Scholarly publishing loves surveys. Perhaps because accurate quantitative information is so difficult to come by in the fragmented and often commercial (and hence private) world of scholarly publishing, many commentators opt for a simpler version of a survey: simply ask a few people what they think. I confess, I’ve used this approach myself: it’s much quicker than a quantitative analysis, which requires time and money, even though this provides the validation of statistical significance.
The recent Ithaka survey, The Current State of Academic E-Book Business Models, funded by Mellon, provided no quantitative data. It took four months, and was based on interviewing just 17 participants, comprising “publishers, librarians, content aggregators, and authors”. Assuming equal proportions of each category, the report was derived from just over four responses in each category – hardly statistically valid. So when the report states “moving towards more open content is a strategic priority for some institutions”, does that mean one of the respondents mentioned it? With such a small number, the chances of exceptional responses is very high, and the report lacks credibility. Overall, the report has little value in giving a clear picture on the open-book world. “Some institutions” is hardly an advance on chatting to people in the street and reporting on what you hear.
Equally fundamentally, the Ithaka report did not mention several initiatives in business models for open monographs, such as the Open Book Publishers programme, even though it claimed to study academic monographs “across the United States and Europe” (perhaps two interviewees from the States, and two from Europe?).
In contrast, the recent Research Consulting report into OA book publishing does provide quantitative figures, although even here the survey comprised only 20 responses; however, in this case, all the responses came from one industry group, research managers at UK institutions. Hence, I trust the figures more, but nonetheless, this was too small a number.
As for findings, the Research Consulting report looked pretty depressing. Although the respondents believed in repositories as the best way to comply with funding mandates, only half of the institutions reported an operational or systematic capturing of OA monographs in the repository, which negates their earlier response.
The most valuable information I have been able to find about business models for OA books is an excellent post by Lucy Barnes on the LSE Impact Blog, “Genuine open access to academic books requires collective solutions”, which lists several initiatives not mentioned in either of the above reports. I appreciate that OA books is an area with a proliferation of small initiatives and business models, but that’s why I read reports to find out what is going on: I expect the reports to tell me about what is not widely known. I am very tolerant of surveys by individuals, whose results will inevitably be partial, because they lack the resources to create a large enough survey (typically 100 or more respondents) to be statistically valid. But I have little patience with paid surveys by reputable organisations that provide no quantitative results, and simply provide results as a commentary assembled from one or more of the responses received.
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