Josephine Asmah prepared “International Policy and Practice on Open Access for Monographs” as a report to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences regarding the state of open access policy and practice in regards to monographs, internationally. This is a unique focus, as most academic and policy-driven conversations about open access concern journals or data, at least in Canada. Journals have been prioritized over monographs in this context for a few different reasons:

1. Time: monographs have a longer publication cycle, generally, from inception to on-the-shelf manifestation;
2. Money: there is much financial pressure on libraries currently due to the serials crisis, that is, from absurdly high journal subscription costs;
3. Money (again): occasionally, authors of books make royalties from their product, whereas journal article authors never make a direct, monetary product from publishing articles;
4. Fetish / tradition: I *suspect* that authors are less concerned about having their journal articles appear in print than they are about seeing their books appear in print;
5. Mass: there are much more articles published, annually, than books.

The concept of open data has also risen in prominence due to some of the same reasons stated above (e.g., no profits made, length of production cycle, etc). Further, there’s a desire to access and re-use others’ results, as well as broad cultural move toward transparency.

Overall, Asmah presents an overview of OA to monograph policies and practices globally, including case studies from Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, France, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and Canada.

 

Work Cited

Asmah, Josephine. “International Policy and Practice on Open Access for Monographs.” Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. http://www.ideas-idees.ca/sites/default/files/aspp-oa-appendix.pdf