Open access eBooks
Abstract:
Open access publication initiatives are cropping up as a way for copyright holders to disseminate individual titles internationally. Most of these initiatives, though still in experimental stages of development, are being led by new publishers who are searching for market niches and applying innovative business models. Despite the recency of open access publication, several major tendencies and patterns are clearly emerging. In this chapter, we will be studying several of these initiatives, defining what open access is and how it is applied to books, and examining a number of websites where free open access books can be found.
Introduction
The Internet is full of useful bibliographical materials, but they are not always easy to find in a single location. Even when you can find what you are looking for, it can be difficult to reach those on-line materials in free open access formats. Restrictive commercial publishing strategies and the large number of illegal direct download websites make the task of accessing materials we want online complicated and risky. Many texts you may need are in the public domain, but many others are made available by authors and editors only partially or as works in progress. In some cases, open access publication is used as a means to publicise commercially available printed works, while in others it is used disinterestedly as a means to reach the widest possible audience.
Open access publication initiatives are complemented by open access projects whose goal is to collect information in digital repositories for the benefit of the community and authors through greater visibility. In this chapter, we will be analysing open access eBook projects and other related initiatives. Though a number of these other initiatives cannot strictly be called open access, they all somehow enable the broader distribution of materials and free access to them. This is the case, for instance, of reading via streaming.
What is open access?
Open access is the international standard name used to describe the ability to consult a scientific document in an open format and for free. The number of open access initiatives created over the last few years has increased, most of them for the purpose of providing the broader scientific community with information freely shared by authors and editors.
The arrival of digital technologies and on-line communication networks greatly improved information access channels and new models of personal and scientific communication. One of the most interesting developments in this process is the Open Access (OA) movement, which has led to the creation of more than 1500 repositories of scientific information and over 4500 OA journals worldwide, according to data from the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)1 and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).2 Nearly all universities and research centres currently have institutional repositories which showcase the content these organisms generate and ensure that these contents are recorded for posterity. The importance of this phenomenon resides in the involvement of information administrators – libraries, documentation centres, and others – and also, for the first time in history, in the joint commitment of researchers, finantial institutions, and even the state to promote and support a more open and free system of communication.
The Open Access movement has reached, in a very short time span, a level of maturity in this development of renewed models of scientific communication and the creation of sustainable alternatives to existing models. However, open access is not free of controversy and divided public and private opinion. In a wide variety of areas, there are concerns about the quality, visibility and impact of the products of academia and scientific research, and there are unresolved issues regarding the management of intellectual property, the need for reliable storage of digital materials and the commercial viablity of OA materials (Alonso-Arévalo et al., 2008).
The new OA horizon requires new and different communication policies and mechanisms in order to ensure faster and more efficient distribution of information. Such policies are now a reality in some of the most dynamic areas of scientific development, such as particle physics, where the need for quick communication is part of the very raison d’etre of particle physics research. Without a doubt, digital repositories and OA journals constitute a growing alternative for making scientific documents publicly available, as they harness the possibilities of the Internet to overcome the restrictions imposed by commercial interests in the spread of information.
Over the last few decades, technological innovations have transformed the way information is processed, saved, accessed and analysed, and they have brought sweeping changes to a field which until recently had been stagnant. One of the essential factors in this process is the migration from printed media to digital, as digital formats offer immediate access and better mobility.
Not only does the switch-over to digital formats affect the printed book, but it is exercising an influence on the general structure of the existing system of scientific communication. It is transforming the functions and the roles of all agents involved. This is why traditional publishing and academic communication are continually subjected to new analyses in the context of a changing world which is increasingly defined by information technologies. Although the context is changing, the momentum of traditional scientific communication still exercises a decisive influence over paper-based formats (Russell, 2001).
Open access (OA) is defined by the following essential characteristics:
OA works are freely available to everyone.
Open access essentially refers to on-line digital documents accesible via the Internet.
Scientific documents are the main body of works available.
Journal articles form the basis of the OA movement, though other document types are also available in open access.
