OASPA Webinar: Gaining Insights into Global OA eBook Usage - Questions answered

Following on from the recent webinar entitled Analyzing Open – Gaining Insights into Global OA eBook Usage, we asked our speakers to respond to the unanswered questions posed by attendees via the webinar chat. You can find those questions and answers below. This may be useful for those who missed it or wish to share with colleagues.

Presenter slides – Cameron Neylon, Ros Pyne, Lara Speicher and Christina Drummond.

OASPA is very grateful to the speakers for all of the work and time they have given to this webinar – in preparation, on the day, and after.

Questions received via the webinar chat channel

Answers from Lara Speicher (LS), Ros Pyne (RP) and Cameron Neylon (CN)

Q. Is there review process and is there an emerging difference (rift) between open and non- open (why would one still use non OA?

LS: All our books are peer reviewed. As all our books are OA, we can’t comment on the distinction between OA and non-OA, but my understanding is that most scholarly books are peer reviewed, regardless of whether they are OA or not.

RP: All our OA books are peer reviewed. Our OA and non-OA books are commissioned by the same editors, undergo the same type of review, and must meet the same quality standards. As a general rule they are treated in exactly the same way throughout the publication process.

Q. How are the OA books at UCL financed?

LS: This was shown on the last two slides. The majority of funding comes from UCL itself – about 2/3. The rest comes from print sales, and a small number of BPCs from non-UCL authors.

Q. Lara – do you know who is buying the OA print books? Is it all individual sales or institutional at all too?

LS: We see sales to both individuals and libraries. We do our best to make it clear to buyers of the print versions that our books are also available as open access – we provide this information on our website of course but also on advance information sheets and on the books themselves.

RP: Same, we see both individual and institutional sales of our print books.

Q. In the OA Ebook Supply Chain, the library online catalog doesn’t seem to be represented. Loading MARC records into the catalog, which also filters into discovery layers, is still important to many libraries. Thanks!

LS: We also provide MARC records for our books – these are available to download from our website. Our OA books can also be integrated into library catalogues via services such as OAPEN.

RP: We, too, provide MARC records for our books. As with UCL, MARC these can be downloaded from our website – we have an OA books filter on our metadata downloader: http://metadata.springernature.com/metadata/books. Meanwhile, if a library purchases one of our discipline-based ebook collection, they will receive MARC records for OA books in that discipline as well as non-OA (although of course OA books are excluded from title counts of books purchased in the collection).

Q. Ros – did those general stats about outputs refer to English-language publications only or long-form outputs in all languages (insofar as anybody can know)?

RS: Many thanks Richard The DOAB stats include books in all languages. The number of monographs published per year is an estimate which, as I understand it aims to take into account monographs in all languages. For those who want to look into this in more detail, DOAB metadata can be downloaded in CSV format here: https://doabooks.org/doab?func=about&uiLanguage=en#metadata. ‘The State of Open Monographs’ Digital Science report, whose estimate of the number of monographs published each year I referred to, is available here (https://digitalscience.figshare.com/articles/The_State_of_Open_Monographs/8197625); the report provides more detail about their basis for the estimate.

Q. OA download statistics are not equivalent to usage for licensed ebooks, because more users are able to download OA books. How can we adjust for this difference?

CN: It depends on the questions you want to answer. If you’re concerned about reach, you probably shouldn’t adjust. But we also compared logged usage (i.e. licensee IPs) and see a similar-if smaller-increase in usage

Q. Cameron – from which platforms (jstor, doab etc.) did you take the data for your analysis?

CN: The data for this specific analysis came from the Springer Nature platform. So we didn’t look at other platforms for that work, which makes the comparison easier. In the data trust work we’re looking at a wide range of platforms as usage data sources.

RP: Just to clarify: at Springer Nature we do make our OA books available from many third-party platforms – but to simplify the analysis for the project Cameron spoke about we focussed just on downloads from our own publishing platform.

Q. How best should an academic library make the world’s OA monograph titles discoverable to our users? For example, there are often delays in OA titles being harvested by, say, DOAB and then DOAB’s content being indexed in our discovery system. Who should we put pressure on to speed all this up?

CN: That is a question that improved analytics can help to answer over time. It is coming up in the use cases.

LS: It would also be worth asking OAPEN, who are a partner of DOAB.

RP: I agree with Lara! We recently worked with DOAB and OAPEN to set up an ONIX feed of our OA books to them. Our books are now indexed in a much more timely way than previously, when we had to submit data individually for each book. If you want to contribute to DOAB/OAPEN to ensure they can continue to provide excellent support to the OA books community, they are participating in SCOSS’s current fundraising campaign: https://scoss.org/how-it-works/current-funding-calls/

OASPA Webinar: Gaining Insights into Global OA eBook Usage – Questions answered

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