Diversifying readership of open access books
Open access to scholarly outputs has taken the central stage in recent years, with numerous international, regional and local initiatives leading the way in advancing rapid changes to the publishing landscape. Yet, despite the high volume of research available on journal articles (and academic outputs in general), relatively little has focused on OA books. In particular, there is limited information on the level of online usage, their geographic distribution and, importantly, how usage may be influenced by publishing books in OA forms.
With Springer Nature we conducted a large scale analysis of the usage and readership of open access scholarly books. We identified a strong signal of increased usage and more diverse geographical usage for these books compared to a stratified comparison sample of non-open access content. We also observed a geographical title effect with books seeing enhanced usage in regions and countries mentioned in the title.
This project involved a large scale data analysis of millions of recorded events and visualisation of the complex data. A significant challenge is how to address the differences between OAs and non-OA books in a retrospective analysis. In this case we developed an approach of stratifying the OA books by type, discipline and publication year and randomly sampling from the full set of non-OA books in each strata.