Summary: Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-book citations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvest Google Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.
Comment. I support OA metadata for all non-OA literature and the development of book metrics from open metadata. But I depart from Stevan on one premise: he says that OA for full-text books cannot be mandated, but I think it can. There are reasons why book mandates are more difficult than article mandates to implement well and fairly, and why none yet exist. But the difficulties can be met.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/11/2008 02:13:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
