"[AAP] Publishers File Brief Opposing Internet Archive Appeal of Loss"


Controlled digital lending is a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rightsholders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work — a principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, movies, television and music that consumers enjoy today.

"[T]here is no resemblance between IA’s conversion of millions of print books into ebooks and the historical practice of lending print books. Nor does IA’s distribution of ebooks without paying authors and their publishers a dime conform with the modern practices of libraries, which acquire licenses to lend ebooks to their local communities and enjoy the benefits of digital distribution lawfully."

The Internet Archive ("IA") operates a mass-digitization enterprise in which it copies millions of complete, in-copyright print books and distributes the resulting bootleg ebooks from its website to anyone in the world for free. Granting summary judgment, the District Court properly held that IA’s infringement is not saved by fair use as each of the four factors weighs against IA under longstanding case law.

https://tinyurl.com/5ah5vx3x

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"Supporting Open Access Monographs: Penn State University Libraries’ Participation in the TOME Initiative"


In 2017, Penn State pledged to participate in the then newly established Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Initiative. TOME was launched by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) as a five-year pilot with two main types of participants: colleges and universities and university presses. Penn State was one of the first universities to commit funds to participate in TOME, which was designed to support peer-reviewed, open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Each participating university committed $225,000 total for the five-year pilot, split out into $45,000 per academic year to support three grants of $15,000 per monograph. This number was established based on the recommendation from the Ithaka S+R Report "The Costs of Publishing Monographs."

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.3.66

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"E-book Acceptance by First-Year Undergraduate Students: A Longitudinal Examination and Implications for Library Researchers"


The frequency of electronic book usage by students, according to the research described here, appears fairly positive. On a six-level scale, ranging from 1 (I don’t use it at all) to 6 (I use it several times a week), the average score was 3.27, and the most frequent response, was "Use several times a month" (n = 84, 28 %). This suggests that, on average, students tend to use e-books approximately once or twice a month.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102847

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"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"


Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

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"UKRI [UK Research and Innovation] Monograph Open Access Policy Coming Soon: Here’s What You Need to Know"


The core requirements are:

  • The final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication
  • The OA version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with an Open Government Licence (OGL) also permitted.
  • Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the OA version where possible (third-party materials DO NOT require a CC licence)….

The UKRI allocates £8 billion of taxpayers’ money annually to support research and innovation.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxrna84

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"Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project"


We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the market for physical books. We find that digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions and provide evidence for the discovery channel. Moreover, digitization allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.

https://tinyurl.com/2pbuzty2

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"Measured in a Context: Making Sense of Open Access Book Data"


Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric — the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

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"An Open Book: Launching a Library-Based Open Access Books Hosting Service"


Edinburgh University Library launched a journal hosting service in 2009, initially to support two journals. The service has since grown into a portfolio of 19 journals and a handful of conference proceedings. The purpose of this case study is to review the 2021 launch of our book hosting service and our service rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond, looking at the reasons for launching, the timeline and challenges, and offering recommendations for those wishing to launch their own service.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13745

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Paywall: "Digital Ownership: The Case of E-books"


This paper presents the results of an empirical research study that used an online survey to examine e-book consumers’ perspectives on digital ownership and digital rights. The study revealed that while most participants value and desire ownership rights, certain conventional ownership rights, such as reselling, gifting, and lending, are deemed less significant and can be relinquished by consumers due to cost-related factors. Furthermore, contrary to prevailing assumptions, the study found no discernible generational gap concerning people’s perceptions of digital ownership rights.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.807

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| Digital Scholarship |

"Springer Nature and Authors Successfully Use Generative AI to Publish Academic Book"


As part of an innovative experiment, Springer Nature has become the first publisher to create a whole new academic book by empowering authors to use GPT as part of the integrated workflow. Developed during a —Hack Day— in the Spring which brought together authors, editors and experts from across Springer Nature, the German-language book Einsatzmöglichkeiten von GPT in Finance, Compliance und Audit (Applications of GPT in finance, compliance and audit) has now been published. It took less than five months from inception to publication — about half the time normally taken. . . .

