Why OA (for books), and why collective funding?
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; the obvious benefits to increasing access to your publications such as increased usage and citations for one. 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.
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 UKRI, the UK national funding agency directing research and innovation funding, brought in a requirement for OA for monographs, edited collections, and chapters from 2024 while Research Councils UK, which pre-existed the formation of UKRI in 2018, published an OA policy for research articles in 2013. And the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the UK’s national research assessment exercise, has also delayed the implementation of any mandate for OA for longform outputs until 2029, following their article mandate which applies to publications from 2016 onwards. Policies in the ERA, which largely leave out OA books, may begin to include them based on the work of the PALOMERA project which has just ended.
We would 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.
Funding OA books is a difficult but vital topic, and one on which a lot of energy has been expended. This is because the funding model which has thus far dominated, the Book Processing Charge (BPC), has numerous problems. Running to several thousand pounds, 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 originally ran from 2020-2023 (extended as Copim Open Book Futures, 2023-2026). 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 and Copim Open Book Futures work packages are dedicated to this very topic (Opening the Future and the Open Book Collective).
One of the project outputs of COPIM was the publication of Revenue models for Open Access monographs in 2020 [ 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 provided 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 Open Book Futures, and continues to do so in 2024. It has been very effective, as we will outline below. 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 Bloomsbury Open Collections, T&F Pledge to Open, De Gruyter’s UPLOpen, and very recently OUP’s own Commit to Open, among 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 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, Penier et al [https://zenodo.org/records/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.
1 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>.