download numbers from the open web are generally around double those from institutional network points.
DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12746177
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Exploring Usage of Open Access Books via the JSTOR Platform
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Modes of access: the influence of dissemination channels on the use of open access monographs
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The deliverance of open access books Examining usage and dissemination