OAPEN-UK: exploring the challenges of the Open Access scholarly monograph

JISC Collections is embarking on a new project called OAPEN-UK to explore the issues impacting upon the publishing of scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Funded by JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the project is taking a collaborative and real time approach to exploring the challenges, risks and potential opportunities of unfettered online access to scholarly monographs.

The project has 5 publisher partners; each has submitting pairs of similar monographs for the project pilot. A title from each pair has been randomly placed in either the experimental group (available through open access) or the control group (available through the publishers’ standard routes to market).

This session will introduce the pilot, which will, over the next three years, gather and compare sales and usage data for the use of monographs under contrasting modes of access. It will also discuss the results of the first phase of the research, which begins with a round of focus groups for researchers, librarians, repository managers, research managers and publishers.