The process was as follows:

  1. Working simultaneously on six screens, the team defined commands which GPT then executed chapter by chapter to create the first version of the manuscript
  2. At each stage of the process, the content generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) was reviewed by the authors, who then asked the machine to adapt the text
  3. This "prompt ping pong" ensured that the knowledge expertise of the authors renowned in their field was combined with the language expertise of the LLM
  4. After the Hack Day, the authors and Springer Nature’s editorial team further checked, corrected and supplemented the text
  5. The team then linked the relevant data sources to ensure proper attribution

https://tinyurl.com/4x7nvvks

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"JSTOR releasing First 100 Path to Open Books"


Launched as a pilot in January 2023, Path to Open is a delayed open access model where new books are made available to supporting libraries upon publication and become open access after three years. Thirty-seven university presses have joined the initiative along with over sixty academic libraries, including consortia like the Big Ten Academic Alliance who are looking to develop sustainable open access solutions. . . .

JSTOR recently released forty-three of the first 100 Path to Open titles. These books, all peer-reviewed, were selected by the participating university presses and JSTOR, and explore topics in thirty-six subjects like Public Health, Religion, Education, Communications, Literature, Conflict Resolution, and Film Studies.

https://tinyurl.com/2p92439j

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Ithaka S+R: Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study


Key Insights

  • OA titles can generate significant print revenue. While there may be some tradeoff between OA editions and print sales, publishers can produce print sales revenue from their OA lists. Publishers may wish to take such revenue into account in considering business models for OA publication today.
  • OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue. When made available through consumer channels such as Kindle, ebooks that are available openly on other platforms can in parallel generate meaningful consumer sales. Publishers may benefit from giving focused consideration specific to OA monographs to their pricing and windowing tactics for such channels.
  • Outliers are essential. A small number of OA titles sell particularly well, just as is historically the case in traditional monograph sales models. Publishers bearing this in mind will be thinking in terms of the sustainability and growth of their lists overall rather than each title individually.
  • Titles with both hard and soft cover formats generate the most revenue. This may be the result of format choices publishers based on market forecasting, so from our data we cannot be sure that there is a causal relationship. Still, publishers may wish to give additional attention to their format strategy for OA books.
  • Sales vary widely by field. History, arts, and humanities saw lower unit sales while social sciences saw higher unit sales and STEM fields saw the greatest. Publishers may need to pursue different sustainability models for OA books based on their field.
  • An opportunity to increase print sales? There is currently significant friction for users in navigating from digital to print editions. Publishers and digital distribution platforms should work together to create a more seamless reader experience from digital discoverability of and engagement with the OA version to potential print sales.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.319642

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"Internet Archive Appeals Loss in Library Ebook Lawsuit"


The Internet Archive announced today that it has appealed its loss in a major ebook copyright case. A notice indicates that it’s filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a publishing industry lawsuit over the nonprofit group’s Open Library program. . . .

Court documents indicate the Internet Archive is still preparing its response to the lawsuit by UMG and other record labels; a pretrial conference in that case is currently scheduled for October.

https://tinyurl.com/ysp8m558

"Finding the Right Platform: A Crosswalk of Academy-Owned and Open-Source Digital Publishing Platforms"


A key responsibility for many library publishers is to collaborate with authors to determine the best mechanisms for sharing and publishing research. Librarians are often asked to assist with a wide range of research outputs and publication types, including eBooks, digital humanities (DH) projects, scholarly journals, archival and thematic collections, and community projects. These projects can exist on a variety of platforms both for profit and academy owned. Additionally, over the past decade, more and more academy owned platforms have been created to support both library publishing programs. Library publishers who wish to emphasize open access and open-source publishing can feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of available academy-owned or -affiliated publishing platforms. For many of these platforms, documentation exists but can be difficult to locate and interpret. While experienced users can usually find and evaluate the available resources for a particular platform, this kind of documentation is often less useful to authors and librarians who are just starting a new publishing project and want to determine if a given platform will work for them. Because of the challenges involved in identifying and evaluating the various platforms, we created this comparative crosswalk to help library publishers (and potentially authors) determine which platforms are right for their services and authors’ needs.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:59231/

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Paywall: "A Study on Copyright Issues of Different Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) Modes"


The paper will explore CDL modes by combing CDL practices and programs from research papers and official website documents of different library organizations. Then, based on legal frameworks of CDL in the US, Canada and the UK which are summarized, copyright issues of CDL modes are analyzed from perspectives of implementing institution, service resources, and usage mode. Finally, some copyright recommendations for sustainable development of CDL are proposed.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231190654

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"Judgment Entered in Publishers, Internet Archive Copyright Case"


Most importantly, the proposed agreement includes a permanent injunction that would, among its provisions, bar the IA’s lending of unauthorized scans of in-copyright, commercially available books, as well as bar the IA from "profiting from" or "inducing" any other party’s "infringing reproduction, public distribution, public display and/or public performance" of books "in any digital or electronic form" once notified by the copyright holder. . . .

