Open Access Books: Open Access in order to…

Author: Penny Freedman

By: Christina Emery, Marketing Manager, OA Books

This week is Open Access Week, a global event that encourages the discussion of open access (OA) amongst researchers and the scholarly community. This year’s theme for OA Week asks the question, ‘Open access in order to…?’ Whilst OA is more established for journal publishing, it is still relatively new for academic books. So, from a publisher’s perspective, why does Springer Nature offer an OA option for book authors? We have been publishing OA books and chapters under our SpringerOpen and Palgrave Macmillan imprints since 2011 and just this week published our 400th OA book. We asked some of our OA books team and editors about what OA means to them.

Open access in order to…?

“…help our authors achieve dissemination and citation, to send our publications into the wider world and to spark debate and share research.”
Maddie Holder, Commissioning Editor, Business and Management, Palgrave Macmillan

“…take chances on emerging or niche areas, to measure interest in these areas (by downloads of OA content), and have an opportunity to reach a wide audience; yet knowing that we will recoup some costs to reduce publishing risk.”
Todd Green, Editorial Director, Apress

“…engage people from all over the world, regardless of their economic background, into the highest level scholarly conversation.”
Agata Morka, Senior Manager OA Books, Open Research, Springer Nature

“…arrive in the digital age, where knowledge should be accessible to all, and to be truly customer centric.”
Andrea Pillmann, Executive Editor Human Genetics, Springer

“…reach the widest possible audience, to fulfil legal requirements and/or the needs of sponsoring institutions, to help companies and institutions to promote their work and to spread their research results.”
Ralf Gerstner, Executive Editor Computer Science, Springer

“…Advance and define new sub-disciplines and emerging areas of research. Our OA titles have given us a fantastic opportunity to establish Palgrave Macmillan as one of the leading publishers in the history of mental health and medicine more widely. Since publishing our first OA titles in the Mental Health in Historical Perspective series, we’ve seen interest grow and grow in this important and timely research area. The series editors have been very supportive and pleased to be able to promote the series beyond our traditional readership of scholars and students, with open access enabling these titles to reach policymakers, NGOs and a wider general readership.”
Molly Beck, Commissioning Editor History, Palgrave Macmillan

Open research at Springer Nature

We see open research as one of the major forces reshaping the way that researchers communicate and collaborate to advance the pace and quality of discovery. Earlier this week we announced how the transition to gold OA for journals was progressing, with more than 70% of Springer Nature authors from four European countries now publishing via gold open access. Although the progression for OA books has been slower, it is growing, with support internationally from funders, institutions, authors and publishers. We are one of the only major book publishers worldwide to facilitate OA across all publication formats: monographs, edited volumes/collections, proceedings, protocols, and short-form books (SpringerBriefs and Palgrave Pivots). We also offer authors the option to publish individual chapters open access within edited collections. You can find further information about the OA options we offer for journals, books and data here and a list of all our published OA books can be found here.

There are numerous benefits for authors and researchers which we highlighted in our previous blog on OA books: the opportunity for increased visibility, wider dissemination, a global readership, maximum reuse through the Creative Commons licence, and access to Bookmetrix in order to view the reach, usage and readership of the book. A Springer Nature report substantiating how OA affects the usage of scholarly books will be published in November. If you would like to receive a free digital copy of this report, please let us know.