Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Christina Emery, a senior marketing manager for Palgrave Macmillan’s and Springer’s open access books programs at Springer Nature. Emery is a member of the editorial advisory board for the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit.
The conversation around open access books seems to have moved on from debating the benefits for readers and authors, to how open access book publishing can be better supported. This is particularly important in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) where a lack of funding is a challenge for many scholars when faced with increasing mandates for open access, especially for scholarly books, which prevails as a central publication format in HSS.
Whilst finding sustainable business models for open access books is still a hot topic, it isn’t something that will be solved quickly, and requires a concerted, collaborative effort across the community. Instead, this post focuses on what is needed to address the specific questions and challenges of authors with an immediate need or desire to publish their book open access. By setting out to understand what authors find most challenging — for example quality assurance, funding models, or copyright — and by providing answers where possible, we can enable more book authors to benefit from choosing open access. Here we explore some of these frequent concerns; what support is already available for authors; and share how part of the open access books community came together to build a free independent resource that provides answers to many of the questions that authors (and others) have about open access books.
Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.