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 named initiatives are seen as representative of speciﬁc types of project (and no slight is intended upon those not listed).

Studies of the OA monograph

The leading studies of the open-access monograph, at present, are: the OAPEN-NL project; Jisc Collections’ OAPEN-UK initiative; and the HEFCE Open Access Monographs investigation. The ﬁrst of these (OAPEN-NL) concluded in 2013. The OAPEN-UK study is ongoing and will end in 2015. The HEFCE panel is currently also ongoing but due to end in 2014 (some time near to the submission of this book’s manuscript). All three studies feature involvement from publishers, libraries and researchers but each has slightly different aims and objectives. This section will give a brief summary of each and, when possible, the ﬁndings. It is worth noting, before proceeding and in the interests of fair disclosure, that the nature of early OA studies is that they are often run by those with an interest in seeing open access come to fruition. Furthermore, while there are some strong headline ﬁndings from various projects, these must remain provisional and some publishers are sceptical of their real-world applicability (or at least are not willing to be the ﬁrst to take the two-footed jump into the unknown).

OAPEN-NL

The OAPEN-NL project – headed by Eelco Ferwerda, Ronald Snijder and Janneke Adema – was based on a broader OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) project, originally established in 2008, with a shared aim between the investigations to explore the business model implications for OA books. From the project’s description:

OAPEN-NL was a project to gain experience with Open Access publication of monographs in the Netherlands. Between June 2011 and November 2012, 50 Open Access monographs in various subject areas were published in [gold] Open Access by 9 participating publishers. For every Open Access title, the publishers provided a similar title that was published in the conventional way. . . Data were collected about usage, sales and costs, to study the effect of Open Access on monographs. OAPEN-NL consisted of