Authors receive no compensation for their effort from commercial entities.
OA documents are available in a wide range of modalities, but authorship and the integrity of each document are guaranteed through licensing.
Between 2001 and 2003 a series of institutional statements, known as the triple B of Open Access Declarations, sketched out the ideological bases of the movement:
2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative.
2003 Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.
2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
These Declarations establish such key concepts as what OA is, what it means for all parties involved, and what its objectives are. They also settle questions of interoperability of OA archives, as well as the two main pathways of OA publishing and archiving, namely:
Green Route: Self-archiving in Open Access Repositories
A repository is a collection of digital web-based objects, typically academic materials generated by the members of one or various institutions, that responds to a policy in which the following characteristics are clearly defined:
There can be different types of repositories depending on whether they contain documents generated within the confines of an institution, a discipline of knowledge or a geographical location:
Gold Route: Open Access Publishing
In this section, we will examine publication media which emerged from OA projects. The DOAJ Project is, we believe, widely known and acknowledged as the premier worldwide registry of open access journals. Insofar as OA books are concerned, a number of initiatives, such as OAPEN and InTech, have emerged.
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) This is a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable open access model of scientific publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN library aims to improve the visibility and user friendliness of top-quality academic research by making all European peer-reviewed journals available in OA format: http://www.oapen.org
Open Access Books | InTech. This multidisciplinary, open access publisher of journals and books in the Sciences, Technology and Medicine uses semantic web technologies. Since 2004, InTech has published more than 1000 books on-line in an effort to grant free access to top-tier research; they currently publish three scientific journals, more than 200 books per year, and an ever-increasing collection of 6500 plus book chapters. The quality of InTech’s scientific journals and books is based on both the valuable contributions by the authors of the research articles and also on the standing of its editors, arbitrators and scientific committees, which is why InTech seeks collaboration from only the most outstanding professionals. The Project began in 2004, when two scientists, Vedran Kordic and Lazinica Aleksandar, set out to instil among the editors of scientific journals a new way of envisioning the distribution of scientific knowledge through open access channels. They founded InTech in Vienna, a city with a prestigious academic community. All InTech publications use Creative Commons licences in which contributors assert their authorship and are allowed to choose which rights they want to protect. All books published by InTech are assigned an ISBN. http://www.intechweb.org/books
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). OAPEN is embarking on a new open access book publishing service which will provide a search index for peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under the open access business model, with links to full text editions hosted on each publishers’ website or in an on-line repository. What promises to be interesting is to witness how the initiative develops, as the technology will apparently be based on the SemperTool platform developed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The main objective of the DOAB is to increase the capacity to search for OA academic books, for which they invite university-based editors to provide metadata which will then be collected and made searchable for maximum diffusion, visibility and impact. Aggregators can incorporate the registers of the commercial services while libraries can incorporate the directory into their on-line catalogues, and in doing so they will help academics, students and independent scholars find books that might interest them. The initiative will be open to all academic publishers and should attract a high volume of books, all of which must be peer-reviewed and formatted for open access. The DOAB will outline a set of requirements for publishers and set up standard certification procedures. A number of academic publishers have already expressed an interest in participating in the development of the service, including OAPEN Library member institutions such as Amsterdam University Press and the University of Gottingen, as well as other widely acclaimed open access publishers such as Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, MPublishing and Athabasca University Press. OpenEdition (www.openedition.org), a portal exclusively devoted to electronic resources for the humanities, will likely take part in the beta phase of the DOAB launch. The initial idea from which DOAD stems came from Lars Bjørnshauge and Salam Baker Shanawa (Directors of SemperTool), who were also behind the development of the DOAJ. OAPEN, already mentioned above, started in 2008 as an EU-funded project coordinated by Amsterdam University Press, then led to the creation of the OAPEN Foundation, based at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek [National library of the Netherlands], which continues to pursue, on an international level, the publication of open access materials. OAPEN develops OA models for books and closely collaborates with academic publishers and research institutes towards the common goal of building the OAPEN Library. The OAPEN Foundation currently takes an active part in two experimental pilot projects in the Netherlands and in the United Kingdom. SemperTool (www.sempertool.dk), a digital software developer specialising in library applications, will develop and maintain the DOAB platform and it will also provide hosting and consulting for platform users.
