A global Springer Nature survey of more than 2,500 academic book authors provides in-depth insights into perceptions of open access (OA).
The majority of book authors support the idea that all future scholarly books should be open access (OA). This is one of the key findings of a new white paper presented by Springer Nature at the OAI-11 conference at CERN this week. Based on the responses of 2,542 book authors who were surveyed by Springer Nature in February and March 2019, the white paper provides a global view of book authors’ attitudes towards OA. The survey looks at researchers’ motivations for publishing a book, and analyses the parameters and key drivers which influence academics to publish OA or not. The white paper also identifies major obstacles to OA publication which book authors still face: from a lack of awareness of OA publishing options and low funding, to concerns about how OA books are perceived. The white paper is freely available for download.
Other key findings note that pro-OA attitudes are stronger among junior researchers, researchers based in Europe and Asia, and previous OA book authors. Ethical reasons (equality in access) and reaching a larger audience are identified as key motivations for choosing OA for books. Majority of authors want more financial support from funders for OA book publication. Gold OA is the most preferred policy for OA books. Reputation of publishers matters less to OA authors but is still the deciding factor for publication.
The findings reflect the views of OA and non-OA book authors alike: out of the 2,542 participants, 407 authors had previously published at least one OA book, 2,037 authors had not published an OA book, and 98 authors did not know whether they had published an OA book previously.
The results also show that the lack of funding still seems to be a major barrier for book authors who want to publish OA. The white paper therefore advocates for funders to provide more support for OA books, and also recommends that the scholarly communications community explores a variety of alternative routes for OA book publishing.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
