Reports on the Open Access landscape
This section includes reports on the current OA landscape in the UK and further afield.
We acknowledge that as the Copim Open Book Futures is primarily a UK-based project, we are working with a highly UK and Anglophone-focussed perspective. So while we have endeavoured to make sure that we include relevant resources from around the world, we are aware that we are likely to have missed many, particularly those that are not in English.
- Collaboration in Diamond Open Access publishing
- Copim WP7 Report on Archiving and Preserving Open Access Monographs
- Guidance on managing copyright under UKRI open access policy
- Landscape of no-fee open access publishing in Africa
- Open Book Futures InfoHub scoping report
- PALOMERA Recommendations for Open Access Academic Book Policies
- Report from a workshop on sustainable open access book publishing in East Africa
- Supporting learned society, subject association, and smaller specialist publishers to transition to open access book publishing
- TOME Report: The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs
- TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report
Collaboration in Diamond Open Access publishing
The opportunities and benefits of collaboration within Diamond OA publishing are evident on individual, regional, national and global levels. Expanding beyond the confines of individual efforts offers significant benefits for enhancing publishing efficiency, quality, and impact. This approach also paves the way for fostering more productive collaborative opportunities in the future. In its effort to strengthen the Diamond OA archipelago and ensure its future financial sustainability, the DIAMAS project has aimed to identify current collaboration patterns at various levels, the obstacles hindering such collaborations, and potential new methods for publishers and service providers to work together.
This study from the DIAMAS project is based on a review of DIAMAS web survey responses, DIAMAS-led consultations with different stakeholder groups through public webinars and events, and six dedicated focus groups held with institutional publishers from across Europe in multiple languages, and a bibliometric investigation into Diamond OA journals and publishers.
Copim WP7 Report on Archiving and Preserving Open Access Monographs
A report on the Copim project's knowledge and recommendation on archiving and preservation. It provides guidance for smaller, scholar-led presses on metadata, archiving and preservation, on repositories, and on the Thoth Archiving Network.
Guidance on managing copyright under UKRI open access policy
UKRI's report from 2023 provides guidance and explanations on third party copyright in the UK context when dealing with open access. It is aimed at researchers (and research organisations), who are seeking clarity on copyright for their open access publications.
Landscape of no-fee open access publishing in Africa
A landscape study from EIFL on Diamond OA journals in Africa which provides detailed reports for several countries and thorough general conclusions about the state of Diamond OA journals in the region, their current challenges, and suggestions for the future. It also provides the survey data which provides a large amount of granular data.
Open Book Futures InfoHub scoping report
This scoping report was the first step in the process of establishing a ‘knowledge base’ (or equivalent) to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice. Establishing a ‘knowledge base’ is is one of the deliverables of Copim's Open Book Futures project.
Drawing on the myriad of resources we know to already exist (produced within and outside the project), the scoping report presents an overview of existing assets and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group to consider, all of which were used to scope the direction and final format of the ‘knowledge base’ AKA Compass Compass.
It is also a useful way to quickly search across all the resources we researched and collated using the Ctl+F shortcut.
Download and search the report
PALOMERA Recommendations for Open Access Academic Book Policies
The PALOMERA project, which ended in early 2025, aimed to ensure academic books and monographs are not neglected in Open Science and Open Access policies. One of the main project outputs was a Knowledge Base of relevant funder policies from within the European Research Area (ERA).
Subsequently, PALOMERA also created a set of actionable guidelines to support and coordinate funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the goal of speeding up the transition to OA for books in particular.
Report from a workshop on sustainable open access book publishing in East Africa
In October 2024, a collaborative online-session for publishers from East Africa was co-organised by the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), OAPEN, the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and French research institutes in Africa, Les Afriques dans le monde (LAM) and the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), supported by the National Centre for Scientific Research in France (CNRS). The session covered approaches towards equitable and sustainable open access for scholarly books.
Supporting learned society, subject association, and smaller specialist publishers to transition to open access book publishing
This report, the result of a collaboration between UKRI, ALPSP, the British Academy, OASPA and Information Power, was published in 2025.
It was produced in the context of the UKRI OA policy change in 2024 that longform publications of UKRI-funded research were to be published open access. It seeks to understand the challenges faced by smaller, specialist publishers of business models, scale, and other issues as they seek to implement open access.
Among its many conclusions and recommendations, it notes the tension between OA models being largely reliant on library support, while libraries find it difficult to turn their budgets to supporting OA books. They also note that without improvement in the supply chain (especially at the discoverability stage) it will be hard for smaller publishers to work without support from larger publishing partners. Additionally, new open infrastructure will be needed.
This report contains a lot of detailed information about OA publishing pain points and supply chains, and also contains data such as librarian survey results about OA support, and case studies of publishers impacted.
TOME Report: The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs
A study of the costs incurred by US university presses in publishing scholarly monographs as part of the TOME pilot project. It is very focussed on US institutional publishing, with extremely high costs that do not necessarily map onto those in the UK and elsewhere.
TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report
The concluding report about the author experiences with the TOME project, and more general conclusions about how the groundwork with authors and universities would need to be built on by any subsequent projects.