Taylor "Open Access Monographs: Managing Resources, Managing Discovery"

Monographs and Open
Access
Managing Resources, Managing Discovery

Your presenter...
● Mike Taylor, Head of Metrics Development at Digital Science
● Mostly working on Dimensions and Altmetric.
● Before Digital Science, I worked at a very large publisher for twenty years.
Over half that time on books, in a commissioning team.
● Still a big books fan, and I regularly talk with small and large book publishers -
so I understand their pain!
● Have been very active in the research community - as part of Orcid, Crossref,
NISO. Have made contributions to Onix, CASRAI etc.
● Actively involved in organizing conferences - www.altmetricsconference.com -
www.transformingresearch.org - www.latmetrics.com.
● https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8534-5985
@herrison | m.taylor@digital-science.com

Monographs and the
Research Lifecycle

The Research Lifecycle
● “Some view the monograph as the central format through which the
humanities contributes to a 'diverse ecology of inquiry and methods'.”
● Monographs represent different modes of communication:
○ Mature - Significant contributions towards thought from established
thinkers, eg Frodeman, R. (2014). Sustainable Knowledge: a theory
of interdisciplinarity. Palgrave MacMillan; Latour, Bruno (2005).
Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.
Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
○ Early stage - Published theses that ‘introduce our intellectual
contributions to a wider community’.

The Research Lifecycle (1)
● Looking at “digital sociology” (using Dimensions
data).
● Looking at one line for all publications gives
us a very singular impression of growth.
● Looking at lines for different publication type,
and understanding the differences in timing,
motivation and effort provides valuable
insights into the progression of a topic.
● Monographs dance to a different beat
from research articles.
● The effort that goes into a monograph is
many times greater than the typical review or
research article.

The Research Lifecycle (2)
● Looking at “human migration studies” (using Dimensions data).
● The axis represents twenty outputs - so in 2016, 23 chapters, and 19
monographs were published (they aren’t chapters from the monographs).
● 2016 (and the years immediately before and after) were years where there
were significant issues regarding human migration.
● These inflections are typically seen around “step changes” in a field, and
are frequently precursors to changes in other publishing output, funding
etc.
● This could be a case of theses being adapted / published to meet a
demand for content in the academic world.

The Role of the Monograph
● The “laboratory” of arts, humanities, social sciences.
● Disproportionately important in these fields...
○ ...plus non-English scholarship
○ ...plus many parts of the world.
○ Therefore, not taking the monograph seriously damages the integrity of global,
multicultural, multi-lingual scholarship.
● The amount of scholarship involved in a monograph may be many times more than in
a research article or proceedings paper.
● A move towards “publish or perish” - at an increased velocity - may change the nature
of scholarship in these areas and push it towards “quicker, shallower” outputs.
● To understand and value the monograph is to understand and value all scholarship.

“The State of Open
Monographs”

The State of Open Monographs - A white paper
● Grimme, Sara; Taylor, Mike; Elliott, Michael A.; Holland, Cathy; Potter,
Peter; Watkinson, Charles (2019): The State of Open Monographs.
figshare.
● https://figshare.com/articles/_/8197625
● https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8197625.v4
● Report addresses the question of how we integrate and value
monographs in the increasingly open digital scholarly network. Analysis
looked at the open monograph landscape in 2019, the impact and role of
monographs in the scholarly record, the move towards open access and
the nuances in funding.

The State of Open Monographs - Scope
● The Open Access Monograph Landscape in 2019
● How Many Monographs Are Published Each Year?
● Challenges in Information Supply Chain
● Valuing and Understanding Monographs - Their Role in the Scholarly
Record
● Understanding Costs and Finding Funding

The State of Open Monographs - Conclusions (1)
● Open access is still a relatively small part of the monograph landscape. As
of mid-2019, the Directory of Open Access Books lists fewer than 20,000
OA books of all dates (https://www.doabooks.org/). This is compared to an
estimated 86,000 monographs published internationally every year.
● Initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched and TOME are experimenting
with new business models that presume a world where open access
becomes the norm for monographs.
● While monographs continue to be central to the intellectual and
professional identity of HSS fields, the technology for publishing them
continues to be driven largely by the needs of a print and journal-based
market. As a result, monographs remain largely outside the growing
digital scholarly information infrastructure.

● The challenges scholarly publishers face in adding open access
monographs to their publishing programmes include issues with general
discoverability and inclusion in library catalogues. They also face the
challenge of how to measure the value and distribution of open access
materials, in the absence of sales data and difficulties gaining usage data.
● Monographs famously collect citations at a slower rate than journal-based
research articles. Data in this report from Altmetric shows that
monographs also accrue impact over a longer life cycle in a broader
context, and show higher rates of impact in policy documents and
Wikipedia, than equivalent journal-based articles.
● OA sheds a harsh light into how academic book publishing is faring in its
transition to a networked digital world, and reveals dusty corners and dirty
piles of laundry that we might rather have forgotten.