The negotiated payment is all inclusive—it covers costs, fees, damages, and other claims, including the IA’s claim that damages should be remitted—something that should assuage initial concerns expressed by some who feared a massive damage award might force the nonprofit IA to cease operations. The negotiated judgment does seek destruction of the IA’s scans as the publishers’ initial complaint had suggested.

https://tinyurl.com/p3yaszd9

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Judge Finds Revived Amazon E-book Monopoly Suit Should Proceed "


For a second time in two years, a magistrate judge in New York has recommended that a consumer class action lawsuit accusing the Big Five publishers of colluding with Amazon to fix e-book prices should be dismissed. But while the judge recommended tossing the case against the publishers, the court found that monopolization and attempted monopolization claims against Amazon should proceed.

https://tinyurl.com/7pru9f4m

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"Big Ten Open Books"


Big Ten Open Books connects readers everywhere to fully accessible, trusted books from leading university presses. The first collection of 100 books is on the subject of Gender and Sexuality Studies. The ebooks are free-to-read by anyone with an Internet connection. They are also openly-licensed under Creative Commons licenses which make most of the titles free-to-reuse in any non-commercial way. . . .

The works in this collection have all been previously published by university presses and have undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content made available. Participating presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

https://tinyurl.com/37y66ccw

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The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy: How Publishers and Platforms Have Reshaped the Way We Read in the Digital Age


This report explains that, while there is nothing new about publishers’ desire to seek novel ways to increase revenues, along with control and surveillance of readers, the new publisher-platform partnership creates a mechanism to align the ebook market with those goals. That new market alignment raises questions about whether these shifts are the best option for readers and institutional book buyers, particularly libraries. It also raises questions about how the newest players in the market — ebook distribution platforms — shape things to align with their own interests.

In order to fully understand the dynamics at play, we interviewed over 30 stakeholders that fill various essential roles in the ebook marketplace, from publishers to platform CEOs to literary agents, librarians, and lawyers. We discussed the priorities, concerns, and constraints that help shape their participation in the ebook marketplace. Our goal was to understand and document how this world looks through their eyes, and synthesize those views into broader conclusions.

https://tinyurl.com/4762bbyv

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"Open Access Books through Open Data Sources: Assessing Prevalence, Providers, and Preservation"


In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016

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"Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and Re-infrastructuring the Funding of Open Access Books"


A major issue is that the sheer cost of BPCs [Book Processing Charges] makes them an extremely expensive way of funding Open Access books. For large commercial publishers, BPCs of £11,000 and more for a conventional academic book are typical. Given very few academics would themselves have the capacity to easily cover these kinds of costs, BPCs are usually paid by universities or funders — sometimes from a specific fund set aside to cover the costs of Open Access publishing, sometimes from a general unallocated part of a university/department budget, sometimes from the budget of a research grant.

As Open Book Collective colleagues have argued again and again, in line with the aims and mission of the COPIM project, as well as arguments made by other project colleagues, a BPC-based Open Access publishing model is fundamentally unsustainable and unscalable. Any requirement for the higher education sector to pay BPCs on a broadscale basis would require an unparalleled national and global injection of funding. . . .

The Open Book Collective’s online presence " its "platform" serves many functions, including providing information about our aims, governance, model and values, as well resources about Open Access. However, a key part of the platform is the area where publishers and publishing "service providers," as we call them (the organisations that provide the crucial infrastructures for Open Access book publishing) make available ‘Offers’ that universities and other organisations can potentially subscribe to. . . .