An increasing number of univerisities publish doctoral dissertations in electronic formats, and many of them have agreements with their publishing services which ensure immediate publication in institutional repositories. Such publication agreements foster the visibility and competitiveness of their researchers.
If a single community had to be singled out for its unquestionable interest in digital information formats, that would have to be scientific publishers, and particularly those acting in areas where high specialisation and low print runs make certain journals and books unattractive for commercial publishers. In many cases, most of these low print runs remain in university publishers’ storage rooms awaiting orders or they are sporadically offered as exchanges with other institutions. For paper-based publications of this type, approximately 60% are returned to the publisher. This is precisely where electronic publishing, through such services as downloads and on-demand printing, provides added value to conventional scientific publishing. In fact, most academic materials today are created in electronic formats, without ever producing a paper-based counterpart, so electronic publishing is logical because it responds to the need for saving on up-front publishing costs, storage space, and rapid distribution to the on-line scientific and educational community.
One thing that electronic publication does is respond to problems of bibliodiversity. The scientific publishing community is fundamentally a mechanism for ensuring bibliodiversity, as many of these highly specialised books would never have been published because of their limited commercial viability. However, by using electronic formats production costs are reduced to a minimum and distribution can be free via digital repositories.
The objectives of open access
The main objective of the Open Access movement is to improve the system of scientific commmunication by optimising acccess to and maximising the impact of research results through self-archiving (Harnad, 2003). It seems obvious that if a publication is freely accessible, it will be read more widely and be cited more often.
The authors of self-archived materials documents are responsible for any infringements of copyright, and they also are the guarantors of authorship and the integrity of the works deposited. In the case of journal articles, for which authors receive no economic compensation, the main question is for authors to determine under what circumstances the rights to public dissemination of the document are established. For this purpose, authors can consult the ROMEO/Sherpa database, which is a tool that allows them to search by journal title, publisher, or ISSN; the resulting information generated uses a colour code scheme to inform authors as to whether or not they hold the rights to public dissemination and under what conditions they are allowed to self-archive in open access repositories. The database will indicate whether authors can deposit preprints and/or postprints of their articles and whether they can do this immediately after publication or only after a certain period of time has passed.
The author is the main agent and the maximum beneficiary of the greater visibility of open access publication, a model that facilitates top-quality publication of scientific literature with no restrictions. The author benefits from being more widely read, cited, and acknowledged by the scientific community, which in turn could lead to better access to subsidies, wider recognition of merits and greater financing for future projects. However, this clashes with the low rate of authors who have deposited at least one document in an open access repository, only 10% (Harnad, 2006). The main argument in favour of open access self-archiving which is used to convince authors stresses high visibility, as evidenced by the download and citation rates of their research results, given that their articles and ideas will be accesible worldwide by means of harvesters and search engines (Google Scholar, Scirus, OAISTER, Scientific Commons, etc.).
Open access electronic books
The supply of electonic books has experienced exponential growth over the last three years, as recent sales figures and statistics prove. Evidence of how this phenomenon is becoming widespread can be found in the data collected by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which found significant growth in the ebook market between 2008 and 2010.3 The consulting firm Forrester Research has also noted growth in electronic book sales in the United States; according to their data, revenues rose from US $301 m in 2009 to $966 m in 2010, and they estimate sales of $2.8 billion in 2015.
Open access publication remains low, but on the increase. On the international scene, there are a number of initiatives that range from publishers who bring out specific books in an OA format to publishers whose entire catalogues consist of open access books. Nonetheless, most of these initiatives are in experimental stages and are being conducted by new publishers which are closely analysing consumer reaction. What the current situation shows is the need for new sustainable business models for the OA book publication.
