19 September 2023
The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) and Ithaka S+R today publish “Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study.” This report is the result of research funded by a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to investigate the effect of open digital editions on the sales of print monographs.
The study sought to understand the print sales performance of scholarly books that are also available in a free-to-read open digital edition. Twenty-six (26) university press members of the Association contributed data for 976 OA titles published between 2005 and 2022. One of the key insights from the investigation is that print sales can be a significant contributor to offsetting the costs of publishing such works, with median print sales of close to $6000—and (excluding outliers) average sales of nearly $8000. The analysis looks more closely at disciplinary differences, high-sales outliers, print format choices, and the potential for consumer ebook sales for supporting OA book publishing programs. While the research team was not able to collect comparable non-OA monograph data from participants, the OA-titles data set has been made freely available, and will be a valuable tool for publishers to study their own lists and sales data.
“I think many publishers will find both the report and the data set immensely useful in analyzing business decisions and determining paths forward. It is another evidence-based piece of the puzzle as we work toward sustainable and open scholarship in the humanities and social sciences,” said AUPresses Executive Director Peter Berkery. “They complement research already undertaken—by AUPresses and others— on the costs of publishing scholarly monographs, on the impact of OA books, and on researcher attitudes towards OA, and towards print versus digital formats. There are also very interesting questions still to answer in this sector of university press publishing and we hope to be able to continue down some of the paths laid out in the report’s conclusions.”
The full report has been published by Ithaka S+R and an anonymized data set is available at Humanities Commons. Report authors include the study co-principal investigators John Sherer (University of North Carolina Press) and Erich van Rijn (University of California Press), Ithaka S+R researchers Laura Brown, Maya Dayan, and Roger Schonfeld, and AUPresses project staff Brenna McLaughlin.