OAPEN-UK:new project to experiment with OA models for HSS monographs

[Caren Milloy]

Today I released news of a new project that will experiment with open access scholarly monographs in the UK. The project is called OAPEN-UK and links into the European project (OAPEN). It is funded by JISC and the AHRC intends to match funds.

The aim of OAPEN-UK is to experiment with scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences to find out if open access as a model is feasible, and what impacts open access scholarly monographs have on print and e-book sales, reach and readership.

Central to OAPEN-UK is the Noah experiment which will measure the impact an open access edition of a humanities or social science scholarly monograph has on the sales of print and e-book editions and the
comparison between OA, print and e-book editions in terms of usage, costs, reach and readership.

Publishers will submit ‘matched pairs’ of HSS scholarly monograph titles for inclusion in the Noah experiment. Total funding of £250,000 is available and for each ‘matched pair’ selected, publishers will receive funding
of £6,000.

Following selection, each title in the ‘matched pair’ will be randomly assigned into either the Experimental Group or the Control Group. Titles in the Experimental Group will be made available in Open Access and
titles in the Control Group will be made available as e-books for purchase. Data will be collected to evaluate the impacts of the titles on print and e-book sales as well as the impact on reach and readership.

The call to publishers of scholarly monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) to participate in
OAPEN-UK was released today and there is a Briefing Event on Wednesday 27 October.

I hope everyone will be pleased to hear about this project and I look forward to sharing what we learn with colleagues across the world.

Caren
Head of Projects
JISC Collections
[e-mail]