“Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem”, Report, Slides, Video Available Online From TOME Task Force Third Annual Meeting

From the Association of Research Libraries:

Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) is a five-year pilot initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members through open editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs. Scholars face growing difficulty in finding publishers for their monographs as academic library budgets shrink and demand for monographs falls.
The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) formally launched TOME in 2017 to collaboratively address this problem.
The TOME Task Force convened its third annual meeting on July 31, 2018, in Washington, DC, to assess TOME’s progress, share lessons learned, and determine an action plan to expand participation in the initiative.
Forty-five people attended the meeting. In addition to members of the TOME Task Force (university provosts, library deans, and press directors), the group included representatives from open access (OA) e-book platforms (Books at JSTOR, Project MUSE, OAPEN, and HathiTrust), TOME’s own infrastructure provider (figshare/Altmetric), and several scholarly societies, as well as licensing experts from Creative Commons, the Authors Alliance, and university libraries.
A persistent theme of the meeting was that openly available scholarship not only finds more readers than paywalled content, open content is cited in new scholarship more often. In addition to greater reach, the Impact Assessment Working Group of TOME presented several other measurable objectives that meeting participants approved:

• Understanding of “reasonable” monograph publishing costs
• Positive change in perception of publishing OA monographs
• Use of the full extent of EPUB 3 accessibility features

By the conclusion of the meeting, AAU, AUPresses, and ARL jointly agreed to develop a clearinghouse of TOME promotional materials for local, institutional use in expanding participation in the project, and to establish additional working groups to look at recruitment, peer review, best practices (case studies), and costs.

Resources
Report:  TOME Meeting Summary and Next Steps
9 pages; PDF.
Presentation Slides: 3rd Annual TOME Meeting
New Video: ScholarsDiscussing How Tome Has Helped Their Work Be Shared, Used, And Built Upon.

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