06. Opening the Future: Introduction and Description

How Opening the Future actually works is very simple, on both the publisher and the library side. It is a revenue model for open access monographs in which a press solicits a relatively small financial contribution from a moderate number of academic libraries, in order to cover the costs of new OA publications. Pooling the library contributions means that no one bears a disproportionate burden and, combined, the small amounts go further.

This section describes the model in detail and explains how it differs from other similar models. It also provides some direct feedback from those who have already implemented the model. 

If you read nothing else, read this!

This toolkit is a step-by-step guide aimed at small to medium-sized scholarly publishers that have a backlist of ‘closed’ books, but who are interested in moving towards open access. If they have no mechanism for doing so, then the Opening the Future (OtF) model might be an option and this guide will show you how. 

Benefits to the publisher
Benefits to library investors (members)

The OtF toolkit on the Copim Compass walks you through the process for setting up the Opening the Future OA book revenue model at your press. It is a comprehensive and detailed guide but the model is simple. In fact, the steps below tell you what you need to do in order to implement it. You can just follow those and read nothing else, or you can delve into more detail in the rest of the guide.

How to Launch OtF in 10 Easy Steps

  1. Create a package of 40-50 backlist books on a similar theme (or create several of around that many books in each!). Think about what might appeal to libraries e.g. UN SDG goals and price it based on what might be appealing to libraries while still covering your costs.

  2. Host this backlist package somewhere known and trusted by libraries (e.g. Project MUSE). 

  3. Create a short description of your offering and host it on a subscription manager (e.g. Jisc, Lyrasis through an agreement) or host it yourselves with a sign-up form to your finance person/department.

  4. Create a web page which contains the description of your offering, details of the backlist package(s) on offer, the pricing, and a link to where libraries can sign up.

  5. Do comms, marketing and outreach to libraries that specialise in the subject of your backlist package, and/or libraries that support other OA initiatives.

  6. Keep track, e.g. using spreadsheets, of who signed up and when, so you know who your advocates are. You also need to track when their renewals are due after 3 years and when their access to the backlist becomes perpetual.

  7. Use the funds from these backlist subscriptions to fund your OA frontlist in the same subject area as the backlist package, and be very transparent to investor libraries about where their money is going.

  8. Create a mailing list of library supporters and keep them informed of your progress in opening up your frontlist. 

  9. When it comes to renewals, create a new backlist package and/or a supporter package without backlist content and reach out to your supporters about it. 

  10. Consider engaging your library investor members in an advisory capacity on a formal Board, but at the very least keep talking to them: keep them up-to-date on books they have funded, keep listening to what they need, what they can afford, what their pressures are, the policy and wider HE landscapes, and what your opportunities to tweak the model might be.

You can just follow those steps and launch OtF without reading any further, but you will find the rest of the toolkit useful to dip in and out of for more detail.

Why OA (for books), and why collective funding?

Can the academic monograph publishing sector afford to keep working the way it always has?

Industry reports examining the state of scholarly publishing have identified that traditional sales of humanities and social science academic books are declining – and yet we are still working as a sector in much the same way we always have, largely based on a print paradigm. According to the Ithaka S+R Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs  report from September 2023, written in collaboration with the Association of University Presses, there has been a ‘decline in monograph sales over the last couple of decades, [and] margins on academic books are so thin that publishers may fear that anything that threatens to cannibalize anticipated print sales of a scholarly title … is a threat to its viability’. (Interestingly, the same report goes on to conclude in its Key Insights that ‘OA titles can generate significant print revenue [and] OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue’.)

Furthermore, as far back as 2017 a comprehensive AHRC/British Library report, ‘Academic Books and their Future’ , warned that ‘publishers are concerned that their e-book revenues do not adequately fill the gap left by declining print sales [while] libraries chafe at the costs of many of the choices they have to make.’ So the scholarly publishing world is changing. We argue therefore that the HE sector needs to adapt to this changing world and that open access is a factor in those changes. It is certainly a factor when the scholarly work has been publicly funded and the labour involved in writing and reviewing has been given willingly by scholars.

Simply put, collective funding OA models are a more cost-effective way to publish these books.

[These two paragraphs have been cribbed from a longer article in the UKSG journal Insights, a link to which is below, along with links to the other two reports cited above]

Benefits of OA for books

Since the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, open access has become an increasingly major component of scholarly publishing and research dissemination. There are many reasons for this, including obvious benefits of increasing access to publications like increased usage and citations.  Additionally, open access allows researchers whose institutions are unable to bear the financial burden of endless subscriptions and purchases, or who work outside of a university structure, to access resources vital to their research too. It also allows members of the general public and citizen scientists – who are often the funders of this work as taxpayers – to access them too.

