Guest post: Taylor & Francis – A Decade of Publishing OA Books
Silke Davison
Wed 27 Mar 2024
We are excited to share with the members of DOAB that we recently marked 10 years of open access book publishing. Negotiating Bioethics became the first fully open access Taylor & Francis book back in 2013. Ten years later, with a list of more than 1,500 OA titles and thousands of individual open chapters, we continue to strive to be one of the world’s leading open access book publishers.
To celebrate a decade of open access books, a new collection was created by our commissioning editors who nominated 12 standout OA books of the last decade. This diverse range of titles puts a spotlight on the role of open access in sharing new knowledge with a broad readership on important global issues, including human rights, environmental justice, sustainable development and public health.
A commitment towards our vision to enhance dissemination of our OA content and cultivate a successful OA books program was boosted as early as 2017 by joining and hosting OA content on OAPEN. We are proud that we are the largest participating publisher in the OAPEN platform, as discoverability and trustworthy metadata is an important piece of the puzzle and challenge in OA book publishing.
We would like to thank our colleagues at DOAB for the opportunity to answer some of their questions below which we hope would be of interest to all of you.
What drove T&F’s decision to sponsor DOAB and why was it an important one to make?
As a leading OA book publisher, we believe that we have a role to play in supporting community driven services, as well as ensuring the widest dissemination of our content. Therefore, we are delighted to contribute to the development and sustainability of DOAB’s platform and services via our continuing Gold sponsorship.
We really enjoy collaborating with the broader DOAB team on a range of initiatives, including via the ongoing OA Book Usage Data Trust, as well as providing input to OAPEN’s Book Analytics Service, PALOMERA, and joining the innovative new PRISM initiative.
Tell us a bit about your experience with PRISM. How was your experience describing your peer review processes and what have you learnt from this?
Our participation in DOAB’s new Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) initiative was indeed a positive experience.
It is our policy to peer review all proposed book projects before offering a contract, including open access proposals. Therefore, our open access content follows the same editorial and production processes as the rest of our book publishing including a robust peer review workflow which encompasses a large cohort of scholars, internal subject matter experts, and practicing educators who serve as peer reviewers.
During the PRISM project it was encouraging to confirm that, despite the broad range of our publishing program across over 60 subjects within HSS and STEM, our peer review processes remain thorough and consistent.
How has inclusion in PRISM been received by your community?
Research integrity is an issue of ever-increasing importance within the broader open research movement, including addressing author concerns around the quality of OA book publishing. Therefore, it is our hope that joining initiatives such as PRISM, in which information about the peer review process is easily available to DOAB users, will help to address these wider concerns.
By providing details about when the review took place (such as at proposal stage) and the type of peer reviewer (for example, by an external reviewer), we are able to enhance the transparency and trust of OA books and to showcase the high quality of this scholarship.
How do T&F see OA book publishing developing and what do you predict your role in this might be?
We are keen to listen and are proactive in initiatives and discussions with funders, libraries, societies, and other stakeholders, with the ambition to make the option to publish open access as straightforward as possible for all involved. With this in mind, we aim to continue to innovate and experiment with new OA models to enable the long-term, sustainable transition to open access.
For example, we have recently introduced a new pilot initiative, Pledge to Open as the first step towards building a sustainable and affordable collective funding model. We continue participating in the SCOAP3 books programme opening up titles in high energy physics, at no cost to the authors. We have also now published over 100 T&F books OA via Knowledge Unlatched, including collections within African Studies, providing an alternative OA publishing solution for Africa-based scholars.
As we are all witnessing, the OA book landscape is constantly evolving, presenting a range of challenges, in particular within an international context where open access mandates and perceptions differ, especially when some countries and regions have well-established open access frameworks, while others are still getting to grips with navigating the complexities of the OA book ecosystem in their own setting.
Therefore, every stakeholder has an integral role to play to speed up the transition to open access for books and promote open research in book publishing. It is important for all of us, publishers, funders, institutions, librarians, researchers, services providers, and other key players in scholarly communication and open research to engage and work together towards aligned practices that will maximise the impact, diversity, and equity of the OA books landscape.
Maria Angelaki (Partnership Development Manager, Open Access Books)
James Watson (Open Access Books Lead)