● The report shows how assessing the current state of open access
monograph publishing is particularly challenging, if for no other reason than
that the terrain is so messy — more so even than it is for journal publishing.
● Key report recommendations for fully integrating monographs into the digital
scholarly information infrastructure include:
○ Urging publishers to adopt DOIs at both a volume and, preferably, chapter-
level, that will support the discovery, monitoring and impact of monographs across
the increasingly open scholarly infrastructure.
○ Recommending that distributors and aggregators make their usage data
available in interoperable and standard forms, and support data aggregation and
interoperability by consistent use of DOIs.
○ That funders recognise the value that monographs contribute to scholarship, and
that they fund the move towards open access at an appropriately sustainable
rate.

Trends in Open Access
Monographs

Volume of Monograph Publishing
● To understand the relative adoption of Open Access in monograph publishing, we need to
know how many monographs are published per year.
● This is not trivial: even a definition of
‘monograph’ is a challenge.
● In the white paper, we use three
different methods to calculate the
number of monographs published
per year, and came up with 86,000
for 2013.
● Initially, this seems like a large figure.
But our visibility of ‘monographs’ is
often skewed by our geographic,
lingual, disciplinary position.

Rate of Open Monograph Publishing
● Given that there isn’t a number for the volume of monographs published per year, it’s not
unsurprising that there isn’t a number for the volume of Open monographs.
● Eg, the Directory of Open Access Books only holds records for 20,000 books.
● Using Dimensions, it’s possible to extract some
values for Monographs published per year, and
Open Monographs published per year.
● Challenges with extrapolation: from this data
we might conclude that 20% of monographs
are Open.
● That’s probably wrong, but quantifying it is
very complex: neither DOI adoption nor Open is
evenly distributed amongst monograph
publishers.

Comparison with Journal Open Access

Conclusions
● OA publishing in journals is growing, and growing consistently
(although it’s no longer accelerating).
● Open Monographs appears to be static, although this is a
difficult conclusion, given the unknowns: it might be growing,
but (arguably) it’s falling behind - in terms of proportion.
● There are a number of issues to explore:
○ DOI adoption,
○ Open Access license challenges,
○ Lack of funding,
○ Lack of visibility,
○ General pressure on academics to publish “more
measurable” outputs.

Metadata

Books are poorly covered by metadata
● Despite having led the way in the 90s with Onix, books (and especially
academic books) are poorly served by metadata coverage.
● ISBN data / Onix isn’t readily available as a “single source of truth”.
● Perhaps 20-25% of current / recent monographs are registered with
Crossref.
● No equivalent to Crossref or the Crossref API.
● The book data model (that received a lot of attention in the 90s / early 00s)
hasn’t progressed in nearly 20 years.
● Crossref supports lots of rich data and structure for books (sub-titles,
abstracts, chapters, author and editor affiliation) - which are rarely populated
by publishers

Harry Potter and the Poorly Defined Book Type
● When is an academic book not an academic book?
● The Harry Potter books definitely exist within worldcat, and are owned by
academic libraries
● There are academic courses on Harry Potter.

Implications
1. The community has inadequate data to conduct thorough analysis of academic books.
2. Even a crude value for a number of “academic books” varies enormously, from 30M to 100M+. So all we
can say is that likely we have data for a minority of academic books, we can’t quantify that degree.
3. Poor metadata has very wide implications:
○ Readership / usage
○ Discovery
○ Citations and Altmetrics
○ Status within the wider scholarly environment: in an increasingly connected world, books are
becoming increasingly invisible.
4. Lack of Open license data, confusing licenses damages trust and re-use of Open Monographs.

Conclusions
● The question of openly available books metadata has to be solved.
● The solutions should be simple: we’ve solved this for a wide range of problems in the past.
● ISBN, ONIX, JATS - these should be advantages, not obstacles, towards universal book
coverage.
However:
● Book publishers are very diverse, poorly funded, often using nothing more than Excel to
manage their metadata and have limited technical abilities.
● If we value the full range of global scholarship we need to acknowledge that book publishers
need assistance to enable full metadata.
● Adjusting journal-centric metadata systems to accept long-standing book metadata formats
should be a priority.
● Does book data in Crossref need a reboot?

Discovery

“The reader will choose the route to finding, acquiring, and using ebooks that has
the least friction. The Mapping the Free Ebook Supply Chain study supported by
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2017 suggested that Google is currently the
dominant channel for OA ebook discovery, but that Twitter, Facebook, and
LinkedIn groups also play important roles. Library catalogs were largely
irrelevant, a situation observed by other studies”
Collough, Aaron. "Does It Make a Sound: Are Open Access Monographs
Discoverable in Library Catalogs?" portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol. 17 no.
1, 2017, pp. 179-194. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pla.2017.0010 from The State
of Open Monographs

● The monograph holds a critical position in the research ecosystem.
● Widespread use of ONIX and MARC metadata has meant that
books - in particular printed books - in retail, and libraries became
highly available.
● One of the reasons that Amazon (and others) sold books online
early was the availability of metadata!
● Increasingly, people (including academics
and students!) are turning away
from specialized tools, in favour
of broad-based searches.
● A trend observed in academic libraries
is a tendency to ‘google’ or ‘wikipedia’ a
subject.
Trends in discovery

