TOME sheds light on sustainable open access book publishing

A five-year open access publishing pilot has come to an end, offering key insights into a future of sustainable open access publishing for monographs.

In December of 2022, Emory University in Atlanta hosted the fifth and final stakeholders meeting for TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem). 

TOME launched in 2017 as a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The goal of the pilot was to explore a new model for sustainable monograph publishing, one in which participating universities commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of monographs by their faculty, while participating university presses commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories.

The December meeting gave stakeholders (publishers, librarians, authors, and representatives from a number of societies and foundations) the opportunity to gather—both virtually and in person—and assess the outcomes of the initiative while also deliberating on next steps. In this post I briefly discuss one discrete piece of the assessment: What did we learn from the pilot about eBook usage and the impact of the OA edition on print sales.

Over the course of the pilot, more than 130 scholarly monographs have been published in OA editions with funding from the 20 participating TOME institutions. Given the long lead time associated with monograph publishing, most of the books (over 70%) were released in the final two years of the pilot, which means that any usage data collected by the publishers would be preliminary at best, so the initial analysis focused on the first 25 books, which were published between May 2018 and September 2019. Prior to the December meeting, the publishers of these 25 books were asked to collect usage data from each of the platforms hosting the OA editions. In addition, they provided print sales figures, both for the TOME editions and for comparable titles on their list. The resulting data were compiled into a spreadsheet for analysis. 

Not surprisingly, the main challenge to analysis of these data was the apples-to-apples problem. Some repositories and platforms collect downloads while others track views only. Some base their stats on single chapters; others on the entire book. Meanwhile, publishers do not all place their OA editions on the same platforms. As a result, the spreadsheet ended up looking a bit like a checkerboard with pieces on some squares but not others. For instance, here’s how a small portion of the spreadsheet looked when the data were filled in:

Figure 1: Sample spreadsheet of downloads/views.

“TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles.”

Peter Potter

Still, when all the data were collected, one thing was clear: the OA editions have been heavily accessed online. By July 2022, the first 25 TOME books tallied nearly 195,000 downloads and views. The average per book was 7,754.¹

These findings are in line with those of other OA book initiatives. In November 2022 MIT Press reported that the 50 books published OA in 2022 through its Direct to Open program were downloaded over 176,000 times.² This works out to roughly 3,520 per book. Likewise, the University of Michigan Press reported in January 2023 that the 40 Fund to Mission books released OA in 2022 were downloaded over 149,000 times up to the end of December, reaching an average of 3,826 per book.³ While the per book numbers for both D2O and Michigan are lower than that of TOME, the TOME books accumulated their stats over a longer period of time.

TOME’s usage stats stand out even more when seen alongside the sales figures for the print editions of the same titles. As can be seen in this bar chart, the average number of downloads/views per book (7,754) is significantly higher than the average unit sales per book (590). 

Figure 2: TOME usage/sales (first 25 books).

We also considered one of the biggest questions that publishers continue to ask about OA books: How does the OA edition affect sales of the print edition? With this question in mind, publishers provided not just the sales figures for TOME books but sales figures for comparable titles on their list. (Each publisher was left to decide what it deemed a “comparable” book.)  As this chart shows, the print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps. 

Figure 3: Print sales: TOME vs. Comps (first 25 books).

“The print editions of TOME books actually outsold their comps.”

Peter Potter

These findings should be taken with a grain of salt. As several publishers pointed out, identifying comps for any single title is mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the sample size (25) is too small to warrant drawing any firm conclusions. For instance, most of the 25 TOME titles had print sales between 300 and 500 copies. Only in four cases did sales exceed 1,000 copies, and if these four titles are excluded from the sample the average drops to a number more consistent with the comps. Understandably, therefore, most presses were reluctant just yet to draw any conclusions about OA’s impact on sales.⁴

Of course, we know that the impact of scholarly books goes well beyond downloads, views, and sales figures. A future post will look at the Altmetric data for TOME books to see what they tell us about alternative measures of impact. Meanwhile, a final report on TOME, including an in-depth examination of attitudes and motivations of the stakeholder groups, is due to be released in the coming weeks.

 ¹ The median was 5,243, with a minimum of 800 and a maximum of 27,470. 
 ² https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-direct-to-open-books-downloaded-more-than-176312-in-ten-months/
³ https://ebc.press.umich.edu/stories/2023-02-01-so-how-did-they-do-in-2022/. These figures filter out a digital project with very high usage, which was considered an outlier.
 ⁴ A larger study of OA impact on sales, sponsored by the NEH, is forthcoming from AUPresses. https://aupresses.org/news/neh-grant-to-study-open-access-impact/

About the Author

Peter Potter

Peter Potter, Publishing Director | Virginia Tech

Peter joined Virginia Tech’s University Libraries in 2016 after many years in university press publishing. He guides the library’s long-term planning in the area of publishing services, consults with faculty, staff, and students on their publishing needs, and advises prospective authors on all aspects of the scholarly publishing process. During most of the TOME pilot, he served as ARL Visiting Program Officer overseeing the initiative.

The post TOME sheds light on sustainable open access book publishing appeared first on Digital Science.