The specific characteristics of each book, in addition to the circumstances of publication and funding, are looming challenges which these business models try to address in one way or another. Nearly all of the models that are currently being experimented with depend on internal or external public funding, or on some sort of public–private collaboration within the confines of a project. In the case of publisher-led initiatives, which are mostly privately funded, hybrid models of publication usually offer an online version for free and a paper-printed version on demand (OAPEN, 2010). Unlike open access journals, OA book publication still depends on funding for its viability. The most commonly used strategy for institutional publishers makes use of public and state sources of funding, as the visibility of research generated within institutions is susceptible to ideological factors, namely the desire to project a dynamic outward image. However, in prívate enterprise, both in consolidated publishing firms and those newly created digital publishers, are experimenting with business models that generate revenues through on demand printing, advertising and/or additional services while seeking to ensure long term sustainability of the model. Analysing both the public and prívate models closely, in actual fact they are not as different as they seem. In the institutional sphere, the publication of results is often considered the most expensive part of the research process, which explains why some institutions decide to allocate direct financial support for open access.
OAPEN classifies the different OA inititives into the following categories:
1. Commercial Publishers (Bloomsbury Academic, Polimetrica, Re.Press, O’Reilly Media).
2. Presses Established by Academies and Research Councils (The National Academies Press, HSRC Press).
3. Presses Established by Libraries (Newfound Press at the University of Tennessee Libraries. Internet-First University Press at Cornell University Library, and Digital Repository, Sydney University Press).
4. Library–Press Partnerships (Pennsylvania State University Press, Athabasca University Press, The Ohio State University Press, The University of Pittsburgh Press, The University of Michigan Press, The University of California Press).
5. University Presses (ANU E Press, The MIT Press, Yale University Press).
6. Presses Established by Academics (Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, ETC-Press).
7. Press–Commercial Publisher Partnerships (TU Ilmenau Press, The University of Colorado WAC Clearinghouse).
8. Other Publishing Models and Experiments (MediaCommons Press together with the Institute for the Future of the Book, Gutenberg-e collaboration between Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association (AHA).
Nearly all universities and research centres have developed OA institutional repositories as a means of following the green road to open access publishing, though these innovative ventures tend to exist alongside conventional publication strategies. A number of centres have even discussed whether depositing open access publications should be mandatory for all members. Of the 2610 repositories in ROAR,4 the Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)5 lists 338 institutions, of which 88 mandate the publication of doctoral dissertations.
The existing open access repositories in the world contain mostly scientific articles online. There is a fundamental reason for this. From the very beginning of scientific periodicals, authors have preferred wide dissemination over remuneration. Authors who published in what is considered the first scientific journal in the world, ‘Le Journal de Sçavan’, established in 1667, refused payment for their articles in exhange for an agile publication vehicle for their work. In other words, they accepted not being paid and this eventually became common practice. The first digital repositories originated in the traditional exchange of manuscripts among scientists to gather feedback from colleagues prior to publication. When in 1993 Paul Ginsparg created ArXiv in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, his objective was to make this exchange process easier, to make these documents more widely available and also to preserve these documents in an electronic format for posterity. What Ginsparg created was not only an effective system for exchanging preprinted documents but a paradigm shift in scientific communication.
Books require a greater economic investment, and thus pose a greater risk to the publisher. The economic and legal model for book publication emerged from the need to make the author a participant in the potential market success of a work by paying him or her in proportion to the number of copies sold (Cordon-García et al., 2011a). These terms are now stipulated in a publishing contract which outlines the exact conditions under which the book is published and the rights are assigned. Unlike the case of scientific journals which are regulated by a set of publication norms which tend to allow authors to self-archive their works in open access repositories, the right of the author to publicly disseminate books is much more limited. The contract conditions tend to legally prevent authors from being able to self-archive their works in open access repositories.
In order to ensure quality control and revision of open access books, most initiatives make a point of subjecting them to the clear and rigorous process of double-blind peer review and they stress that because of that the quality of OA publications is on a par with print publications. By insisting on these quality controls, open access publishers attempt to counteract the popular perception that they are inherently of poorer quality (OAPEN, 2010). In defence of the quality of OA publications, they also stress the more open and alternative indicators, namely the number of downloads and citations, as a measure of quality (Kurtz and Shrank, 2006).
