Open Access Monographs: An Aggregator’s Perspective

By Phil Hearn (Publisher Relations Manager, Project MUSE) <phearn.muse@jhu.edu>

Project MUSE operates within a bustling cross section of the knowledge community, built upon the balance of the (often competing) needs of libraries, publishers, and users. While this balance has been carefully calibrated and iterated across our institutional sales models for books and journals, open access (OA) completely resets the scales of each stakeholder’s roles. How does an institution best serve its users when the content is freely available outside of its walls? How does a publisher sustain a monograph publishing list as the scholarly winds push more toward a fully open access norm? What responsibility (if any) falls on the user of OA content, and how is that responsibility best enforced? And, to push into the focus of this essay, what is the role of an aggregator platform like Project MUSE to help answer these questions?

Open access monographs have been part of the Project MUSE platform since 2018, when we launched our Mellonfunded MUSE Open initiative. In four years we have grown the program to include about 4,500 OA books in the humanities and social sciences from over 80 nonprofit scholarly publishers. These publishers operate across a wide spectrum of scale and resources, from the largest North American university presses to small independent presses operating on a shoestring budget and publishing one book per year (or less). Our role as an aggregator is, in large part, to enable these publishers to reach their intended readers with minimal barriers, regardless of size and resources. We charge a modest hosting fee from participating publishers and encourage them to account for these hosting fees when acquiring funding.

Open Access seems unlikely to rest on a one-size-fits-all model across different publishers, countries, subjects, and use cases. And in one respect, the aggregator that hosts an open access monograph is simply the end point of a long process of securing funding, editorial, production, distribution, and marketing of the content itself. But MUSE and other aggregators are responsible for ensuring that the access is indeed open for this content, as well as secure, stable, preserved, accessible, and, most importantly, discoverable, so that it can rise above the infinite search results and be selected by researchers to play its part in the scholarly discourse.

Ensuring that a book is available open access does not guarantee that users will discover it. It is one thing to place a monograph’s metadata and PDF in an institutional repository or on a web page for anybody to download free of charge; it is quite another to make sure that scholars can find that page to begin with. When so many users begin their research on Google, what systems are in place to make sure that relevant scholarly open access resources are returned prominently among endless search results? Authors and publishers, of course, want their open access books to be read as widely as possible, and this is often the challenge that encourages them to seek wider aggregation for these titles.

A major function of MUSE’s technical infrastructure is in fulfilling access to users at institutions who pay for our gated content. When a book is OA, and the role of arbiter for institutionally purchased access is not necessary, MUSE’s primary responsibility becomes making sure that as many users who want to find a book can do so. This means leveraging our scale to send open access metadata to as many linking and discovery partners as possible.

Project MUSE has decades of experience navigating SEO trends and requirements to boost the discoverability of content on the platform, and we track closely with the evolving standards around open access metadata in this space. We initiated a partnership with the Directory of Open Access Books, automatically distributing data for any OA title that launches on MUSE from a member publisher, so long as it has a Creative Commons (CC) license. We deposit DOIs through CrossRef, either as the primary depositor or via their Co-Access program, to ensure stable reference linking even for books that appear on multiple platforms. We actively encourage institutions familiar with Project MUSE to ingest our Open Access title lists into their discovery layers, and maintain constant feeds flowing to discovery services like EBSCO Discovery Service, OCLC, and Ex

Libris (among many others) to enable this ingestion. For those who prefer to update their holdings manually using MARC records, we offer those too, free for any librarian to pull from our site. This, I should note, is how data for all content on MUSE flows downstream; the difference with open access content is that the downstream activities are not limited to purchasing institutions for certain collections or titles, but are instead available to any institution who wishes to add them to their holdings. MUSE’s approach to open access is to fully integrate it with our existing processes, and to expand the reach of that content to broader channels made possible by the open access model.

More and more institutions are choosing to add open access books to their holdings. Just from 2020 to 2021, MUSE saw discovery system and MARC record ingestion of open access books more than double, and the uptake continues to increase to well over 1,000 institutions. It is important to stress how meaningful this is: libraries are, at an increasing rate, choosing to place open access books in their holdings right alongside content that they have carefully selected and deliberately purchased or subscribed to for their users to access. This tracks with growing library support for open access initiatives across the market. We are seeing institutional investment in projects like Central European University Press’s “Opening the Future,” in which paid access for backlist books supports the publication of new open access titles. Library membership programs are emerging to fund OA projects from OAPEN to MIT Press’s “Direct to Open,” and Subscribe to Open (S2O) experiments (which MUSE is exploring on the journals side) encourage libraries to take an active role in sustaining open access publishing via existing funding channels.

This dovetails with the deeper symbolic value of open access books appearing on an aggregator like Project MUSE, a nonprofit entity that hosts only peer-reviewed, scholarly content from nonprofit publishers and societies. OA books and journals are not differentiated from gated content on our site in any meaningful way apart from access tags; there is no implication of lesser scholarly value, because of course there is no inherent difference. In pushing for a more open access future, it was important for us to place OA content on the same playing field as our most popular traditionally gated journals and books. It is encouraging to see institutional libraries around the world actively make the same determination.

All this focus on discoverability would be empty without a similarly robust focus on usage statistics. When sales are not part of the picture, usage becomes the key metric for publishers to track the success of their titles on Project MUSE and elsewhere, with applications from mere curiosity to acquisitions planning to grant applications. The launch of open access books on Project MUSE included a completely rebuilt in-house usage statistics suite for providing publishers with as much information as possible about the readership of their OA books. These tools enable publishers to view OA usage alongside the usage for their gated titles, compare year-over-year performance, identify highest-performing chapters, and easily identify trends over time. Project MUSE has taken a collaborative approach to collecting and analyzing the usage of OA books, providing usage statistics to efforts like University of North Carolina Press’s Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and Knowledge Unlatched to help facilitate a holistic view of how OA books perform online across hosting platforms.

These efforts to boost and understand the discovery of OA books on MUSE have yielded great success for our young open access program. In 2021, usage of OA books on MUSE increased about three times over the previous year to over 6 million hits, with users from almost every country in the world. With our scale as an aggregator, we have the critical mass of data to expand beyond anecdotal successes to attempt to pinpoint more systemic trends and movements in how users are engaging with OA books. We are actively studying this data to inform future platform updates, linking arrangements, and other adjustments to our approach or infrastructure that might further reduce any barriers to entry for readers seeking OA scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.