Europe is firmly committed to achieve open access (OA) to publications. However, when OA policies aim for a swift transition, they usually refer explicitly to journal articles, not books or book chapters. Books are often implicitly included in OA policies when they refer to ‘peer-reviewed publications’. Nevertheless, when it comes to concrete mandates, things look different. For example, the general H2020 policy clearly mandates articles, not books: the guidelines explain that ‘grant beneficiaries are also strongly encouraged to provide open access to other types of scientific publications’ including monographs in the examples. This is the case for most OA mandates from research funders. Monographs are considered a different type of publication, requiring a specific approach. ERC is one of the research funders that does include monographs in its OA mandate. Other examples are FWF (Austrian Science Fund), Wellcome, SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) and ARC (Australian Research Council). ERC has developed its own approach within the EU policy framework. Although the ERC programme is part of H2020 and the H2020 OA requirements in principle apply to actions funded by the ERC, the ERC Scientific Council explicitly refers to monographs as well as journal articles in its Open Access Guidelines. The H2020 Annotated Grant Agreement also explains in its ERC specific part that for ERC projects monographs and books are included in the OA mandate. These examples from research funders suggest that OA mandates can work for monographs.
Why is it important for society?
OAPEN Foundation believes that the benefits of OA apply equally to scholarly monographs, and that in the general transition to OA, books and other long-text publications should not be left behind. This is why OAPEN is dedicated to support Open Access (OA) publishing of academic books, by providing a platform for the full text hosting and dissemination of open access books and chapters and providing services to publishers, research funders and libraries. By making monographs OA, society can take full advantage of these works, which would otherwise remain accessible only to a very limited number of peers.
What were the overall objectives?
The OAPEN deposit service for OA monographs was set up to support funders' OA policies. It was launched in 2014 and has been implemented for the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Wellcome Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), and the ERC. Through the deposit service, new publications - funded by these funders - are disseminated through the OAPEN Library and (if they have an open licence) the Directory of Open Access Books.
ERC-OAPEN-2017 had built on the established service for ERC and the experience gained from project ERC-OAPEN-2015, and has developed a number of new components to further improve the service and make it more attractive for researchers. The overall goal was to collect and host as many of the books and book chapters resulting from ERC funding as possible, in order to maximise dissemination and scientific and societal impact.
The resulting collection of books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has grown: compared to the ERC-OAPEN-2015 project, more than 2.5 times as many more publications were made freely available. Worldwide usage, measured as COUNTER compliant downloads, grew nearly 3.5 times in size. The OAPEN website contains an extensive section to guide researchers and the ERC funded publications are easily identified and link to relevant information in the CORDIS database.
