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,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. 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.