Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/141

 a quantitative and a qualitative research component, measuring the effects of Open Access publishing and the perceptions and expectations of publishers and authors.25

This concept of ‘similar titles’ is difﬁcult to pull off. As many publishers will attest, no two books are alike in their sales proﬁle or content and there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ monograph. Faced with such difﬁculties, for the OAPEN-NL project, similarity was deﬁned in terms of publication date, number of pages, price and subject area. The OAPEN-NL project was ﬁnished in 2013 with data returned from Koninklijke van Gorcum, IOS Press B.V., Springer Science & Business Media, Techne Press, Wageningen Academic Publishers, Koninklijke Brill NV, KITLV Press and Amsterdam University Press.26 This resulted in a sample size of ﬁfty books with a total expenditure of €239,615.85 by the project at a maximum of €5,000 per book paid to publishers.27

The project’s headline ﬁndings from its quantitative data used a statistical technique called Analysis of Variance between groups (ANOVA) that is designed to ensure minimal risk that the result was derived by chance. From this analysis, the OAPEN-NL project concluded that ‘no signiﬁcant effect of Open Access on monograph sales could be found’ but that there was signiﬁcant increase in digital usage (the number of times a book was viewed on Google Books) when it was OA. There was no observed citation beneﬁt to a book being open access, a result that contradicts several studies in the journal sphere.28 Finally, the project also examined the costs of publishing and concluded that an OA edition is approximately 50% cheaper to produce than the total cost of a conventional, print monograph, although I have heard non-participating publishers exhibit scepticism towards this ﬁnding in particular (and there is the temptation to believe, once more, that the intangible digital object should always cost less, regardless of the labour invested).29

For OA advocates, there are two positive outcomes in these ﬁndings and one unexpected negative result. However, a sequential and sceptical look at these ﬁndings reveals that each can be interpreted differently. The ﬁrst result of the project, that open access does not act to the detriment of other sales, can be viewed sceptically if one considers the fact that the open-access route is not so well embedded within researcher-speciﬁc discovery channels as traditional