Unlocking the Digital Potential of Scholarly Monographs in 21st Century Research

Abstract

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format "journal article." The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS). In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options. We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph.

The future of academic publishing: Revolution or evolution revisited

“…The Directory of Open Access Books lists over 16,000 OA books and chapters from 300 publishers (http://www.doabooks.org/). However, OA monographs only represented around 5% of overall output in 2017 (Bargheer, Dogan, Horstmann, Mertens, & Rapp, ; Ferwerda, Pinter, & Stern, ). As an example, OA books only represented around 2.5% of Springer's annual monograph publishing in 2017 (Pool, ).…”

Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement

“…However, as they place additional workload on authors and editors and require activation energy, as well as permanent support from technical staff, they continue to be out of scope for the majority of smaller presses, such as ours. However, some recently-founded presses have benefited from the German Research Foundation (DFG) funding programs, which enabled them to enhance their production processes and to develop alternative business models for monograph publishing (e.g., Heidelberg University Press 11 ).…”

“…However, adopting open access publishing models for scholarly monographs is still slower than for scholarly essays [9,10]. As [11] have shown, scientific journals and articles travel through the digital transformation much more smoothly than books, as they have to overcome fewer technical and conceptual barriers, be it in terms of reading habits, reputation gain or storage concepts. In particular, prestige and reputation play a decisive role, especially if a discipline depends on a narrow circle of traditional high-quality publishers.…”

Decoupling the academic book

“…As Pochoda said in 2013: and digital (or digitized) resources. A common theme that runs through the potential solutions provided by Bargheer et al (2017) is the need to better integrate the processes of research into the processes of producing research outputs.…”

“…There are also significant changes in academic book publishing, especially innovative new models for the sustainable delivery of open access solutions for the book (see Speicher et al, 2018 for a recent review). Despite this innovation, it is striking that there is little evidence of significant structural disruption in the academic book-publishing process (Bargheer, Dogan, Horstmann, Mertens, & Rapp, 2017;Jubb, 2017).…”