How to transition / flip to Open Access
Cookbook for Open Access books
This book describes the experiences of setting up a community-based publisher, Language Science Press. It discusses the main principles of community-based publishing and gives a very granular breakdown of the different tasks. The discussion of the different tasks is complemented by readings, time lines, and a list of time sinks. This book is complemented by the business model , open business data, and a spreadsheet for drafting and calculating own business models.
COPIM's toolkit for running an Opening the Future programme at an academic press
This document sets out how Copim implemented the OtF model, including the documentation of challenges, resources, timetables, and activities. It is intended as a roadmap for other presses that wish to implement an ‘Opening the Future’-esque model. It is the only toolkit dedicated to flipping book publishing from closed to open (although the Information Power report due in December will likely render this incorrect). It is now slightly out of date as many of these funding models have developed greatly since 2020. It is also not currently very user-friendly and has not been widely adopted.
See: https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/copim-toolkit-for-running-an-opening-the-future-programme/release/3 or https://zenodo.org/records/7003979
It has now been superseded by Books 6 , 7 and 8 of Copim Compass.
How to Begin the OA Transition: a guide for smaller and specialist publishers
This guide, the result of a collaboration between UKRI, ALPSP, the British Academy, OASPA and Information Power,Power, was published in 2025. It provides advice and tools for learned societies and other smaller specialist publishers seeking strategies and business models for transitioning to OA.OA Itas provideswell as guidance on advocating for OA to necessary stakeholders such as board members, potential pain or clarification points for any commercial publishing partners the smaller publisher may have, and a detailed guide to different available revenue models. It also provides practical guidance on licences, metadata, archiving, and tracking title performance.
How to Start an Open Access Journal: 2024 Small Publisher Primer
The Primer is a guide from Scholastica for those working with a scholarly society or institution to launch an OA journal in-house. ComprehensiveA comprehensive resource for journals to flip to OA and might be useful background reading.
How to flip your journal: A guide to more equitable publishing with Diamond Open Access
This guide, an output of the Strengthening Diamond OA in the Netherlands project, is a comprehensive guide to the rationale and logistics of flipping a journal to Diamond OA; what routes are available, how they work, the financial aspect, and case studies for implementation. While it is speaking primarily to the Dutch context, the suggestions are more widely applicable.
OPERAS Pathfinder
A publication service finder hosted by Operas for editorial managers, editors and authors at any stage of a publication project. UsefulAlthough a useful resource as it caters for different stakeholder groups;groups, it is currently in beta so not fully developed but hosted by Operas so watch this space… developed.
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 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. NewAdditionally, 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: 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.project. While it is very focussed on US institutional publishing, with extremely high costs that do not necessarily map onto those in the UK and elsewhere, we still consider it a highly relevant resource.
TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report
A concluding report about the author experiences with TOME, and more general conclusions about how the groundwork with authors and universities would need to be built on by any subsequent projects, and relevant to the proposed section of the InfoHub on flipping to OA.