Licences
In order for a book to be open access, it must either already be in the public domain or it must be licensed for public use (Hellman, 2011). The licensing regulation of OA books is done through a legal instrument called copyleft, which ensure that all copies and revised editions derived from the use of an open access licensed text will also remain open access. Copyleft utilizes the same legal mechanisms as copyright but in reverse, which is why the symbol for copyleft is a reverse c inscribed within a circle; what it does is not prohibit but authorise in such a way that the work’s open access nature is preserved. Copyright licenses certain uses of each book, making each of these right inalienable. There are some projects that also use traditional copyright licences.
Most open access electronic books are licensed through Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation founded in the U.S. by Lawrence Lessig, a Standford University law professor. The idea behind Creative Commons licensing stems partly from GNU General Public Licenses for open software established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Since their creation in 2001, Creative Commons licences have become a fundamental means of promoting and extending the copyleft ideal to new cultural spheres. The project as a whole has created a series of licences that allow authors to establish which uses they authorise and which they would like to limit. The licences have been translated and adapted for use in more than a dozen countries.
Creative Commons licences address the following issues:
Attribution of authorship: this option allows licensees to copy, distribute, show and perform the patented work and derive works from it under the condition that the authorship of the original work is always formally acknowledged.
Non-commercial usage: this option allows others to copy, distribute, show and perform the patented work and derive works from it providing that this is done for non-commercial purposes only.
No derivative works: this option allows others to copy, distribute, show and perform the patented work, though no users are licensed to derive new works based on it.
Share alike: this option allows others to derive work based on the patented work, under the condition that the new work be licensed under the same type of licence as the original work.
Different licences are being used on different open access projects, and some make use of conventional copyright licences to protect authorship and usage. Most use one of the Creative Commons licence types, although a few use the CC-BY licence, the type considered appropriate for OA and recommnded in the Berlin Declaration. CC-BY licences, as we have seen above, authorise licensees to copy, distribute, show and perform the copyrighted work and derive works from it under the condition that the authorship of the original work is always formally acknowledged.
Services
Open access electronic resources are an ever more important part of library services, above and beyond the print-formatted and copyright-licensed electronic materials. Most of these resources are available for library users in different platforms that range from the library catalogue to on-line institutional repositories to individual platforms for each one of the distribution formats. The diversity of search tools, screen interfaces and data retrieval methods subtract from the overall efficiency of libraries, and thus subtract from the value of public investment in libraries, because every user needs to use more and more search platforms to find what the library holds in relation to what interests him or her. Some institutions have opted for a complete integration of all holdings into OPAC catalogues as the main search tool. According to a 2009 poll by JISC, OPAC catalogues were the main means for searching for data in libraries (83%)6 versus publisher’s on-line platforms and web adverts. Electronic books are integrated into OPAC catalogues through publisher-provided MARC registries, which contain enriched data such as cover images, tables of contents and author biographies; MARC 856.4x tags link catalogue users to the complete texts. Other public institutions use meta browsers such as the SFX component of metalib, Aquabrowser, and others, though these solutions can often be costly and ineffective.
Platforms, courses, web adverts
Libraries are committed to providing access to information and culture, and they have long prided themselves on this distinction. Open access ideals are perfectly aligned with this mission, and librarians envision this system as a means to reach the communities they serve. Therefore, open access to electronic books can play an important supporting role in pursuit of this goal. Libraries are ideally positioned to provide the communities they serve in the process of selection, production, description, storage, retrieval, and, of course, access to OA electronic books.
One of the most widely used ways of publishing open access books is through collaborative ventures between presses and libraries. Publishers provide the content and the services of revision and edition, and librarians provide the technical description, infrastructure and dissemination platforms.