Mandates and policies

The growth of OA has also been due to the proliferation of funder mandates demanding it, and providing the funds to support it. But books have lagged behind journals in this arena. For example in the UK, UKRI, the national funding agency directing research and innovation funding, brought in a requirement for OA for monographs, edited collections, and chapters from 2024 while an OA policy for research articles went live over ten years earlier in 2013. 

Funders in the Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Slovenia, and Portugal, and others have OA book policies (see Annex A in the Overview of existing OA book policies from cOAlitionS for a longer list). The Council of the EU stated in May 2023 that “immediate and unrestricted open access should be the norm in publishing research involving public funds, with transparent pricing”. Further policies in the European Research Area (ERA) may begin to include them based on the work of the PALOMERA project.

We argue therefore that it is necessary for publishers to engage earnestly with open access, both for moral and pragmatic reasons; there are enormous benefits to publishing OA to the researcher and to the publisher, and it is also increasingly required by funders and other national bodies, at least in some countries – both carrot and stick. 

The difficulties of funding OA books

Funding OA books is a difficult but vital topic. This is because the funding model which has thus far dominated, the Book Processing Charge (BPC), has numerous problems. Running to several thousand pounds/dollars/euros, it is unaffordable for a large number of authors and their supporting institutions, particularly in AHSS subjects where the monograph is particularly important. It is also difficult for many libraries as it causes a highly variable and unpredictable strain on their budgets, as they cannot easily predict how many BPCs they will be asked to pay in a single financial year. And many precariously employed scholars, such as ECRs, and independent researchers have no access to institutional funding at all. It therefore renders open access outside the reach of many scholars whose work is no less deserving than those who can afford to pay. 

It is for this reason, among others, that many began to consider more equitable, non-BPC business models that presses could use to support their existing OA publishing programmes, or transition to OA from entirely closed publishing. These included our own project, Copim, which ran from 2020-2026 (the project is sometimes also referred to as Copim 'Open Book Futures'). It is a reflection of the high degree of importance, but also difficulty, of equitably funding OA book publishing that not one but two of the Copim work packages are dedicated to this topic (Opening the Future and the Open Book Collective). 

The genesis of the Opening the Future model

One of the project outputs was the publication of a report in 2020 entitled 'Revenue models for Open Access monographs' [Izabella Penier, Martin Paul Eve, and Tom Grady, ‘Revenue Models for Open Access Monographs 2020’, Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs, 2020 <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4011836>]. This described an adaptation of the journal ‘Subscribe to Open’ model whereby members ‘subscribe to a backlist, with the revenue then used to make the frontlist openly accessible’.  This model is called ‘Opening the Future’. It constituted a new business model for OA monographs that had not previously been implemented at the time. 

Before continuing, we would like to note that collective funding via library memberships, of the sort this model relies on, is not new, and we need to acknowledge a debt to the forerunners such as Open Book Publishers, Lever Press, and punctum books, who began their membership programmes in 2014, 2016 and 2018 respectively. Nevertheless, the last few years have seen something of a sea change, and the awareness and implementation of collective funding for books has expanded hugely. 

Opening the Future was first put into practice with two publishers, the Central European University Press (CEUP), and Liverpool University Press (LUP) in 2020. This model presented a potential route for the mass and sustainable transition to OA of many small-to-mid sized publishers. Our partner publishers have spent the past few years utilising and refining it in partnership with Copim. It has been very effective, as we will outline. At around the same time that Opening the Future launched, so too did MIT’s Direct to Open, another collective OA funding scheme, and Fund to Mission at the University of Michigan. Since that time, many other schemes have proliferated, including from commercial firms, such as (amongst others):

The size of the field now should indicate how much confidence there is among publishers and libraries around collective funding. These are all slightly different, a reflection of many factors including that they are tailored to suit the needs of their publishers. Ours, which is designed for small to medium scholarly publishers looking to transition to OA with as little financial risk as possible, is a particularly straightforward one; it is also unusual in that it is acquisition-based. 

This toolkit

This toolkit provided here provides the documentation for how to implement your own version of Opening the Future in order to fund OA books on your frontlist. It builds very heavily on an earlier version of this toolkit [Eve, M. P., Pinter, F., Poznanski, E., & Grady, T. (2022). Opening the Future: How to Implement an Equitable Revenue Model for Open Access Monographs (3.0). Zenodo. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7003979>] with updates to reflect real world changes and experience gained as we have gone on, for example, regarding the renewal process which was not yet a factor at the time of the first publication. 




What is Opening the Future?

How the Opening the Future (OtF) model works is fundamentally very simple, on both the publisher and the library side. It is a revenue model for open access monographs in which a press solicits a relatively small financial contribution from a moderate number of academic libraries, in order to cover the costs of new OA publications.

