2019 Charleston Library Conference

2019 is shaping up to be the year that the scholarly community gets serious about open access books. In this session, we bring you the view from Europe and beyond. We’ll explore the position of authors, institutions, funders, and publishers, drawing on recently conducted research, and in a panel discussion we’ll consider what we as a community can do to change attitudes and support the transition to OA for books.

This year, Springer Nature conducted the first ever landscape survey dedicated to understanding the views of book authors about OA for books. More than 2,500 authors worldwide responded. Springer Nature will share highlights from their findings, including authors’ motivations for publishing books and why they choose to publish OA (or not to), as well as views on policy detail, and how attitudes differ by region and experience level.

The Knowledge Exchange (KE) partners, six national organisations within Europe, published a “Landscape Study on Open Access and Monographs” in 2017, and, in 2018, commissioned a follow-up survey and held a workshop in Brussels to help identify the next steps to support the transition to open access. KE’s presentation will provide an overview of the results of the survey and the follow up workshop, which developed key themes, such as policy, author engagement, technical infrastructure and monitoring, and called for the development of a European roadmap for Open Access monographs.

LIBER is the voice of Europe’s research library community. Earlier this year, they surveyed LIBER libraries about OA books. LIBER will share comments from respondents on how libraries can create workflows and funding mechanisms to encourage OA book publishing, on the kind of training needed for library staff to adapt to OA developments, and on ways libraries who are not starting their own university press can support OA book publishing.