When it comes to locating these books on-line, one essential question concerns what URLs should be used to guarantee stable and long-lasting access. Another strong point which commends libraries is their capacity for describing information, and this is no less true about locating and accessing information on-line. As more and more information becomes available for free on the Internet, the more libraries can fulfil their role as guarantors of what materials are most appropriate for library users.
Many libraries are also working towards digitalisation of their print holdings, which in many cases are hundreds of years old and are needed in new reading formats in order to be made available for public consultation.
Another one of the basic tasks of libraries in the context of open access digital books is in raising awareness of the advantages of OA among researchers. In this role, libraries acquaint research professionals with what open access publication can mean for them in terms of visibility.
Open access can help create an international community of mutual understanding and learning, and it does this by providing shared access to the ideas, culture and knowledge that are found in that fundamental means of scientific communications, i.e. the book.
Digital libraries
Digital libraries are Internet sites consecrated to the creation and preservation of electronic book collections and holdings of other kinds of materials, without the need for end users to purchase the materials they want to consult and read. Creating and preserving these collections involves the participation of a large number of intermediate institutions, which is part of what makes digital libraries so interesting. Among the participants are those institutions that secure from the publishers the rights to transform or distribute their materials in digital formats, and libraries that purchase the rights for the members of their institutions to access these materials while respecting certain conditions. In some case, libraries do not acquire copyright but merely are licensed by publishers and distributors to consult these materials. Digital libraries are mainly stocked with sources of information that are available on the Internet in open access format, and they are remarkable for the ease of access to collections, the networking possibilities they offer, and the universal availability of their collections. These libraries are places where new digital objects are added to conventional documents already housed there.
Among the most noteworthy of these digital libraries are the Project Gutenberg, the World Digital Library and the Europeana Library. The World Digital Library was created by the U.S. Library of Congress and inaugurated on 21 April 2009; the Europeana digital library, inaugurated on 20 November 2008, is an open access library that serves Europe. There are digital library projects sponsored by national libraries, among which the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library [Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes] of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Gallica digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and other such projects stand out. The contents of these libraries are fundamentally works in the public domain. Though national legislation may vary, a work is typically considered to be in the public domain 70 years after the death of the author. As a result of this lack of international consensus, there are countries where works can be in the public domain only 50 years after the author’s death, which explains how in one country an author’s works may be freely available while in another they are not.
Books in the public domain on the platforms of major publishers
As an added benefit to their global platforms, publishers may offer free books that are in the public domain. A chart available in an online article Murphy shows the different percentages of public domain books available on major publishers’ platforms (Murphy, 2010). Note that of the 610 000 titles available on Amazon Kindle 20 000 are in the public domain; Google Books, with ten million titles on its platform, has two million that are in the public domain and which are available as PDF and ePub downloads; Barnes & Noble have 160 000 volumes on their platform, of which 100 000 are public domain eBooks.
Perhaps the most controversial eBook venture is the wide-reaching and self-imposed Google Books initiative. Google Books7 is a project which aims to digitalise the entire stock of books in the world and make them available to web users, and currently hundred of thousands of these are available on the Internet. Google Books thus emerged as a distribution and sales network for many of these out of stock and impossible to find books as a business model that harnessed the potential synergies of its widely used search engine (Cordón-García et al., (2011a). However, the project is currently at a standstill in the wake of opposition by publishers and authors who believe their rights have been violated by the wholesale digitalisation of copyrighted works. In response to the loss of income that Google Books could bring their eBook sales if it succeeds, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo have created the Open Book Alliance, though they also trust that their suing of Google Books for unfair competition will help them. Google’s lawyers acknowledge that they have digitised seven million books, but they deny the charge by alleging that with only 1% of the estimated 270 million books in the world they cannot be accused of competing unfairly.
Many national and international individuals, corporations and institutions have also opposed this effort to monopolise the distribution and sale of books on the Internet, but it is also true that it is the first time that the old project envisioned by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine has been feasibly put into action. While their project consisted of compiling a world catalogue of all published books, Google not only seeks out the references of what exists but the complete documents as well.