How it works, in a nutshell

Libraries sign up to get unlimited, DRM-free access to curated packages of a press’s backlist, with perpetual access after three years and the option to renew (on which more later in this Toolkit). The press then uses the revenue from the membership subscription fees solely to produce frontlist titles in open access format immediately on publication. We informally call it the ‘Backlist to the Future’ model as it uses the backlist to fund the frontlist. Publishing the OA titles is a rolling process: as soon as the publisher accrues the funds to produce a book, they can publish the next one in line, and so on. Therefore, unlike many other collective models, there is no target member threshold to reach other than simply the production cost of the next book, which means the more members they have, the more books a press can publish OA.Opening the Future in a nutshell - diagram.png

Benefits to the library

This detail, about libraries retaining perpetual access after their initial subscription term, is in fact key to how the whole thing works. While we call this a subscription, or a membership model, it is in reality an acquisition by the library. As it ends up being a purchase after the three years, a library can pay for this out of a conventional subject acquisition budget rather than needing a dedicated OA fund (many libraries don't have dedicated OA funds yet - although these can also be used to financially support OtF). So it fits elegantly into expected channels and budgets for libraries on several levels. It also means that the model can reach several different budgets within the library. This can justify the expenditure as a purchase of books to which they would otherwise not have access. The backlist/frontlist combination also provides a unique dual-route to rationalisation for acquisition librarians. Anecdotally, several librarians have told us that this is a major draw and strength of the model. At the same time, every year of membership grows their (open) collection by whatever frontlist titles are funded via Opening the Future. This is how libraries with OA budgets are able to justify this expenditure because the new frontlist titles are openly accessible. This also allows institutions that have access to block grants for OA to use this pot to fund the purchase. It is further possible for funders directly to support such consortial membership schemes. 

Benefits to the publisher

From a publisher perspective, it operates very differently from other collective funding initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched, which is a point of comparison some publishers we have spoken to have raised, and which publishers may be familiar with. With OtF, the financial dealings are directly between the publisher and the library, and the publisher holds the funds directly and makes decisions on which titles to spend them on. This differs from KU where applications are made per title by the publisher, who is granted funds administered by KU. This gives the publisher greater control (also in comparison to charging BPCs) over what work they are able to publish open access, which is particularly important in mission-driven presses where you may have a strong desire to make certain titles as widely accessible as possible, but not currently the financial means to do so. 

A low-risk, sustainable OA funding stream for publishers

The aim of this approach is to continue to yield a sustainable source of revenue for a press while achieving the desired commitment to making more titles OA. Given the current global library environment and budget pressures, a consortial model of funding promises a cost-effective solution for OA that means no single institution bears a disproportionate burden. The model also yields an elastic approach to open access that can grow with the success of the model. This elasticity is also a vital piece of its design. The Copim project aimed to support small to medium presses with this (both institutional and small mission-driven commercial presses), those who operate on tight margins, with limited cushion for experimentation, and who need to incur as little risk as possible in adopting new funding models. This is one of the reasons why library membership/subscription to the programme lasts a minimum of three years, with the option to renew after that: the press is able to plan ahead for at least three years with some measure of financial certainty. Risk is further mitigated by the level of investment by the publisher. You only use a selection of your back content to create subscription packages, rather than imposing an ‘all or nothing’ approach. Additionally, you are still able to sell individual copies of your backlist titles and print copies of the OA frontlist titles that the subscription funds, meaning that committing backlist titles to the packages interrupts normal revenue streams to a small degree. 

What Opening the Future is NOT, and the importance of working with libraries in good faith

What Opening the Future is NOT

Opening the Future is not like a ‘transformative agreement’ in the journal world. There is no linkage between an institution supporting the model and their own authors being allowed to publish OA. The model is trying to break the link between institutions paying and their own authors being allowed to publish openly, in favour of the press securing a 100% open frontlist and so achieving the former by default. Opening the Future is better thought of as an attempt to build a one-time, open, global ‘collection’ that is shared by libraries in common, around the world.

Working with libraries in good faith

One of the major factors underpinning the success of this model is good faith on the part of the participating publisher. While in some ways, the model plays the part of a conventional acquisition of content by a library from a publisher, it is primarily a mechanism to enable the OA publication of frontlist titles, and the library is as much an investor as a purchaser (if not more so). The funds accrued this way must therefore be used for their stated purpose. We strongly recommend that you publish quarterly news bulletins on your progress which also list the titles that have been published open access with OtF funds. 

