New Springer Nature report on the effect of open access on books
This week, Springer Nature published a report called ‘The OA effect: How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books?’
This report is the first major comparative analysis of usage data for open access (OA) and non-OA scholarly books. Our findings establish that there is a performance benefit from publishing a book OA as they are downloaded seven times more, cited 50% more and mentioned online ten times more.
The interviews we conducted with authors and funders also revealed some common themes around why they publish and fund open access books, from increased visibility and wider dissemination to ethical motivations.
Read the full report here: https://goo.gl/LB9kP6