Future Prospects for Open Access Books — History and Perspectives from a European (Humanities) Press By Carsten Buhr (Managing Director, De Gruyter) and Steve Fallon (Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Steve.Fallon@degruyter.com> and Christina Lembrecht (Head, Open Research Department, De Gruyter)
Looking Back: How the Open Access Book Journey in Europe Began Recently, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) announced that it had reached an important milestone: more than 50,000 peer-reviewed open access books, published in more than 90 languages by 560 scholarly publishers, are now indexed in what has become one of the most comprehensive and relevant sources for tracing and understanding the development and the current physiognomics of the global open access book landscape. The DOAB was founded in 2012, in a period that can be understood as the formation phase for open access books in Europe. At that time, the first initiatives were launched to fund open access books (the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which started its OA books program as early as 2009, was a pioneer here). New publishing houses were founded that specialized exclusively in open access publications for the humanities and social sciences, and infrastructure emerged to drive the development of OA books (in addition to the already mentioned DOAB, these include OAPEN and Open Edition). And in summer 2013, a landmark conference entitled “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences” took place at the British Library in London, with more than 200 participants discussing how to foster open access for books and — more broadly — how the digital change can be used to fundamentally reform the publishing ecosystem and publishing habits in the humanities and social sciences. In this formation phase of open access book publishing, De Gruyter started to build our open access list. The first two open access books (one in library and information science, one in classical studies) were published in 2010, just two years after introducing eBooks for all new titles. After selling and sending print copies to libraries and end customers around the world for more than two centuries, electronic formats as a first step and open access publications as an (optional) second step have added new possibilities to fulfill our mandate to grow the reach and visibility of our publications. While the eBook was introduced across the board for all our titles, open access publications initially remained in the clear minority compared to what we today — for lack of an appropriate term — often call the “traditional” publications. We published only a handful of open access monographs per year in the first five years. But from 2015 onward a clear and continuous increase in open access frontlist titles can be observed due to the rise in OA funding in Europe, particularly in the context of larger third-party funded research projects (figure 1).
Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Figure 1. Development of OA frontlist book publication at De Gruyter 2010 to 2021. At the same time, we started to open — often in collaboration with partner institutions — backlist and archive titles. As a result, we surpassed the threshold of 1,000 open access books available on our platform in 2017.
Present Times: What the Structure of Our Portfolio Reveals about the State of Open Access Book Funding In 2021, more than 10 percent of our total book frontlist output were published immediately open access, the large majority in the humanities, where gold open access publications account for up to 20 percent of our publishing programs in select disciplines. Most of our OA books are funded through publication grants or subsidies, often referred to as book processing charges (BPC), which means that one party — generally the author or their institution — funds the OA publication of the book. Looking at our OA book portfolio over the past two years, just under 90 percent of our OA books are financed through BPCs (figure 2). Just over 10 percent of OA books are non-BPC funded, so there is no direct link between the author and the OA funding source.
Figure 2. BPC vs. non-BPC models share of total OA books at De Gruyter, 2020–2021.
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