We also strongly suggest that, if you do not already have one, you consider trying to set up a library advisory board. Copim has devised this as a community-minded model, as it has with all its projects (the ‘C’ in our name stands for community after all!). It is a collective model with community funding via libraries, funding a global collection. Therefore, it is extremely important to centre the library community who provide the funding for these initiatives - to make sure that community means more than just accepting their money. That it also means receiving guidance, feedback, and criticism from them, as equal stakeholders in this endeavour with publishers, and stakeholders with extremely relevant knowledge to share.

It is also pragmatic to do so. We have heard from many librarians that they are increasingly overwhelmed by collective OA funding requests from publishers, and so this is a vital means of communication to learn how to work with the libraries and make your own offering as clear, palatable, and easy to acquire as possible. Many libraries have begun to publish evaluation criteria in order to grade the offerings given to them. The following is just a sample of the criteria by which libraries are beginning to measure OA book funding programmes. Being able to ask librarians if they feel you fulfil these sorts of criteria, and that it is sufficiently clear in your marketing materials, is materially important to receiving library funds:

Comments from current users of Opening the Future

Hear from staff at Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, who have both been using the model since its inception in 2020. 

CEU Press implemented the Opening the Future model in 2021, and has been running it successfully for the last 4 years with the support of the COPIM colleagues. Having the COPIM staff on hand initially made a huge difference to the implementation at the Press as we only had a small team available to administer the model, ensure invoicing and access setup, work on outreach - anything that is necessary to establish the model in the community, and for continuity and scalability. In this time, we worked on setting up our own administrative workflows to ensure we can continue working with the model as long it is needed. 


Our approach to the model was to have a lot of flexibility with regards to package choices and start dates as well as payment terms, which, while convenient for libraries, lead to more administrative efforts than initially planned for. For any presses starting with the model now I would definitely recommend a fixed support cycle, as well as considering how to renew library support after the first three year cycle from the start. Tracking revenues and renewals on a fixed annual cycle would reduce the administrative efforts required considerably, and make it even more viable for small presses. The main effort to increase the uptake by libraries is outreach and library relations - the most enjoyable part of the job, involving webinars, conferences, and other contact points with the market, and both personally and in terms of OA support, the most rewarding.  


The approach to work with the entire frontlist as an open access target is quite ambitious - this may not work for all presses, but using dedicated series or subject areas is also an option that can work. As always, the risk involved in pledging an open access percentage of your titles is very low as it flows with the given support from the library community.  For CEU Press, as we look to open up as many titles as possible, OtF supports authors from regions that do not have funding for OA. Through the model, we have collected funding for over 55 titles up to the year 2027,  and the three-year library support agreement helps us plan the next few years OA publications - we always know the minimum funding we have available, and how many titles this definitely translates into. Any supporters joining during this period add to the pool, and add to the number of publications. 
Our authors are very happy with the options granted by the model, and so are we. We may tweak the approach in the coming years, based on feedback from the library community, but that is the beauty of the model. It can adapt to the requirements of both the publisher and the library.
 

– Kat Baier, Central European University Press

University presses exist to disseminate scholarship. A majority of university presses have long-standing programmes rooted in the humanities, disciplines for which the monograph remains a significant vehicle both to conceptualise research and to share it.  Repeated narratives of the decline of the monograph ignore the strength of supply, with an unending pipeline of authors driven by a compelling mixture of intellectual hunger and career necessity. They ignore a growing potential audience, as the drive for impact has created ever more urgent and engaging long-form research outputs. The problem, of course, is the model.  Open access has for some years served to unite authors with wider potential readership for journals but it has not been systematically adopted for books because of the substantial costs arising from length, complexity and curation. Faced with the possibility of a well-funded, openly available STEM and a closed-access, narrowly available HSS, scholarly book publishers should be willing to explore new models that maximise the audience for the monograph.

Opening the Future, with its realistic acknowledgement of publisher costs and of the realities of library budgets and policies, offers a potentially sustainable model to reform the dissemination of scholarly books. Liverpool University Press is ideally placed to test that assumption, as a mission-based publisher operating entirely without subsidy or endowment. If we can make the model work without a financial safety net then it should be possible for any publisher to make it work. 

To test the hypothesis behind OtF we have opted to work at series/discipline level. This has two advantages: first, it enables us to leverage an existing strength of the Press in the Modern Languages. We know who to market to, while librarians know that the LUP imprimatur is a guarantee of quality. OA may in time also serve as an editorial differentiator for prospective authors in our chosen field. Secondly, working at series level allows for more rapid progress than expensive larger collections but also avoids the inefficiency of title-by-title OA. Funding levels for a series OtF are comfortably within library means, while for publishers it is a minor risk but a major opportunity, with the option to scale up if the model gains traction.

– Anthony Cond, Liverpool University Press

CEUPress 2023 OtF figures.png

This graph shows CEU Press' progress and aspirations for OtF, 2020-2026.