Tag: Wellcome Library

We are delighted to be able to offer our readers this cross-posting from The New York Academy of Medicine blog series on Innovation in Digital Publishing.

There are so many opportunities and—if we’re honest—challenges for innovation in digital publishing it’s hard to pick one and stick with it, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do because some things are worth sticking with. Open access is the best facilitator of, and the biggest opportunity for, innovation in digital publishing. Publishing research open access means anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read it, instead of just the comparatively infinitesimal group of people who have access to a reasonably wealthy university library. Opportunities don’t get much bigger than that.

Much of the research the Wellcome Trust funds is in the biomedical sciences, but we also support research in the medical humanities. This is frequently published in monographs, and monographs now commonly have print runs in the low to mid hundreds. You won’t find these books in the public library or your local bookshop. You might find them in your university’s library if you’re lucky enough to have access. You will probably find them online but you might balk at the price. This lack of access is a problem!

We believe the research we fund is outstanding, and think everyone should be able to access it (and build upon it). Accordingly, we recently extended our open-access policy to include monographs (and book chapters). The first monographs covered by this policy are only just being published open access, but initial usage data gives some indication of the opportunities open access affords. For example, Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 by Aya Homei and Michael Worboys was published open access with Palgrave Macmillan in November 2013, and made freely available through PMC Bookshelf and OAPEN (as well as the publisher site and e-retailers like Amazon). So far, the free ePub version has been downloaded from Amazon 300 times. Another 600 PDF copies have been downloaded drom the publisher and repository sites, and nearly 3,000 individuals have accessed the HTML chapters. The true readership across digital platforms may be much greater yet, as the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) means readers and other content providers and aggregators can share the work. Readers who prefer the printed page have also purchased hard and paperback copies from Palgrave.

Innovative open access publishing can provide avenues other than the traditional monograph or research article to disseminate research. Mosaic is a Wellcome Trust initiative that publishes longer narrative-based science journalism under the CC BY license. This license allows other platforms to take the content and republish it—with remarkable results. An article by Carl Zimmer on why we have blood types was republished on the BBC, io9, Pacific Standard, and The Independent, among others. Stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Polish, and Hungarian. The point is not just that more people read it, but that the content can be taken to the many different places where the people who are interested in this topic gather.