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 spans international criminal law, classics, literature and history, through to marketing, among many others. As the OAPEN-UK project is still running, no deﬁnitive results from the quantitative portion of the experiment/control study are yet available. That said, the project has already released some extremely valuable ﬁndings from various case studies and focus groups as part of a structured qualitative research programme.32

The ﬁrst round of OAPEN-UK focus groups was held between November 2011 and February 2012 and consisted of institutional representatives, publishers, researchers, funders, learned societies and eBook aggregators. The core issues raised in these fora, among many others, were: quality and prestige; dissemination; versioning, preservation and archiving; and costs.33 While the matter of ‘costs’ will be dealt with shortly in the section below on economic models for monographs, among the most prominent remarks to emerge in this portion of OAPEN-UK’s investigation was that:

Most commentators identiﬁed a perception that OA content is, per se, lower quality than books published in more traditional ways, although not all agreed that this is necessarily the case. The prestige of print publication was recognised as very important to researchers, and there were concerns that they would be slow to adopt OA, as both authors and readers, although the researchers themselves did not mention this as a potential problem. 34

While this view on OA as lower quality ties in well with my earlier remarks on perceived value and pricing, it is also clearly false. Open access is supposed to refer to peer-reviewed research and there is no reason why it should be lower quality. As awareness of OA grows and as traditional publishers expand their efforts, this view will probably become less common.

Another area in which there was some consternation surrounded the ofﬁcial version of record. In a green OA environment for monographs, were copies to be distributed among repositories, for instance, there was a fear that a proliferation of different versions would cause trust in the monograph to decline.35 This was also linked to the supposed challenges for perpetual access to OA content. While this is an important area and shouldn’t be taken for granted and to reiterate a point made in the introduction to this book, Kathleen Fitzpatrick also does much to challenge such repeated