Diversifying readership through open access

A usage analysis for open access books

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/5.5580

Keywords:

open access, monographs, usage, lower-middle-income countries

Abstract

In 2019 Springer Nature worked with COARD to analyse usage data relating to almost 4,000 books, including 281 OA books. Our goal was to better understand the extent to which usage of OA books differs from usage of closed books, looking not only at the number of downloads but also at their geographical distribution. The findings show that for every book type, every discipline and across all time since publication, OA books are reaching more readers, in more countries, including more readers in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Author Biography

Ros Pyne, Springer Nature

Ros Pyne is Director, Open Access Books and Books Policies at Springer Nature. She has been involved with OA books since 2013 and is passionate about bringing OA to long-form scholarship and to the humanities. In her current role, she steers the strategic development of Springer Nature’s OA books programme. Ros sits on the Universities UK OA Monographs group and the advisory boards for the Mellon-funded Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage project and the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit; she is co-author of several reports on open access.

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Published

2020-09-22

Issue

No. 4 (2020): The 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2020

Section

Posters

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