In the Open Book Collective model, we give publisher/service provider members substantial — but not total — control over how their individual Offers are priced. Each initiative proposes a "tiered" costing Offer to us (tiered pricing involves varying subscription prices by university’s size and/or national context), which we assess to determine whether it is fair and reasonable. If so, and our Membership Committee agrees that the initiative meets our broader membership criteria, then it is eligible to become a member of the Open Book Collective, with its Offer potentially hosted on our platform.

https://bit.ly/45yZsXQ

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"Towards an Author-Centered Open Access Monograph Program: Understanding Open Access Cultures in Scholarly Publishing"


Author attitudes towards Open Access (OA) remains an important area of investigation in academic publishing. The successful implementation of new OA infrastructure and business models depend on their reception within scholarly communities. This paper proposes "Open Access Culture"—the set of beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards OA publishing shared by members of an academic field—as a framework to understand how OA innovations are and will be received by different scholarly communities. The investigation of OA culture helps identify the needs of individual academic fields (e.g., the importance of print publishing for a particular field), thus foregrounding author preferences in the publishing process. The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is drawing upon the OA Culture framework to aid the implementation of its OA monograph initiative. UMP has undertaken research (author survey as well as editor, author, and librarian interviews) to understand how the monograph initiative will integrate different fields. This paper presents results of this research demonstrating the application of the OA Culture framework to several fields, as well the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences (HSS) more broadly. This is one way that University Presses may take an author-centered approach to OA publishing programs, one that foregrounds the needs of individual authors and considers their unique disciplinary context. Moreover, the paper offers a recent view of sentiments towards OA in the HSS and thus helps to contextualize the current OA landscape.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3332

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"What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the ‘Business’ of Care, and the Case of punctum books"


In this article, we share how a small, independent, academic open access (OA) press, punctum books, has survived and can maybe thrive financially, but also in terms of human quality of life dividends, in the very precarious landscape of making and funding open books. Tracing the history of the press and our bumpy road to better financial sustainability, and the ways in which we have settled upon a business model that purposefully "scales small," we argue that the mission and the business model of any OA book publisher must be in better alignment than is currently the case in much of academic publishing and that bibliodiversity, along with an ethics of care—of ourselves, our authors, and the librarians who fund us—should be paramount in everything we do as a publisher. We also offer a brief survey of the current state of the field of library funded OA books initiatives in order to raise some questions about the weight and logics of these initiatives and, with more and more players entering this scene, about the viability more largely of consortial library funding for OA books in the United States.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627

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"Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection "


Open access infrastructure for books is becoming more mature, and it is being used by an in-creasing number of people. The growing importance of open access infrastructure leads to more interest in sustainability, governance and impact assessment. For this paper, we will assess the OAPEN Library. In the spring of 2022, it passed the milestone of 20,000 titles. This was a good moment to evaluate the core asset of the OAPEN Library: its collection.

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible books and chapters, all of which have undergone external peer review. In other words, it functions as an academic library and in our assessment we should treat it as such. However, it is an online library and the limitations of physical books do not play a part. Shelf space is not to be considered.

More important is the question of how well the collection meets the needs of its users. The OAPEN Library sees global usage; the collection reflects this by offering titles in over 50 languages. The collection is not focused on a specific subject area, but the choice of medium — books and chapters, not journals and articles — is more strongly associated with the humanities and social sciences. It does not track its users, but the supporters of the OAPEN Libraries are globally dis-tributed academic institutions, scientific and scholarly funders and publishers. An assessment of the OAPEN Library should therefore take into account the diversity of languages, subjects and stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498

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"Sustainable Futures for OA Books: The Open Book Collective"


This article describes and explains the need for the work of the Open Book Collective (OBC). The OBC is a major output of the COPIM project (Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Monographs). The collective will bring together diverse small-to-medium open access (OA) publishers, open publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive, and interdependent community space and platform designed to sustainthe future of OA book publishing. The OBC is founded upon equitable, community-led governance and helping publishers move beyond Book Processing Charges (BPCs). Central to the functioning of the Open Book Collective is an online platform that will make it far quicker and easier for libraries and other potential subscribers to compare, evaluate, and subscribe to different OA publishers and open service providers via membership packages. The OBC supports small-to-medium OA publishers by way of the COPIM (Community-Led Publication Infrastructures for Open Access Books) philosophy of "scaling small." This allows publishers and other members to operate sustainably and collaboratively whilst retaining their diverse and singular editorial missions, rather than operating from philosophies centered on economic growth, competition, and monopoly.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3372

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |