How to flip to Open Access
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. 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.
See:Read https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:47235/the guide
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. 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.
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, 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.
How to Start an Open Access Journal: 2024 Small Publisher Primer
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.
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.
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.
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.