Book publishing

A new, collective action Open Access business model for scholarly books. Direct to Open harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship.

We want to find a model which is more fundamentally geared towards demand. By making selective books OA directly in response to their being purchased, we are flipping the traditional publishing model upside down. Publishers have historically been most proprietorial about their most popular and most-used titles. With our model, we are saying that those sought-after titles are the books that should be freely available first, because they are the ones that most people are likely to want to access.

University of Michigan Press has been taking steps to develop a publishing program that aligns with its mission and commitment to equity, justice, inclusion, and accessibility. Based on these principles, the Press is now transitioning to an open access monograph model we call “Fund to Mission.”

Luminos is University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

Open Plus Books enables authors or book editors to publish a book open access first on the open research platform within just a few days of submission. Each chapter is a standalone piece, enabling chapters to be published as soon as they are accepted, and additional chapters to be added at any time. Chapters can be updated, revised, and amended individually by the author to reflect changes in research, knowledge, policy, legislation, or standards.

The SCOAP3 for Books pilot aims to facilitate the conversion to open access of relevant existing books and monographs, such as university-level textbooks in HEP and related disciplines like instrumentation, detector engineering and accelerator physics. Open availability of these books will empower students, researchers, and faculty members at institutions across the world (including members of the general public) to benefit from full access to these important texts.

"The study sought to understand the print sales performance of scholarly books that are also available in a free-to-read open digital edition. Twenty-six (26) university press members of the Association contributed data for 976 OA titles published between 2005 and 2022. One of the key insights from the investigation is that print sales can be a significant contributor to offsetting the costs of publishing such works, with median print sales of close to $6000—and (excluding outliers) average sales of nearly $8000." Gary Price, Infodocket

This collection was brought together by Lucy Barnes of Open Book Publishers and François van Schalkwyk of African Minds. It is intended to document the diverse ways that presses in different parts of the world have set up and now maintain their open access operations. The presses included have devised their own approaches to tackle the challenges of publishing OA books; they are structured in different ways in a variety of national and, in some cases, institutional contexts. We hope that these case studies help to illustrate the reasons behind the choices made by the presses, as well as detailing the models themselves.

The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit covers specific topics related to open access books. Each article offers a quick and brief introduction to a particular aspect of open access book publishing. The toolkit also serves as a signposting tool: articles include a list of sources referenced, further reading and links to definitions of key terms.

Eighty scholarly monographs and edited collections partially funded by libraries participating in MIT Press’s Direct to Open model will publish openly this year.

Springer Nature has signed its largest institutional OA book deal with the Max Planck Society through the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). The agreement covers all Springer Nature book imprints, across a broad range of disciplines, providing OA funding to affiliated authors from over 80 Max Planck Institutes.