Aupress: A Comparison of an Open Access University Press with Traditional Presses (Author Abstract) (Report‪)‬

Introduction This investigation compares Canada's first open access press, namely, AUPress with three other traditional Canadian university presses, which do not support open access at this time and whose editions are available only for purchase mostly in print format. AUPress, on the other hand, allows free downloading of its online edition under a Creative Commons, (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada) licence and sells copies of its print editions. Open access is a model for scholarly publishing in which authors and publishers make their content freely available online with no requirements for authentication or payment. This analysis is based on actual physical book sales rankings on the largest online book retailer: Amazon.com and the Canadian version: Amazon.ca. Statistical methods are used to determine whether or not the traditional university presses show higher or lower sales rankings than the open press. This includes the sampling of the sales ranking of eleven randomly selected recently released books from each press on two occasions separated by three months in 2010 and one occasion a year later in 2011.