OAPEN-UK

OAPEN-UK is the United Kingdom branch of Open Access Publishing in European Networks, a research project that aims to devise a comprehensive, equitable, and sustainable model for Open Access (OA) publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) that is agreeable to all stakeholders: publishers, authors, readers, librarians, and others. The heart of the project is a pilot involving an experimental group of 29 OA titles paired with the same number of traditional route-to-market books in a control group. Matched as closely as possible by subject, timeliness, price, format, and sales over time, the monographs are made discoverable via MARC records, previews in Google Books, on author and publisher Web sites, and, for each title in the experimental group, a full-text PDF in the OAPEN Library, a repository of more than 800 HSS monographs. Now entering its third year and slated to end in Spring 2015, the full impact of OAPEN-UK’s Open Access “disruption” is unknown. Consequently, this review appraises the projects research design, preliminary results, and potential for building new infrastructure in OA monograph publishing.