From: Pierre Mounier <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2017 17:25:18 +0200

Dear Antony,

here are some answers to your questions :

- DOAB lists 8800 OA books. Oapen disseminates around 4200 books,
OpenEdition 4300. Not all books from Oapen and OpenEdition are in DOAB
because DOAB has criteria that are not met by all books on these
platforms.

- Regarding OPERAS working groups on standards, practices and
services, our aim is certainly not to create new regional standards!
The aim is rather to adopt collectively the same existing
international standards and, here comes the beef, to help small
organizations such as those participating to the consortium to adopt
them. That's exactly the point of HIRMEOS as a proof of concept for
this aim.

- Regarding your US/Europe question, that's another point, complex but
interesting:  first, we should start with the idea that
'international' doesn't mean US in all cases ;-)  Second, my
experience with US publishers is that they are frequently focused on
their own domestic market, which is normal, considering its size, but
make 'international' cooperation difficult.  But I hope of course that
OPERAS will be able to help in this in the future (we are just
starting so our initial efforts are to structure the consortium in
Europe)

- And we already started international cooperation with Scielo which
is a major player at global level, not on OA books but on journals.

- Finally, you're right:  OPERAS is not formally closed to big
commercial publishers but not intended primarily to them, firstly
because they appear to be self-sufficient.  In other words, we don't
target the head but rather the long tail of the distribution curve
where a lot more work has to be done to coordinate small highly
specialized players, particularly in SSH.  Not exactly "e pluribus
unum" but rather "in varietate concordia" ;-)

- That's why OPERAS effort is to set up a public distributed
infrastructure open to all players in need of support to upgrade their
OA publishing activity, by difference and complementarity with big
commercial publishers which integrate vertically services in their own
closed environment.

All the best,

--
Pierre Mounier
Coordinator of OPERAS - http://operas-eu.org
Associate Director for international development - OpenEdition


EHESS
54, boulevard Raspail
75006 Paris
Bureau/Office A-435
Mob. +33 (0)6 61 98 31 86
Twitter : @piotrr70
orcid.org/0000-0003-0691-6063


On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 8:48 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2017 11:05:26 +0100
>
> Forgive me Pierre. I meant to write "Publishers of most open access
> books" which is rather different. I may well have been wrong in any
> case.
>
> I have just been looking at the OAPEN site. I cannot tell how many
> publishers are involved. I may be looking in the wrong place. I did
> find a mention in a newsletter that OUP were placing 24 OA titles. It
> is interesting to learn that CUP are also placing their OA titles.
>
> I also notice that OAPEN is working with SCIELO.
>
> I do not know about the commercial publishers of monographs. In terms
> of monograph publishing they are the biggest players in the English
> language world along with OUP and CUP. Not all are UK. There are also
> important commercial publishers like Brill and de Gruyter not in the
> UK and of course there is Springer.
>
> Then there is the output of the US university presses. They publish
> 4000 humanities monographs a year. Of course they are not European
>
> Now in both cases  I have no idea how many OA books they publish but
> they are undoubtedly publishing some OA books and  in many cases want
> to publish more.
>
> OK does this matter. OPERAS is (as I see it it) primarily concerned
> with infrastructure and with supporting smaller European enterprises
> in all languages.
>
> But in my hat as a researcher and recently (again) a researcher in
> this area I worry about compartmentalisation on geographical lines. I
> am the first to object when (as happens) US enterprises tried to set
> standards for the world. I do not see that it is any better if Europe
> tries to do the same. Then there is the question of commercial
> publishing. As a scholar I could not care less if a book I want to
> locate is published by a commercial publisher. There are bodies in the
> US that fund infrastructure but ignore commercial publishers - not
> good
>
> When I see working groups on Standards and Best Practices and Seamless
> Services at European Level I wonder what this may be? I worry about
> new standards which are not international standards.
>
> I am pleased to see that DOAB is open to all academic publishers like
> DOAJ and regardless of where they are based
>
> I realise that I am making rather a meal of this - apologies to the
> list. I shall desiist
>
> Anthony