DigitalKoans

Scholarly bibliographies are not destined for the bestseller list. This is especially true of bibliographies that deal with fairly specialized topics vs. those that deal with topics of more general interest. Selling more than a few hundred copies of a specialized bibliography is a major achievement.

Does open access to digital bibliographies change the picture? Two digital books, one of which is also in print form, illustrate the potential of this new publishing strategy.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has been freely available since 1996. What has use been like? Below is a table that shows file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand (a "page," such as an HTML page or a PDF file, contains content; page requests are a subset of file requests).

From 2006 onward there is only partial use data, since all or part of the University of Houston Libraries' use data for this period is unavailable to me. (DLIST and E-LIS use is not included for any year.)

In my experience, Web log statistics provide a general indicator of the magnitude of use, but not an absolutely precise one. There are also hermetic disputes about whether spider activity should be included, as it is above.

There are four things to note about SEPB: (1) it was born digital and has live links; (2) in July 2004, it was put under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that permits any kind of noncommercial use or reuse; (3) it has been updated 70 times, and these updates have been advertised; and (4) it includes a Weblog and a resource directory. It also has a prehistory: the freely available article that it was based on had 26 versions, so one could argue that the bibliography has 96 versions.

These characteristics make SEPB represent an extension and evolution of the traditional bibliography model, but not a perfect example of it.

For more information on the evolution of SEPB, see the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" and "A Look Back at Eighteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

The second bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, is closer to the traditional model because it has not been updated and it is based on a printed book. There are two digital versions: a PDF file and a XHTML site, neither of which has live links. All print and digital versions are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. The OAB was advertised on the Internet and elsewhere.

Below is a table that shows OAB file and page requests rounded to the nearest thousand. It does not include any use of the digital book at the publisher's Website (Association of Research Libraries) nor at DLIST and E-LIS.

Does open access make a difference? The history of these two open access digital books suggests that it can significantly increase use. As the potentials of digital publication are more fully exploited (e.g., linking and updating), use may be driven even higher. However, these examples tell us nothing about the commercial potential of open access books, since my data are for "no-profit" use only and do not include ARL sales data for the print book (I do not receive royalties and do not have access to this data).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Bibliographies, Digital Scholarship Publications, E-Books, Open Access, Publishing, Scholarly Books, Scholarly Communication. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.