Towards a Knowledge Exchange Roadmap for OA Monographs

Open Access (OA) for monographs is mandated by only a few funders, such as Austria (FWF), the Netherlands (NWO), Switzerland (SNSF), and the Wellcome Trust in the UK. However, in a rapidly evolving landscape, recent announcements concerning OA monographs policies in the UK and France have shown an increasing OA commitment for scholarly books across Europe. Furthermore Plan S and COAlition S (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/moedas/announcements/plan-s-and-coalition-s-accelerating-transition-full-and-immediate-open-access-scientific_en) as well as the recently published report (https://operas.hypotheses.org/visibility-oa-monographs) on the “Visibility of Open Access Monographs in a European Context” from the EU funded OPERAS project shows a growing commitment on a European level. This commitment can also be seen when looking at the rise of new academic-led and library presses and their engagement with OA monograph publishing. These presses demonstrate a high level of professionalism and quality (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1306506). However, due to the experimental phase in which they exist, development can sometimes be ad hoc. The Knowledge Exchange (KE) (http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/) is a partnership of six key national organisations within Europe (DFG in Germany, CNRS in France, DEFF in Denmark, CSC in Finland, SURF in the Netherlands and Jisc in the UK) tasked with developing infrastructure and services to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research. As part of its ambition to make Open Scholarship work, KE has developed building blocks for a roadmap towards the transition to OA monographs. This session will present a set of best practices and recommendations for libraries and library-led publishing initiatives before inviting the audience to discuss these further. This will help to inform and develop the next steps to support OA monographs. These recommendations and best practices focus on four themes for OA monographs, namely author engagement, technical infrastructure, policies and monitoring of OA monographs, which are currently being developed based on: The analysis of a survey (https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7101/1/Knowledge_Exchange_survey_on_open_access_monographs_October_2018.pdf) conducted by Jisc collections on behalf of KE in May 2018, which identified emerging themes around OA monograph policies, funder engagement, university presses, academic-led publishing and traditional publishers; publishing platforms; quality; author awareness; business models; costs; and collaboration. The results of a Knowledge Exchange Stakeholder Workshop on OA monographs, which took place in November 2018 in Brussels (report forthcoming). The workshop brought together experts and key stakeholders in the OA monograph landscape and gave the opportunity to reinforce the importance of OA monographs being integrated in the development of an OA culture, to encourage collaboration and share best practices. The Brussels workshop was a call to action in order to move beyond sharing experiences by working towards a set of principles, an action plan for OA monographs, around which the community can collaborate to build a workable solution. Could this be the basis of a Brussels Declaration on Open Access Books? Or a Plan M(onographs)