The Membership Modeller
Below are the financial models, calculators and plans that we used with our first two publishers in 2020, and which our ongoing work is still based on.
The first step towards implementing an Opening the Future model is understanding your own press’s finances and what the transformation will look like. To that end, we have produced a membership modelling tool that will allow you to insert your own figures and then to model the resulting scenarios (see Appendix B). In the tool, boxes in yellow should be replaced with your own figures (and you should only type in the boxes that are highlighted in yellow). Boxes in green represent automatically calculated incoming finances while boxes in red represent calculated outgoings.
[NB SOME OF THESE ARE OUT OF DATE AND IN EUROS - NEED TO SEE IF WE WILL CHANGE THEM IN THE MODELLER??]
| Variable Name | Description | Default |
| Base cost per book | The basic cost per book that the press needs to recover. | €7,500.00 |
| Approx. billing agent fee per membership transaction (presses may wish to add a slightly higher figure in this box to also account for sales agent fees, if applicable) | The fee requested by a billing agent per membership transaction. | €85.00 |
| Bank fee per transaction | The fee requested by the Press’s bank per transaction | €15.00 |
| Higher Band | The fee rate for ‘large’ band (biggest) library subscribers. | €1,200.00 |
| Middle Band | The fee rate for ‘middle’ band (middle size) library subscribers. | €800.00 |
| Lower Band | The fee rate for ‘lower’ band (smallest) library subscribers. | €350.00 |
| Number of titles in backlist | The number of titles that are offered in the ‘backlist’ package (i.e. how many books does the library get as an exclusive reward for joining?) | 50 |
| Number of yearly titles in frontlist | The number of titles that the press aspires to make openly accessible every year under this scheme. | 25 |
| OA deposit fee per book (e.g. OAPEN per-title fee) | The fee to deposit each OA book (for example, in OAPEN). | €10.00 |
| OA deposit annual membership fee (e.g. OAPEN annual membership fee) | The annual membership fee to be able to deposit books (for example, the OAPEN annual fee. |
€175.00 |
| Secondary annual OA deposit location fee (e.g. JSTOR) | The annual membership fee to be able to deposit books in a secondary location (for example, JSTOR). | €100.00 |
| One-time setup fee | The one-off staff labour cost of sorting out the backlist titles into packages. | €2,000.00 |
| Approx. annual fee (based on 300 members) | The annual fee from a platform provider to provide access to the backlist. | €3,000.00 |
| Approx. annual deposit fee per backlist title | The annual fee per backlist title book for a platform provider, to provide access to the title. | €100.00 |
| Creation of metadata records per backlist title | The cost of creating metadata records for an item of backlist content. | €50.00 |
| Format-shift costs (e.g. improved digital copies, OCRing PDF text, creating epub) per title | The costs of ensuring that the backlist is in a viable format for digital delivery. | €100.00 |