Diversifying Readership Through Open Access: A usage analysis for OA books ● Mithu Lucraft, Marketing Director, Outreach and Open Research at Springer Nature One of the attractions of publishing OA is the potential for greater reach, but is OA living up to its promise of expanding and diversifying the readership of books? In this session we present findings from the largest ever usage and citation study comparing OA and non-OA books, and show that OA books are read more, across more countries, than non-OA books, and reach more readers in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

1. Diversifying Readership for
Open Access Books
R2R conference - Mithu Lucraft
February 2021
Antarctica
meltdown
could
double
sea
level
rise

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“Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share
the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as
useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual
conversation and quest for knowledge.”
Budapest Open Access Initiative, February 14, 2002
Two decades on, is open access delivering on its promise?

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R2R Conference Feb 2021 - Mithu Lucaft
The opportunity: sharing a publisher case study
Multiple book types:
Monographs
Edited volumes
Briefs/Pivots
Major reference works
100m + chapter downloads since 2013
More than 1,000 OA books published across HSS and STM disciplines

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Our collaboration with COARD
White paper: https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-
research/journals-books/books/diversifying-readership-
through-open-access
Preprint: https://zenodo.org/record/4014905#.YCa-BI_7RhE

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Why readership?
White paper:
http://www.springernature.com/futu
reofoabooks
● Authors want to increase the visibility and
readership of their work
● Authors who had published OA showed greater
interest in ensuring reach to low/lower middle
income countries

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Findings are consistent with
Springer Nature’s 2017
report, the OA Effect,
showing an even more robust
OA advantage.
Findings: a strong usage effect for OA books

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OA advantage is across every book type, discipline, and year

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OA books reach more readers, in more countries
N.B. Log scale

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OA books have more diverse readership
For the corpus as a
whole and for every
category, the median
Gini coefficient of OA
books is lower,
meaning that the
geographical usage of
OA books is more
diverse (i.e. less
unequal), while non-
OA titles have lower
diversity.
Gini co-efficient by subject cluster and book type

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Downloads from the open web are around double those from
institutional network points
We see significant
differences in logged
and anonymous
usage, with
downloads from the
open web (anonymous
usage) generally
around double that
from institutional
network points.

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OA boosts readership of books that mention country or region
x5
x100

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• On average, OA books have 10 times more downloads than
non-OA books and 2.4 times more citations.
• OA books show more downloads than non-OA comparison
groups for every type of book, every discipline, and each of
the three years of publication in the sample.
• OA books show a higher diversity of geographical usage
• OA books increase access and usage for low-income or lower-
middle-income countries
• OA books that contain the names of countries and regions in
their title generally show enhanced usage, including in that
country or region.
OA is making a substantial difference for scholarly books
https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/books/diversifying-readership-
through-open-access

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The story behind the image
Antarctica meltdown could
double sea level rise
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have
been considering how quickly a glacial ice melt in
Antarctica would raise sea levels. By updating
models with new discoveries and comparing them
with past sea-level rise events they predict that a
melting Antarctica could raise oceans by more than
3 feet by the end of the century if greenhouse gas
emissions continued unabated, roughly doubling
previous total sea-level rise estimates. Rising seas
could put many of the world’s coastlines
underwater or at risk of flooding and storm surges.
Mithu Lucraft, Director, Content
Marketing Strategy
mithu.lucraft@springernature.com
@mithulucraft
Thank you