How to begin the transition to Open Access

A study of the costs incurred by US university presses in publishing scholarly monographs as part of the TOME pilot 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

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See: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:47235/ 

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. 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.

See: https://zenodo.org/records/14679068 

This guide, the result of a collaboration between UKRI, ALPSP, the British Academy, OASPA and Information 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. It provides 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. 

See: https://zenodo.org/records/14679095 

The Primer is a guide for those working with a scholarly society or institution to launch an OA journal in-house. Comprehensive resource for journals to flip to OA and might be useful background reading. 

See: https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/how-to-start-flip-open-access-academic-journal/

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. 

See: https://www.arl.org/resources/tome-stakeholder-value-assessment-final-report/