The membership modeller and realistic modelling
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.
To access the modelling tool, see DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7003979 for a link to this appendix MS Excel document (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[NB SOME OF THESE ARE OUT OF DATE AND IN EUROS - NEED TO SEE IF WE WILL CHANGE THEM IN THE MODELLER??]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 |
Other tabs/sheets in the modeller also have configurable variables. For instance, the ‘Linear Data’ sheet describes what happens when members join at a rate of 84 per year, spread exactly evenly between the different banding levels. As a note: our experience with CEU Press and LUP is that most memberships have originated from larger institutions, despite our attempt at fair pricing at the lower end.
This sheet also allows you to enter the number of Book Processing Charges that are anticipated to be secured, independently, and so will not count towards the Opening the Future scheme (but will nonetheless enable OA).
Different tabs/sheets depict different scenarios. For instance, the ‘Early Adopters’ sheets are designed to show a rapid uptake, followed by a longer tail.
Each sheet shows the projections for revenue and the number of funded books in each year at this stage. However, the safety and beauty of the scheme is that, if any of these figures are not met, the book should simply be processed as a ‘sales-only’/‘toll-access’ title. The model does not require a press to make a book openly accessible until the revenue target to enable this has been met.
When modelling costs, the crucial balance to strike is between value for money on the backlist and value for money on the OA frontlist. A good pricing level will yield a valuable return to libraries solely on the backlist (i.e. it will appear good value if they only received the backlist titles), solely on the frontlist (i.e. it will appear good value if they only received the OA frontlist titles), and it will appear very good value when the frontlist and backlist titles are combined.
Realistic Modelling
There are many factors that will affect the accuracy provided by the financial modelling tool. The rate of growth, for instance, will be dependent on the success of the marketing strategy and the level of resource that is devoted to these activities. It is always better to plan for more conservative growth and then to exceed this target than to make unrealistic predictions.
Our initial implementation of Opening the Future also took place against a number of significant world events and policy decisions that changed the landscape beneath our feet, such as the Covid-19 pandemic hit with associated fears for university library budgets (although subsequent events have shown that library budgets are at risk regardless), although these particular fears are now replaced by concerns about the dire financial straits that many UK HEIs are currently in in late 2024 and early 2025, which have led to many budget cuts.
Understanding the types of institution who are willing to join an initiative is also important. In the first four years of CEU Press’s Opening the Future implementation, the press achieved 111 package sign-ups from 80 libraries (as, since they offer multiple package offers, some libraries went for two, three or even four at once), excluding renewals, This has been enough to publish 21 titles so far, with funding for around 40 more. This has been from a range of libraries in the UK, US, EU and Australia, many of them large or medium institutions. You are able to see our current list of supporters for both presses here.
While CEUP’s progress gives the best indicator that we have of early signup rates, it is difficult to extrapolate from these data for a number of reasons:
- This was the first year of operation, meaning that much of our time was spent explaining the model, asking librarians to understand the premises, and generally spreading the word. Similarly, these sorts of models were less common then than they are now and so there was more basic explanatory work to potential subscribers.
- We were operating during perhaps the most exceptional set of conditions in our lifetimes: the Covid-19 pandemic, with knock-on effects on library budgets although, as noted above, the budget constraints have not improved despite the end of the Covid-19 crisis.
- Library budgetary planning takes a long time to go through – once a library has decided that it wishes to participate, it can take up to 12 months for the funding to be approved and to become available for expenditure.
- Mandates for OA monographs are only now coming to prominence.
We had hoped that future signups would occur faster than the first year as the model became better understood. While it has certainly become more prominent, and more widely used, a knock-on effect of this has been competition for funding between different collective funding models.
While funder mandates may prove to be a powerful driving factor in the future, the delay of the proposed REF monograph mandate in 2026 (now pushed to tentatively 2029) means that this factor too has been delayed.
While the Covid-19 crisis period is over, budgets have been cut across HEI institutions, including their libraries. This has impacted our renewals, as some prospective renewal libraries have stated that budget cuts mean they cannot continue to support Opening the Future.
Presses should, therefore, appraise their own brand strengths, including disciplinary placement, and make informed decisions about the likelihood of institutional support. For instance, if the press has authors who work at universities that have been known to support OA membership models in the past – such as the Open Book Collective, Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, arXiv, Subscribe to Open – then this may give confidence in that institution’s support. Creating an initial spreadsheet of authorial affiliations of the Press’s backlist and correlating these with institutions known to support OA initiatives may provide a benchmark of potential reach.
Further reading: https://nag.org.uk/development/criteria/ (Emma Booth, Metadata Manager for Content Management at the University of Manchester Library)