2. INTRODUCTION

The distribution of information through the scientific community has been changed by web based technology. Promising instant online access to ‘everything’, it has transformed the way scholars, librarians and publishers look at their roles. Some scholars and libraries may act as publisher (P. O. Brown, Eisen, & Varmus, 2003), while publishers may create digital libraries ("ScienceDirect - Elsevier," 2009). Using the web, new possibilities arise. Innovation is not just limited to business structures, pricing is also revolutionized: Open Access publishing operates with free – unpaid – access to publications.

Scholars do not work in a vacuum; research is based on work from others and new discoveries must be disseminated in order to be used. It is essential for scholars to have access to verified information. Also, if new discoveries are made, these results must find their way to an audience of peers and to the complete scientific community and beyond. Publishers play an important role in this process, by ensuring that published results comply with scholarly standards and by informing interested parties of the new publications. The resulting publication validates the work of the authors through the quality control of the publisher. The recognition of the author is further enhanced by the prestige of the publisher or publication series. Simply put: the most prestigious publisher will only accept manuscripts of the highest standards. Furthermore, the impact of a publication is measured by the number of times it is cited in other scholarly publications. Awareness of the publications is therefore an important issue, in which both publishers and libraries may work together. For scholars, Open Access may enhance the use of their publications by removing access barriers and consequently enabling all interested parties to read the content.

Depending on the scholarly discipline, results are published mostly in journal articles or in books. Scholars in science, technology and medicine will write articles, while in the humanities and social sciences books are the norm (Williams, Stevenson, Nicholas, Watkinson, & Rowlands, 2009). This has several implications; here we will discuss citation analysis and the rate of digitization. One of the most important ways to measure the impact of a scientist is citation analysis. By counting the number of times a publication is cited, it is possible to rank the output of a scientist. Citation analysis of journal articles is common, but citation analysis of books is not. Here we use the search engine Google Scholar to remedy this (Harzing & van der Wal, 2008; Kousha & Thelwall, 2008). Similar to this, the distribution of electronic versions of articles is well established, while the use of electronic books is still limited.

The dissemination of scientific knowledge through paper books is challenged by economical factors, as scholarly publishers are faced with a decline in sales. As the number of published titles increased, average print runs declined. In the mid-seventies this number ranged between two- and three thousand copies; nowadays an average print run comprises of five hundred copies or less. This leads to severe financial problems for publishers specialized in humanities and social sciences books (Alonso, Davidson, Unsworth, & Withey, 2003; Greco & Wharton, 2008; Thompson, 2005). The decline of print runs is also clear when one studies the expenditure of academic libraries. Recent figures for the UK from the Library & Information Statistics Unit clearly show that within the category ‘information provision’, book expenditure has not kept up with other information sources, leading to a decline of more than 30% in a 10-year period since 1995 (LISU, 2006).

Considering these restrictions, digital publishing may be an alternative way to disseminate scholarly books that would otherwise not have been published. Ithaka published an extensive report which suggests that the online publication role of university presses should be expanded and that presses should collaborate on many functions related to online publication, as is already common in journal publishing (L. Brown, Griffiths, Rascoff, & Guthrie, 2007). An example of this development is the revival of Rice University Press as the first fully digital university press in the United States (Henry, 2007).

A related development is the rise of Open Access. In Open Access, scholarly documents – in digital form – are made available without restriction. A common form of Open Access is placing a copy of the document in a ‘repository’, while another version is available trough the publisher’s systems. In most cases, access via the publisher is only granted if the reader – or the reader’s institution – has paid for a subscription. This form of Open Access is called the ‘green road’. Publishers may also decide to use the ‘golden road’ by making the publication freely available – to publish it directly in Open Access. These models are fairly well established in the disciplines using articles, but not in the humanities and social sciences. Most literature on Open Access is focused on scientific journals and journal articles, while research on books is scarce. This paper describes research done on Open Access publishing on books. When documents are published directly in Open Access, publishers use a different business model where the author – or the funding agency – pays for the publication, instead of the reader.

Following this, we arrive at the central question: does publishing books in Open Access lead to a better dissemination of scientific information? The main aspects of this question are the usage by scientists and the economic consequences for publishers. If publishing in Open Access removes barriers, the usage of the information may increase which benefits the scientific community. Academic publishers play an important role in the dissemination of scientific books. Publishing in Open Access leads to a new business model, which must sustain the publisher in order to be successful. Therefore, the main research question is: what are the effects of changes in accessibility and dissemination channels on the scientific impact of academic books?

This research question can be broken down into smaller questions:

- Does publishing of academic books in Open Access lead to a higher discovery rate?

- Does publishing of academic books in Open Access lead to more usage?

o Does publishing of academic books in Open Access lead to more online consultations or downloads?

o Does publishing of academic books in Open Access lead to higher citation rates?

o Does publishing of academic books in Open Access lead to higher sales figures of their paper counterparts?

- Which channel is best suited to promote discovery of academic books published in Open Access?

- Does a multichannel approach lead to more usage of academic books published in Open Access, compared to using a single channel?

o Does a multichannel approach lead to a higher discovery rate of academic books published in Open Access, compared to using a single channel?

o Does a multichannel approach lead to higher sales figures of the paper counterparts of academic books published in Open Access, compared to using a single channel?