17 May 2021
Taken from: https://zenodo.org/record/4768388
"Books play an essential role in scholarly communication, notably but not only within the Social Sciences and Humanities. Open science benefits the quality and value of research and scholarship. If open access is to benefit society as widely as possible, it is logical to include academic books. In a 2019 briefing paper, Science Europe reported that: “Open access to academic books must be considered in the wider open access policies developed by research institutions, funders, and governments”.
In recent years, Knowledge Exchange, a joint network of six key national organisations in Europe, has been working on gaining a better understanding of the open access book landscape, identifying existing initiatives as well as gaps that need to be addressed in the countries concerned. In general, there is a clear will in the scholarly community to accelerate open access for academic books in order to better serve research and society's needs."
Read the position paper, by Pierre Mournier, Jeroen Sondervan, and Graham Stone here