Published today in Katina Magazine, Lucy Barnes, Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Ursula Rabar, and Niels Stern have written an article on ‘How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?’ You can read it here.
A collaboration between two OPERAS working groups, the Open Access Books Network and Open Access Business Models, this article is intended as an intervention into the ongoing discussions and activity surrounding diamond open access (OA) in order to bring books into focus.
The authors grapple with some of the issues that would need to be considered in order to develop criteria for diamond OA books along the lines of the DIAMAS Operational Diamond Open Access Criteria for Journals, including persistent identifiers, business models, and the basic issue of what it is that’s ‘diamond’ in book publishing – would it be an individual book, a series, or an entire publisher?
This article is not intended to answer questions, but to raise them: we hope it will foster further conversations and explorations about the issues we’ve identified (and those we might have missed). As part of that ambition, we’d like to invite you to respond to this post with your thoughts, questions, additions, and counterpoints by email, if you wish, to info@oabooksnetwork.org. We’re also open to having conversations about these issues in other forums, in person or in writing – just get in touch.
Thank you for reading!
Photo by Tahlia Doyle on Unsplash