A comparison of an open access university press with traditional presses: Two years later¹

Issue title: 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing – ELPUB 2012 – Social Shaping of Digital Publishing: Exploring the Interplay between Culture and Technology

Guest editors: Ana BaptistaGuest Editor, Peter LindeGuest Editor, Niklas LavessonGuest Editor and Miguel A. BritoGuest Editor

Article type: Research Article

Authors: McGreal, Rory^{a; *} | Chen, Nian-Shing^b | McNamara, Tim^a

Affiliations: [a] Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada | [b] National Sun Yat Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding Author: Rory McGreal, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada; E-mail: [email protected].

Note: [1] Paper also published in the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, ISBN 978-1-61499-064-2.

Abstract: This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way ANOVA analyses show that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AUPress in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AUPress, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by the number of downloads of the open electronic versions.

Keywords: Open access, OA, open publishing, university press

DOI: 10.3233/ISU-2012-0650

Journal: Information Services & Use, vol. 31, no. 3-4, pp. 211-214, 2011