PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This report describes the work of WP3 (Analysing the Knowledge Base), which builds upon and extends the work of WP2 (Building the Knowledge Base). The primary objective of WP3 was to analyse the various data collected earlier in the project in order to gain insights into the current status of open access book policies in the European Research Area. The analysis findings documented in this deliverable serve as the foundation for WP4 (Recommendations and Resources), where actionable recommendations are provided for different stakeholder groups.

In this report as well as throughout the project, academic books are defined as scholarly, peer-reviewed, books including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form scholarly works unless otherwise noted.

Running from month 6 to month 21 of the project, WP3 conducted various analyses of the diverse datasets collected in the project: interviews, open access policies, surveys, and bibliometrics. Each dataset required a tailored analytical approach to leverage its unique contributions and derive meaningful insights, ensuring that the project’s objectives were met through a thorough and nuanced examination of the available information. For this purpose, the project has been oriented around conducting a holistic PESTLE-analysis since the initial design of the data collection, where the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors of OA policies and current challenges around OA book publishing are approached and interpreted from multiple perspectives in order to build a comprehensive understanding of the complex landscape. The analysis methodology underwent an external validation process during which three external experts (Janneke Adema, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Charles Watkinson) provided valuable feedback for shaping the methodological approaches and presentation of results.

The project analysed 246 OA policy documents from the ERA. For this research, we defined an OA policy as a document that:

●      Is issued by a policymaker or an organisation that is either an RFO, RPO, library or infrastructure provider, or organisation with regional or national policy impact.

●      Requires or encourages OA scholarly publications that are associated with or supported by the issuing organisation through funding, affiliation, or other forms of upstream involvement.

This analysis revealed diverse practices when it comes to if and how OA books are present in current OA policies for all types of stakeholders. Our results indicate that OA book policies are still an emerging practice compared to the mature landscape there is for OA journal article policies. RFOs (Reserach Funding Organisations) were in general more strict in their requirements for OA to books when a policy was present, but also providing associated funding for making it OA directly through the publisher when a requirement was present, while RPOs more commonly had OA to books as a recommendation with self-archiving as a commonly mentioned pathway to achieve that. A quality we found many policies lacking was specificity with everything from definitions, responsibilities, and timeframes being so vague so as to make the policy ambiguous.

The 42 interviews across different stakeholder groups and countries provided an important mechanism for elaborating on past, present, and future circumstances of OA books in the ERA countries beyond what formal policy documents can provide. The most frequently mentioned barriers that emerged during our interviews were a lack of available funding resources and OA book policies, as well as challenges for coordination on a national scale. The list of additional challenges is long, spanning all the PESTLE factors, which offer helpful guidance for anchoring strong OA book policies in different types of environments.

We conducted an ERA-wide web survey that generated 420 complete responses from different stakeholder groups (national policymakers, RFOs, RPOs, publishers, libraries, infrastructure providers).

Learned societies. In addition to mapping out awareness of current OA policies in different countries and types of organisations, a key thread of inquiry was related to the respondents attitudes towards the design of policies and policy measures for OA books. Declarations and policies were well known among respondents where such existed, particularly in centrally organised countries compared to countries with federal systems. A general tendency among respondents overall was calling out for more intensive stakeholder involvement across the board in the implementation of OA policies. Among the more detailed questions, transparent calculation of book processing charges was regarded as the most important statement concerning economic measures, and concerning technical infrastructures respondents were overwhelmingly in favour of publicly funded technical infrastructures rather than commercial solutions.

The analysis in this deliverable includes a bibliometric investigation that provides an overview of what OpenAlex, the broadest bibliometric database based on open data, can tell us about the current information quality and prevalence of OA books during the last few years. Due to the many limitations of current bibliometrics databases comprehensively indexing in particular titles by national publishers we conducted a survey of national libraries in the ERA to establish to what degree they are able to track OA books, and to what degree such data can be shared by them.

As a final step, we draw together the different strands of collected data and findings to the individual country-levels of the ERA in order to map commonalities and divergences in their current policy circumstances as well as other supporting aspects of OA book publishing. The OA policy frameworks in different countries show very different levels of presence and strictness, and also OA book funding and support mechanisms. While we could see that most countries had a moderate or strong technical infrastructure in the country, the opportunities for OA book publishing were quite often low or moderate with publishers in the country.

As far as we are aware, this is the most comprehensive study on OA book policies yet, including not only a large and internationally diverse set of policies analysed in a structured and detailed way, but also through all the other supporting datasets that were collected in parallel in order to understand the circumstances of individual countries and stakeholder groups in an unprecedented and more detailed way. The Knowledge Base that has been the foundation of the project will persist as an open data resource to serve continued inquiries into this space, hopefully updating and extending the research which has been conducted within this project and this WP. The Open Access Book Toolkit managed by OAPEN has been extended with articles stemming from the analysis work in the project, creating an accessible pathway for dissemination of central findings from the project.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.