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 Open access journals

4.25. There is no published analysis of the numbers of open access articles published by authors from different countries; but analysis of the SCOPUS database suggests that authors with an affiliation to an institution in the UK were responsible for over 11% of the articles published in PLoS One in 2011. Similar figures apply to other major open access publishers such as BioMedCentral. Such figures are considerably higher than the 6% of the global total of all articles for which UK authors are listed; and the conclusion must be that authors from the UK are among the leaders—alongside colleagues in the US and Germany—in adopting open access publishing.

Monographs

4.26. In many areas of the humanities and social sciences, monographs and edited collections of essays (henceforth, monographs is the term used to cover both) are regarded as the most important channel for communicating the results of research, both to members of the research community and more widely. Monographs are also in many cases the standard against which the performance and standing of researchers is judged. But there has for many years been concern about the decline of the monograph, both in the UK and across the world. Hard evidence is difficult to come by, but it is clear that print runs have declined, that prices have risen, and that libraries have found it difficult to sustain the development of their collections of monographs. UK university libraries’ expenditure on books has declined significantly since 2006 in real terms, while expenditure on serials has increased.

4.27. Digitisation has made a significant impact in improving access to books that are out of copyright. Alongside major international initiatives such as Google Books and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, individual libraries have made significant efforts to digitise material in special collections, and to expose metadata to the major search engines. Copyright restrictions constitute a major impediment, however, to digitisation and online access to more recent material, including publications (‘orphan works’) for which the rights-holder cannot be traced. The Hargreaves Review last year made various recommendations to address some of the issues that libraries face in improving digital access to their collections, including orphan works; and the Government has responded positively to those recommendations. Much remains to be done, however, if we are to develop in the UK, and internationally, a more effective regime to address the issues highlighted by Hargreaves.