Digital and cost-free access to scholarly books broadens their reach, but the impact of open access on sales figures is slight. These are the key findings of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) pilot project OAPEN-CH.
The authors of the recently published final report concluded that, compared to purely print publications, open access had positive impacts in many areas: freely accessible monographs had higher visibility, their international reach was broader, and they were used more frequently. At the same time, an impact of open access on the sales of these books could not be statistically proven.
The SNSF conducted the OAPEN-CH project between 2014 and 2017 with scholarly publishers, libraries, and authors in order to measure experiences with the publication process for scholarly open access monographs.
Ferwerda, Eelco; Snijder, Ronald; Arpagaus, Brigitte; Graf, Regula; Krämer, Daniel; Moser, Eva: OAPEN-CH - Auswirkungen von Open Access auf wissenschaftliche Monographien in der Schweiz. Ein Projekt des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds [OAPEN-CH - Impacts of open access on scholarly monographs in Switzerland. A Swiss National Science Foundation project]. In: Zenodo (2018), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1219171
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