Basically, Google Books is comprised of the following charactistics. All words in each book are indexed, except for empty words. This allows for users to search within books containing the search terms entered. The search within text function is a complete revolution of conventional catalogue searching by such fields as title, author, summary, and key words. Rather than being able to search among hundreds of words, this function allows users to make filtered searches in a data base containing millions of words.
The response generated by the system contains books with the search terms in the text. Visualisation of the resulting book depends on the agreement established with the publisher, or whether the book is exempt or has no copyright. The basic viewing options are as follows:
Full View. For books not protected by copyright, or for books for which the editor or author have granted permission, a full view of all the book’s pages is available. If the book is in the public domain, users can download, save and print a PDF version of it to read when they please.
Limited Preview. If the editor or author has granted permission, a limited number of the book’s pages are available for preview.
View of Fragments. Like a catalogue entry, this view shows information about the book and the short passages where the search term(s) appear(s) in context.
No Preview Available. Exactly like a catalogue entry, only the basic data about the book is available.
All contents of books in the public domain can be digitalised, reproduced and distributed freely.
Self-publishing and streaming reading
Many self-publishing systems also offer free electronic books. When self-publishing through the following companies, authors choose whether or not they want their books to be open access:
AuthorHouse
AuthorHouse is a provider of book-publishing solutions. It is the world leader of self-publishing and marketing of self-published books. Commited to providing the highest level of service, AuthorHouse assigns each author a personal publication consultant, who counsels each author throughout the publication process. AuthorHouse also offers a wide range of tools and services that help authors take their own decisions in the self-publishing process. Headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana, AuthorHouse has published more than 60 000 books since its beginnings in 1997.
Bubok
The idea behind Bubok is that authors obtain 80% of sales profits for all books that are self-published with them. The business model centres on on-demand printing. The Bubok portal allows authors to publish books for free. If authors wish to receive a print copy or if authors wish to allow their books to be distributed through them, the price is much lower than it would be with conventional publishing houses and printers.
Lulu
It is free to publish on Lulu, and authors can create a wide range of publishable texts, including hardcover books, electronic books, photo albums and calendars. Authors hold copyright and they keep 80% of the profits on book sales. Lulu has a worldwide network of printers and its books are available on platforms such as Amazon.com and on Apple’s iBookstore, so they can help authors reach readers all over the planet. Authors who need assistance with the cover design, text editing, desktop publishing, marketing or anything else related to the publication process can make use of their à la carte professional services.
Smashwords
An on-line self-publishing community of authors and editors founded by Mark Cokeren for publishing electronic books, Smashwords sets the prices of the books it publishes and receives between 60% and 85% of the final sales price. The average book price is five dollars, which means that authors receive a minimum of three dollars per unit sold. Smashwords is also a platform for distributing eBooks in different free DRM formats, which is a competitive advantage as its books are sold on large platforms such as Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, the Sony Reader Store, Kobo and the Diesel eBooks Store.
Soopbook
SoopBook is a social networking tool that allows users to read and write books in collaboration with anyone else in the world. Social open books such as those resulting from collaborative efforts on SoopBook are created after several users join in sharing their ideas and knowledge, put it into writing, and benefit from the shared opinions of other users in the system.
On-line reading using streaming is another business model that is trying to reconcile free online reading and copyright. Streaming, which refers to uninterrupted broadcasting over the Internet, is commonly used for transmitting audio and video but can also be used to broadcast reading materials. Streaming technology allows computers to capture audio and video signals in a buffer and play them in such a way that if the Internet connection goes down the streaming user can still enjoy whatever is already stored. Streamed contents can also be listened to, read and viewed asynchronously by playing them whenever required from the computer’s buffered memory. This type of reading is usually based on freemium business model (advertising + subscription). In other words, online reading is free while readers are exposed to non-intrusive contextual adverts, though they can also read ad-free by becoming premium subscribers. This is more or less the model of Spotify, though geared towards books. In fact, after their success with Netflix,8 an on-line video platform that uses streaming, Amazon.com is thinking about expanding the model to eBooks. Netflix offers over 100,000 films and television series to more than 25 million users in the U.S. and Canada at $7.99 per month.