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BMC must respond to air pollution as a public health emergency like Covid-19

Clearly, the agencies involved in Mumbai’s administration can no longer treat this as business-as-usual or an issue that will dissipate on its own as the winter ebbs, as they are most likely to, and wake up only when the smog makes the city invisible next winter

For several years, Mumbaikars believed the coastal city was a cut above New Delhi in the fierce rivalry between the two during winters, given that the national capital was generally enveloped in a smog for days, making visibility low and people’s health precarious as air pollution peaked. Mumbaikars have been forced to drop this snobbishness in the last two months as Mumbai’s air quality has seen depths that we did not think possible. The city has had more days of “poor” and “very poor” Air Quality Index (AQI) through December and January than in any previous winter, according to the data available. On some days, the AQI has been worse than in New Delhi too.The problem needs no more description or testimony; we know it, we are all living it. The question is: What have the agencies responsible to counter the air pollution done about it in the last two-three months? A more basic question, perhaps, is where, with which agency, does the buck stop.

To recap, Mumbai’s AQI has swung between 200 and 400, straddling the categories of poor, very poor, and severe since December 2022. These are alarming and cataclysmic levels of pollution which affect every person across the city, irrespective of class and geographical location. Mumbai, going by the trend of the last few years, usually sees moderate to poor AQI, between 100 to 200, through the winter months thanks largely to the sea breeze which helps lift the load. This has been the first winter in which “the city has seen a seen a prolonged period of poor to very poor AQI in the last six years” since tracking was started six years ago by SAFAR, according to its founder project director Dr Gufran Beig.

The reasons for the rising pollution levels are not clouded. There has been a huge uptick in construction and related activities across Mumbai after a lull during the Covid-19 years of 2020-21. Traffic movement is back to the pre-pandemic levels too, possibly with more vehicles on the roads than at any other time in the city. Land-filling has been relentlessly happening at various locations. Along with all these there is dust from unpaved roads, debris thrown every few metres at the sites of major infrastructure projects across the city, and garbage dump fires, all contributing to the rising air pollution.

There have been natural reasons too; the sea breeze which helped Mumbai has changed, perhaps due to climate change factors. Experts have noted a reduction in coastal wind speeds around the city due in large measure to the abnormal drop in surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean among other locations. Simply put, the change in wind patterns has meant that dust particles — of which there are many more now due to the causes identified above — remain in the air for a longer time.

Clearly, the agencies involved in Mumbai’s administration can no longer treat this as business-as-usual or an issue that will dissipate on its own as the winter ebbs, as they are most likely to, and wake up only when the smog makes the city invisible next winter. The buck stops with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB). The time for action is now; in fact, it is late already.

To begin with, it is important to see the alarming air pollution as a complex multi-sectoral issue rather than an isolated one to be addressed by one agency — the most important acknowledgment of such drastically poor levels of AQI should be as a public health emergency or at least a public health hazard. Mumbai’s air has to be made cleaner, first and foremost, for its 20 million residents. It has caused health problems for millions, with general practitioners in practically every area registering a higher number of patients with upper respiratory tract infections.

Poor air quality most impacts all those who work outdoors and spend a large amount of time on streets, such as vendors, drivers, police personnel and so on. It has been a health hazard for months now — and air purifiers or masks cannot be the answer to the problem. At what point will it be declared a public health emergency so that counter-measures can be initiated on a war footing? This is a question that public health professionals in the BMC and the state government must answer — soon.

The BMC is responsible also for the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) that has been drawn up for precisely such a time. How and to what extent it was implemented in the last two months remains unclear in the absence of direct communication from the civic body to Mumbaikars. Is this not important? During Covid-19 months in 2020, the BMC had kept a steady stream of information about the spread of the pandemic in every ward, steps taken, location and occupancy of Covid centres and so on. If it could be done then, it can be done again. And air pollution is no less a public health emergency than the pandemic.

In fact, the ward-wise war room approach to tackle that public health emergency, often cited as the Mumbai model, and Mumbai’s municipal commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal had come in for lavish praise from all over the world. Air pollution, according to the GRAP, too needs to be tackled at micro-area and ward levels. The template exists; Chahal and his team have to resurrect it from two years ago and tweak it to address air pollution instead of the virus spread.

Alongside this, the BMC and MPCB must join forces to regulate construction sites with at least adequate proper green curtains, ban the throwing of debris along infrastructure project sites irrespective of how important that project is, and use water sprinklers regularly across the city to keep the road and traffic dust down. There is some merit in regulating the number of vehicles on the roads, perhaps through the controversial odd-even number plate registration as was done in New Delhi, and commercial vehicles can be off the roads from 8am to 8pm; there must be recognition that the odd-even measure is a Band-aid solution to a bleeding wound but it might work in the short run. If nothing else, the BMC can — and must — start imposing stiff penalties on offenders from infra majors to polluting vehicle owners.

What Mumbai needs is rapid and purposeful action that is not hampered by the multiplicity of agencies; the BMC has to be in command and control. If it could use water sprinklers and regulate construction activities along Marine Drive during the G-20 summit last month, then it can do so across the city too. The ball is in your court, Mr Chahal. And this action should be replicated across the Mumbai metropolitan region.

Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and media. She is the founder editor of ‘Question of Cities.’

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