Hi all, next Thursday (17th November) at 3pm GMT we’re looking forward to speaking with OABN stalwart Eric Hellman at our next boOkmArks event, about his work with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders and how these experiences have informed his perspectives on the early days of open access and more recent developments in OA books.

Eric…[Read more]

Hi all, next week we’re really looking forward to talking to Christina Drummond and Lucy Montgomery to discuss the OAeBU Usage Data project and the new developments the work will take over the coming years:

Wednesday 9th November, 1pm GMT, ‘Open Access Usage Data: Present Knowledge, Future Developments’: Sign up here!

Hi all, join us for an OA Week event on climate justice and open access books on Tuesday next week:

25th October, 3pm BST, ‘Lowering the Barriers to Climate Research: Climate Change and OA Books’: during Open Access Week, we’ll bring together a panel including authors, publishers and campaigners to discuss the impact of open access books relat…[Read more]

Hello all,

Jisc is organising a webinar series on the topic of open access books related to the forthcoming UKRI open access policy. Please find more details below and don’t hesitate to register if interested!

In August 2021, UKRI launched a new open access policy, which for the first time includes a provision for long form scholarly works…[Read more]

Hi everyone, we are looking for a new team member that will help us with managing a Horizon Europe funded project about research funder policies and strategies for open access books across Europe and beyond.

We are looking for a colleague with skills and experience in project management and communication. Knowledge of the subject matter is not…[Read more]

UNC Press uses CoreSource and we have just changed our OA settings from zero price to <UnpricedItem>, and I’m wondering what to do about the Amazon situation, since they still need zero pricing. I was worried that having one ISBN for zero price and another ISBN for <UnpricedItem>, as Trond suggests, would be confusing to other vendors who could…[Read more]

In the full ONIX 3 specification, “$0.00” is not a price that should ever exist. Either a non-zero <Price> block or an <UnpricedItemType> tag should be used.

Ideally, someone properly parsing ONIX should either disallow a price of “$0.00” or, more realistically, treat it differently.

For example:
You can make a book “free” via sending…[Read more]

Robby and Trond,

Thank you so much for your helpful answers!

I’m curious why we have to use “Unpriced Item”. Will some vendors not accept a $0.00 price?

All best,

Andrea

Though I suspect Trond overstates my capability, I appreciate the confidence.

He brings up a point that’s clearer in the slide stack than in what I posted: using multiple eISBNs.

As the slides point out, there are a few ways you might use multiple eISBNs in general.

Your system might allow you to create an “OA” eISBN versus a “free” eISBN (in…[Read more]

Oh and I should mention we don’t use CS (yet), we use Biblio for distribution, so I don’t know if CS actually allows an actual $0 price.  But Biblio does.

Also everything that Robert said, he is always right.

Cheers,

Trond

Hi Andrea, how we get around this is we have separate ISBNs for EPUB and Kindle (so we’re sending the exact same file but under a different ISBN as EPUB to Amazon), which allows us to price the OA EPUB as “unpriced” while the OA Kindle is priced at $0. It doesn’t make sense but it works. Until it doesn’t.

Trond Knutsen

Digital Publishing…[Read more]

I’ll upload the slides from my presentation at AUPresses this year if I can, but the gist of it is that BiblioVault classifies 4 types of vendors in their “OA-ness”:

OA “Only” – hopefully self explanatory, these vendors take ONIX 3, with UnpricedItemType with value “01” for free/no-charge, EpubLicense, and other OA specific tags. OAPEN,…[Read more]

Thanks! This is good to know.

It’s great to have this channel here. I’ve included a link to it in the new proposed guidelines Crossref has issued for making DOI links accessible. It’s not specific to books but I hope it’s of interest. It’s a call for comments so we’re very interested in getting…[Read more]

EBSCO was having trouble getting them from their Excel sheets (they do both Excel and ONIX), so we added them to our ONIX 2.1 and ONIX 3 output. It seems to have helped the EBSCO situation. No idea if any other vendors are using the data, but we send it. SubjectSchemeIdentifier “04”