Attitudes towards Open Monographs in the European Research Area

Maciej Maryl, Gabriela Manista, Magdalena Wnuk

Keywords: data collection, open access books, open access policies, research assessment, multilingualism, prestige

Introduction

This paper presents the analysis of interviews conducted in the framework of the PALOMERA project with the key stakeholders: researchers, librarians, publishers, research funding agencies and policymakers throughout the European Research Area. The study aims to shed light on the perspective of the attitudes towards the open monographs, trying to describe common threads in ERA countries. The key takeaway is that despite the small number of OA policies across ERA (and even a lower number of policies including monographs), the open academic books seem to be gaining momentum, supported bottom-up by various institutions and funders.

PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) is a two-year Horizon Europe project aiming at speeding up the transition to open access for books by providing recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate institutional and funder OA policies. The project seeks to understand the state of the art concerning OA book policies by collecting documentation (policies and contextual material), surveying key stakeholders, and obtaining in-depth contextual knowledge through interviews. To capture the multifaceted context of open access (OA) book publishing, the analysis focuses on the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE) dimensions of the issue. 

Academic books are defined here as scholarly, peer-reviewed, books including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form scholarly works. When conducting research we maintain an inclusive approach, i.e. follow how the academic books are defined in each analysed country, including the variety of quality assessment practices they undergo. However, the field of science policy and practice regarding open access (OA) books is constantly evolving within scholarly circles. Hence, numerous aspects remain unclear, including the quantity of OA books and the extent of their preservation coverage (Laakso, 2023).

Methodology

The research team covered 39 ERA countries and all stakeholder categories through 39 individual interviews and 3 group interviews. In total, 47 interviewees took part in interviews: 24 women and 23 men. All interviews lasted around 60 minutes. The interviews were transcribed with HappyScribe, translated into English via DeepL (if needed), proofread and anonymised. The interviews were precoded for PESTLE categories in MaxQDA and later coded in vivo.

Results

Although the first round of coding is still ongoing (expected to be finalised by the end of February 2024), the initial analyses yield interesting results. 

1. Research assessment

The lack of clear regulations and policies regarding open-access scholarly monographs does not seem to prevent the publication of OA books. It does, however, lead to difficulties in the publishing process, related to both the legal aspects of publishing books in open access, i.e. copyright, licensing, and the technological dimension of publishing – the availability of infrastructures, the standard of content or metadata. Interestingly, the absence of national OA policy is often offset by funder’s or institutional regulations requiring the beneficiaries of research or publishing grants to make their work available in the OA. However,  the interviewees made it clear that in the absence of reward systems, the funder’s requirement remains the only incentive to publish in the OA.

Finding a balance between requiring and encouraging author engagement with OA monographs is crucial. Academics feel burdened if excessive responsibility is imposed on them. Emphasizing the excellence and reputation of OA (in hiring, evaluations, etc.) while providing detailed information on opportunities and publishing workflows is equally essential to encourage academics to publish OA. When it comes to mandates, it's important to recognize that additional obligations on academic institutions often lack sufficient funding (Adema 2019: 31).

1. Multilingualism

Quite paradoxically, open science may be seen as a threat to multilingualism. Openness is often connected to the issues of transparency and excellence and thus becomes a part of internationalization strategies (cf. Kulczycki et al. 2019). Consequently, the issues of visibility come into play, one interviewee reached a telling conclusion that “books in  English are more visible than books in [add. national language] Bulgarian” (20230928_BG_RPO_PALOMERA), in other words, the opportunities to publish open monographs seem to favour the works in English. Another challenge perceived in this context is a possible domination of the commercial English-only publishers over the publication in local languages.

1. Prestige

Researchers are expected to prioritize the dissemination of their research findings through what are deemed the most esteemed channels. The concepts of "excellence" and "quality" (Lamont 2009; Moore et al. 2017) within academia, as well as the prevailing culture of academic prestige (Fyfe et al. 2017) and the method of “quantified control” for funding allocation (Burrows 2012), significantly influence how research book publishers' quality and prestige are perceived. 

Monographs in open access are often perceived by authors as less prestigious than traditionally printed books (Maryl et al. 2021) or even, as marked by one of the interviewees – “there is no prestige being in open access” (20230825_SK_RPO_PALOMERA). It rather applies to monographs published exclusively online and not so much to those digitised but originally published traditionally in print. As for the roots of those attitudes, the interviewees mentioned the lack of trust in OA formats caused by vanity publishing practices and predatory publishers. As Martin Paul Eve suggests, this may be also due to the relative novelty of OA and more time needs to pass for the prestige accumulated with open access outlets (Eve 2014: 50).

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