New: Survey Of Use Of Monographs By Academics – As Authors And Readers (UK)

The report was released late last week by OAPEN-UK, “a collaborative research project gathering evidence to help stakeholders make informed decisions on the future of open access scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.”
From the OAPEN-UK Website:

This paper reports the findings of the second OAPEN-UK researcher survey, carried out in early summer 2014. In collaboration with the HEFCE open access and monographs project, we surveyed UK humanities and social science researchers and achieved 2,231 usable responses.
The survey explores the role of the monograph for researchers, as both authors and readers. It looks at issues around publishing, including what motivates researchers to change publisher and how they handle rights issues. It also looks at researcher preferences when reading books, including how and why they read them, and explores how desirable and realistic they consider open access to be.

From the Introduction of the Report:

The survey builds upon four years of research already undertaken by OAPEN-UK to try to understand how monographs fit into academics’ working lives. Previous research suggests that academics value the monograph very highly, as both authors and readers, but that they are concerned about its long- term sustainability (as are many others involved in publishing academic books). We have also sought to address more specific areas where our existing research has shown unanswered questions about open access for monographs. These include researchers’ willingness to change publishers from book to book, issues around rights and licensing for open access monographs, the sustainability of open access models which continue to rely upon print sales for some of their revenues and researcher attitudes to open access.
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The report is broken down into four main sections:

• The role of the monograph
• Publishing monograph
• Reading monographs
• Open access

Direct to Full Text Report (20 pages; PDF)
See Also: RECENTLY RELEASED: Academic Libraries: JISC Publishes National Monograph Roadmap For the UK
UPDATE: Analysis from Ellen Collins, Research Information Network

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Journal Articles, Libraries, Open Access, Publishing, Reports