Open Access E-books in Science and Technology: A Case Study of Directory of Open Access Books

Abstract

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for open access e-books. It provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed e-books published under an open access business model, with links to the full text of the publications at the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) Library, publisher’s website or repositories. The present study aims to assess the current trends of the open access e-books in the field of science and technology available through DOAB. The data was collected online regarding the science and technology e-books in March 2014 for analysis. The results reveal that 307 e-books are available on science and technology through DOAB falling in three categories–monographs (209, 68.08 %), book series (93, 30.29 %) and conference proceedings (5,1.63 %). These e-books deal with eight major subject areas of Science and Technology having 36 sub-fields. The maximum number of e-books is available on General Science (95), Technology & Engineering (54), Earth & Environmental Sciences (50) & Health & Medical Sciences (47). In sub-fields most of the e-books cover Computer Sciences (24), Information Theory (24), General Medicine (20), Mathematics (17), Biology (13) & Geography (11). The authorship trends show that the maximum contribution is by single author (51.14 %) followed by two authors (74, 24.10 %) and three authors (36, 11.73 %). The linguistic assessment shows that 57.98 % (178) of these e-books have been published in English followed in German (88, 28.66%) and Italian (18, 5.86 %) respectively. The publishing trends reveal that 59.93 % (184) e-books have contributed by university presses whereas 40.07 % (123) by other publishing houses around the world. The maximum number of e-books (245, 79.80 %) is available through the Creative Commons (CC) license, whereas 20.20 % (62) e-books are available through comparable institutional licenses.