● We should not assume that people will go to lengths to discover a book.
● The assumption should probably be that “faster trumps complete”.
● Having ‘books’ data only available in book-specific platforms will reduce adoption, usage and status of
books.
● Eliminating the ‘money’ associated with book usage (as is the case for an Open Monograph) questions the
value added by certain elements of the book publishing world.
Fragmented and partial metadata reduces
discoverability … and usage

● Books are already facing issues with discoverability, thanks to poor and
fragmented metadata.
● Relatively speaking, books are becoming less visible in systems, thanks to
increasing visibility of articles and user behavior.
● Open Monographs will suffer more, as a consequence of even more fragmented
metadata and a change in commercial pressure!
● The most successful Open Monographs are likely to be those that have first class
metadata, and propagate it well via existing and emerging systems.
Future proofing Open Monographs

Understanding Usage

Sales versus Downloads
● “How many has it sold?”
● For years, the principal mechanism for understanding the usage of a monograph was through sales.
● Sales data is integrated tightly into publishing companies’ workflows: the sale of a physical book was
closely related to the need to move a physical copy of a book within a warehouse.
● Online sales were added to publishers’ workflows, but Open Monographs bring about new challenges:
○ Sales are mostly for printed-paper versions of monographs.
○ Downloads are not equivalent, and not easy to gather.

The problem with downloads
● By definition, an Open Monograph doesn’t have copy protection … so it can be copied.
● The same file may be distributed to several different outlets by the publisher.
● Do they have comparable data?
● But do the different outlets report data in the same way?
● Are these data being reported back the publisher?
● Can they be combined?
● There are initiatives to address some of these issues.

Open monographs and identity
● Even if an Open Monograph has a DOI, when it’s distributed to different systems, the platforms often:
○ Create a new DOI.
○ Register it with Crossref.
○ Supply new metadata.
○ And don’t provide a data trail to connect the two assets.
● And being open, anyone can replicate this - placing the monograph onto a university repository, or
ResearchGate, for example.
○ So whereas adoption by a university might have resulted in a known number of sales to the bookstore
and / or library…
○ ...That richness of data now comes down to one, single download.
Which is probably anonymous.

Open Monographs -
evaluation, metrics and
Altmetric

The growing importance of data and metrics
● In the absence of sales figures, usage (downloads), citation and shares will become
increasingly important to show the impact of Open Monographs.
● Free distribution, and fragmentation of platform data implies that download data is
likely to be partial (at best).
● Existing research evaluation strategies tend to be fine-tuned towards STEM subjects
and focus on the research article.
● Monographs and Open Monographs “dance to a different tune”.

Is there a citation or Altmetric advantage for Open?
● This phenomena has been observed in journals / articles.
● A superficial look at Dimensions / Altmetric data suggests there’s an advantage.
● Data for History and Archaeology Monographs, published in 2014-2016, with 257 Open Monographs and
6651 non-Open Monographs suggests it is worth research:
2014 2015 2016
Non-Open Altmetric Coverage (%) 19.7% 16.7% 15.9%
Open Altmetric Coverage (%) 37.7% 26.9% 46.6%
2014 2015 2016
Non-Open Mean Citations (N = 6651) 4.85 2.01 1.37
Open Mean Citations (N = 257) 5.15 2.68 1.91
History and
Archaeology

2014 2015 2016
2014 2015 2016
2014 2015 2016
2014 2015 2016
Studies in
Human Society
Communication,
Language and
Culture

One Graph:
Three Phenomena!
1) Clear disciplinary
differences
2) Monograph citations accrue
slowly
3) Possible Open advantage

A three-year research
evaluation cycle is not well
suited to monographs
Three years old Five years old

Research evaluation at 3 years disadvantages monographs

Research evaluation and the Open Monograph
● Monographs and Open Monographs “dance to a different tune”, when compared to
STEM subjects and research articles.
● The strengths of monographs, and advantages to Open Monographs become
apparent over time.
● Short period research evaluation disadvantages both Monographs (as a whole) and
Open Monographs.
● Trust needs to be built in citations, Altmetric data, downloads in order to displace sales
figures.
● Conversations about the impact of Open Monographs need to evolve to more
appropriate data indicators and metrics.

Overview

In summary
● Monographs play a key role in the development of intellectual thought.
● They are disproportionately important for discipline (Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, non-English
languages and non-north/west hemisphere countries.
● Open Monographs have higher usage rates, citation rates and appear to have higher Altmetric shares: they
are more impactful.
● However, fragmentation of metadata and usage data may relatively harm their discovery, usage and
adoption.
● Funding policies need to be adapted to support the monograph life-cycle, and shouldn’t inadvertently push
researchers towards ‘short form’ research outputs.
● We will lose far more than we gain, if we don’t actively take steps to ensure appropriate funding and
evaluation of Open Monographs.

Taylor "Open Access Monographs: Managing Resources, Managing Discovery"

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