How important are open access books to academic authors?

To kick off Academic Book Week in April, Springer Nature held a free event  for researchers exploring open access (OA) books, discussing topics such as why academics publish OA books, how the impact of their research can be tracked, and the future of OA book funding. Researchers in the hard sciences are more familiar with the concept of open access article publishing, but we were interested in talking to researchers across various disciplines, including the Humanities and Social Sciences, specifically about OA books. You can read what the event speakers had to say in our recent LSE Impact blog but we wanted to share with you here what researchers who attended the event think about open access books. Setting the scene More than 30 researchers attended from a variety of subject areas from the Humanities and Social Sciences to Physics, Engineering and Computer Science. From pre-event registration information, we knew that 56% had previously authored an academic book before, but none had experience with publishing an OA book, whereas two authors had previously published an OA article. Researchers came from institutions such as Imperial College London, LSE and Coventry University as well as from industry. We discussed the benefits of OA books, asked authors about their opinions and experiences, and looked at the challenge of finding funding for OA books. What are the benefits of OA books? The Springer Nature report ‘The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of schol...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Open Access Publishing open access books Source Type: blogs