Conclusion
Many of these emerging models are not that new, though what is new is the sheer volume of open access proposals that utilise recent technological developments. Also new are some of the players entering the market; in addition to institutional agents, there are now new agents interested in emerging OA prospects that eBooks have to offer.
Open access is a different way of conducting and distributing research findings that makes them available and accessible in digital environments. This objective can generate a variety of revenue sources from a combination of different business models that address what ways materials are disseminated, what means of funding are available and what added value is provided during the process of text production.
Apart from these emerging business models, open access has already become well- established in periodical publishing as it now coexists with traditional subscription-based journal delivery. Given the idiosyncratic nature of electronic books, however, open access cannot yet be considered a viable alternative; the business model for eBooks is different from that of scientific journals in that they require larger and riskier investments and in that eBook authors receive part of the revenue. The main initiatives still stem from institutional open access repository projects which mainly collect doctoral dissertations and some books for which the institution itself holds the copyright. Private enterprise is currently experimenting with alternative systems that seek to generate revenue from open access books via on-demand printing services, from author-pays publishing similar to the open access model of scientific and academic journals,9 from additional à la carte services (for instance, by improving manuscript quality through the provision of visual and audio contents such as maps, photographs, narratives, and so on), or from streaming reading supported by non-intrusive advertising. Sustainability of OA publishing is a major concern; initiatives currently underway are still in their experimental stages, so for many it is difficult to determine whether in the long term they will be sustainable or not. Whether current models which generate income from on-line sales, payment for additional services and advertising will be viable in the long term remains to be seen, especially since users seem reluctant to pay for additional services and advertising is not a sufficient source of income for publishers.
Another related concern is that information about the viability of open access electronic book publication is very dispersed. While thousands of companies and institutions publish on their own web pages reports on their activities, or reports on issues of interest to them, these reports can be a waste of valuable resources because they are not very visible that way. Different business and institutional models may be viable in one context but not another, for some objectives but not for others, and for one publisher but not for others. Though information is very dispersed at the moment of this writing, it would seem that long-term sustainability is strongly context-dependent, and dependent on whether the OA book publishing initiative is institutional or commercial in nature (OAPEN, 2010).
There are many reasons why presses should experiment with the open access model, which entails cost reduction with respect to conventional publishing and thus the ability to optimise efficiency. Many of the OA models based on open software instrastructures, such as the Open Journal System (OJS), D-Space or Drupal, are currently doing this. Open access can be a considerable improvement for providing learning materials for blended learning and distance learning, which are becoming increasingly popular. Another significant advantage of OA is that is provides a high degree of visibility to the academic contents of such courses by making them accessible on a massive scale; on-line open access teaching materials are easily retrievable, more widely consulted and thus more frequently cited, with the benefit accruing to the author(s) and their institutions and/or publishers.
Despite the increasing number of open access books, emerging business models and new developments in book production, traditional publishing continues to prevail in the sector; as with scientific journal publication, electronic books and their prevailing print counterparts will continue to coexist. This does not preclude an upcoming surge in electronic book publication as institutions, scientific organisations and commercial ventures are in future likely to embrace more readily the philosophy of free and open access to the documents they produce. This has already happened with other types of documents.
1.Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), http://roar.eprints.org/
2.Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), http://www.doaj.org/
3.IDPF http://idpf.org/about-us/industry-statistics
4.Registry of Open Access Repositories http://roar.eprints.org/
5.ROARMAP: Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies http://roarmap.eprints.org/
6.‘Dispelling Myths About E-Books with Empirical Evidence.’ JISC (2009). http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/wp-content/jc_ebooks_observatory_summary-final.pdf
7.Google books, http://books.google.com/books
8.Netflix http://www.netflix.com/
9.The ‘author-pays’ model occurs when the author or the author’s institution pays for open access publication of a work. This model guarantees the quality of the final work by ensuring peer review and the value of the model is often assessed in terms of the book’s impact measured in terms of number of downloads, citations received and other factors.