Sustainable eBook Acquisition and Access: The not-for-profit Perspective By John Lenahan (Associate Vice President, Published Content, ITHAKA) <John.Lenahan@ithaka.org>
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ver the past decade, eBook acquisition and access practices have evolved significantly, including a shift to usage-based acquisition strategies, the expansion of DRM-free access, and the development of new Open Access approaches. With many models and platforms available to support Open Access publishing, it is important to understand how this content is being used across the globe and to have assurances that the models and access to the content are sustainable for the future. The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of the monograph, and supporting users with electronic materials is now more important than ever. As we look to the future, how can we expand access to high-quality eBook content while improving the experience for both librarians and researchers? As a not-for-profit organization, JSTOR works closely with libraries to understand their needs and collaborates with publishers on new solutions. In this article, we will provide background on our collective efforts to increase access to monographs over time, discuss existing models to support the publishing of Open Access content, review usage data of Open Access eBooks on the JSTOR platform, and share our perspective on ensuring long-term value, impact, and sustainability.
eBook Model Evolution We launched the Books at JSTOR program in 2012, when just 7% of academic library budgets were used for eBooks (Schonfeld and Long, 2014). Since then, libraries have steadily expanded eBook acquisitions, with over 12% of budgets being spent on eBooks in 2019 (Frederick and Wolff-Eisenberg, 2020). During that time, shifts in teaching, learning, and research needs led us toward a more open, barrier-free eBook market. This trend is consistent with the mission and aims of not-for-profit publishers, libraries, and JSTOR. We want more people to have access to more books, with resources invested in ways that will yield the greatest impact. Thus, we have worked closely with our partners to learn together and make improvements to our program to maximize the discovery and impact of important scholarship, and on new models to expand access to more users. The most significant changes have included:
DRM-free Access When Books at JSTOR first launched, we offered both unlimited, DRM-free access and single-user, DRM-restricted access. We included the single-user model to provide access to more eBooks from publishers, including new and course-adopted titles that publishers did not offer in unlimited models. In 2015, we decided to offer the unlimited, DRM-free model exclusively to ensure that every eBook would be as easy to use as journal articles on our platform. We discussed this change with our publishing partners, who agreed to convert
Against the Grain / February 2022
thousands of titles to the DRM-free model. While some publishers continue to hold back selected titles with course-adoption potential, we have been pleased to see movement across the community toward expanding DRM-free access. In a survey of our participating publishers, most said they have put more eBooks in unlimited, DRM-free models due to the demand from both libraries and users. Fred Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press, put it succinctly: “We like to make our content available in formats that libraries and patrons want to access it” (Nachbaur, 2021).
Chapter-level Discovery We first believed the best way to discover eBooks was through preserving the integrity of the whole eBook and displaying them alongside articles in search results. Data showed us that while users were clicking on the table of contents pages as expected, they were not going to the chapter level. Our user experience research group began exploring the barriers to students using eBooks in their research workflow. A key barrier was that eBooks were too long, and it took too much time and effort for students to find what was most relevant. This led us to begin surfacing chapters instead of full eBooks in our search results. Since many of our publishers only provided book-level metadata, this required us to create our own specifications for dividing eBooks into chapters and applying this consistently across publishers. We also developed our own internal systems to support chapter-level search and discovery, display, and metadata feeds to discovery-service providers. We saw an immediate spike in usage. We also began to see more library participation in our program, and sales increased 600% the following year. This was driven mainly by the increased discoverability of backlist eBooks, which accounted for 70% of sales.
Usage-based Acquisition Models Libraries are offering broader sets of eBooks to their users than ever before, allowing discovery and access across titles from a wide range of publishers, yet only paying for the materials that are used the most. We worked closely with libraries and consortia to develop our versions of Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) and Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) to ensure that we addressed common challenges of eBook acquisition. Importantly, these usage-based models were designed to be sustainable for publishers as well, and we have seen consistent growth in publisher sales and participation.
Developing Sustainable Open Access Models Even as the shifts described above were taking place, we were exploring the potential of Open Access (OA) models for eBooks. We launched an OA eBook program in 2016 that has grown to include more than 7,700 titles. Libraries can use free MARC records or activate the OA titles in their discovery service, and
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