Category: Publishing

A major issue is that the sheer cost of BPCs [Book Processing Charges] makes them an extremely expensive way of funding Open Access books. For large commercial publishers, BPCs of £11,000 and more for a conventional academic book are typical. Given very few academics would themselves have the capacity to easily cover these kinds of costs, BPCs are usually paid by universities or funders — sometimes from a specific fund set aside to cover the costs of Open Access publishing, sometimes from a general unallocated part of a university/department budget, sometimes from the budget of a research grant.

As Open Book Collective colleagues have argued again and again, in line with the aims and mission of the COPIM project, as well as arguments made by other project colleagues, a BPC-based Open Access publishing model is fundamentally unsustainable and unscalable. Any requirement for the higher education sector to pay BPCs on a broadscale basis would require an unparalleled national and global injection of funding. . . .

The Open Book Collective’s online presence " its "platform" serves many functions, including providing information about our aims, governance, model and values, as well resources about Open Access. However, a key part of the platform is the area where publishers and publishing "service providers," as we call them (the organisations that provide the crucial infrastructures for Open Access book publishing) make available ‘Offers’ that universities and other organisations can potentially subscribe to. . . .

In the Open Book Collective model, we give publisher/service provider members substantial — but not total — control over how their individual Offers are priced. Each initiative proposes a "tiered" costing Offer to us (tiered pricing involves varying subscription prices by university’s size and/or national context), which we assess to determine whether it is fair and reasonable. If so, and our Membership Committee agrees that the initiative meets our broader membership criteria, then it is eligible to become a member of the Open Book Collective, with its Offer potentially hosted on our platform.

https://bit.ly/45yZsXQ

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Author attitudes towards Open Access (OA) remains an important area of investigation in academic publishing. The successful implementation of new OA infrastructure and business models depend on their reception within scholarly communities. This paper proposes "Open Access Culture"—the set of beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards OA publishing shared by members of an academic field—as a framework to understand how OA innovations are and will be received by different scholarly communities. The investigation of OA culture helps identify the needs of individual academic fields (e.g., the importance of print publishing for a particular field), thus foregrounding author preferences in the publishing process. The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is drawing upon the OA Culture framework to aid the implementation of its OA monograph initiative. UMP has undertaken research (author survey as well as editor, author, and librarian interviews) to understand how the monograph initiative will integrate different fields. This paper presents results of this research demonstrating the application of the OA Culture framework to several fields, as well the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences (HSS) more broadly. This is one way that University Presses may take an author-centered approach to OA publishing programs, one that foregrounds the needs of individual authors and considers their unique disciplinary context. Moreover, the paper offers a recent view of sentiments towards OA in the HSS and thus helps to contextualize the current OA landscape.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3332

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

In this article, we share how a small, independent, academic open access (OA) press, punctum books, has survived and can maybe thrive financially, but also in terms of human quality of life dividends, in the very precarious landscape of making and funding open books. Tracing the history of the press and our bumpy road to better financial sustainability, and the ways in which we have settled upon a business model that purposefully "scales small," we argue that the mission and the business model of any OA book publisher must be in better alignment than is currently the case in much of academic publishing and that bibliodiversity, along with an ethics of care—of ourselves, our authors, and the librarians who fund us—should be paramount in everything we do as a publisher. We also offer a brief survey of the current state of the field of library funded OA books initiatives in order to raise some questions about the weight and logics of these initiatives and, with more and more players entering this scene, about the viability more largely of consortial library funding for OA books in the United States.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Open access infrastructure for books is becoming more mature, and it is being used by an in-creasing number of people. The growing importance of open access infrastructure leads to more interest in sustainability, governance and impact assessment. For this paper, we will assess the OAPEN Library. In the spring of 2022, it passed the milestone of 20,000 titles. This was a good moment to evaluate the core asset of the OAPEN Library: its collection.

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible books and chapters, all of which have undergone external peer review. In other words, it functions as an academic library and in our assessment we should treat it as such. However, it is an online library and the limitations of physical books do not play a part. Shelf space is not to be considered.

More important is the question of how well the collection meets the needs of its users. The OAPEN Library sees global usage; the collection reflects this by offering titles in over 50 languages. The collection is not focused on a specific subject area, but the choice of medium — books and chapters, not journals and articles — is more strongly associated with the humanities and social sciences. It does not track its users, but the supporters of the OAPEN Libraries are globally dis-tributed academic institutions, scientific and scholarly funders and publishers. An assessment of the OAPEN Library should therefore take into account the diversity of languages, subjects and stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |