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Open Access Open Scholarship Open Science

What’s in a number? A closer look at Open Access readership data, Part Two

This is Part Two of a two-part series on Open Access Readership Data. To see Part One, click here.


In Part One of this blog series I have already explained how the readership data of the OA books published with the support of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access are gathered and displayed on our website. However, in order to really show the potential reach and impact of Open Access publishing, I will now break down and analyze the metrics more carefully.

Categories
Open Access Open Scholarship Open Science

What’s in a number? A closer look at Open Access readership data, Part One

This is Part One of a two-part series on Open Access Readership Data. For Part Two, click here.


Open Access (OA) literature is freely available online to be read by anyone, anytime, and anywhere. It is a publishing model that offers an alternative for the traditional method of publishing scholarly output behind a paywall, where articles and books are inaccessible to everyone except a select few with a library subscription or the money to pay for exorbitant individual fees. Broadly speaking, there are two routes to achieving an Open Access publication: the first is Green OA (the author publishes behind a paywall and self-archives a digital copy in a free online repository); and the second is Gold OA (the author publishes an article or book immediately in OA, making it directly available to the public without any costs charged for reading).1 Whereas academic journals that offer Gold OA options have become widespread in the last decade, the transition to Open Access for academic books is lagging behind, despite the fact that monographs are still the leading publishing format in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In order to boost the publication of OA books, KU Leuven Libraries reserved a substantial part of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access, established in 2018, to help finance OA books published by Leuven University Press (LUP).

  1. This is Open Access in a nutshell. For more detailed information see: https://www.kuleuven.be/open-science/what-is-open-science/scholarly-publishing-and-open-access/open-access-why-and-how []
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