UKRI, in partnership with the Association of Learned Society Publishers (ALPSP), the British Academy, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), commissioned a project from Information Power to support book publishers in their transition to sustainable open access (OA) models. The project had a particular focus on learned society, subject association, and smaller specialist publishers. These publishers play an important role in the research and scholarly communications ecosystem. Our objective: to explain what needs to happen to aid small and specialist book publishers to transition to OA successfully and sustainably.
How to Begin the OA Transition: a guide for smaller and specialist publishers was developed as part of our project and accompanies a fuller report for all stakeholders which provides detailed advice and guidance for both independent publishers and those who work with larger publishing partners.
For Information Power this is the fourth project in the Scholarly Publishers Advancing Open access and Plan S project, affectionately known as SPA OPS 4.0[1].
A shared vision is essential for helping stakeholders to make decisions and prioritise actions and investments, and we set out a clear and compelling future that all stakeholders can aspire to aim for. This serves as a reference point and provides a benchmark against which progress can be measured. The recommendations in our report support this vision for OA books:
Stakeholders will work together to create a world in which OA book publishing is:
Most of the smaller and specialist book publishers we engaged with, although not all, are supportive of OA in principle. They face challenges with predictable and scalable funding and an array of practical matters. Many felt overwhelmed, understandably, by the pressure for a great deal of practical change and the expectation of time constraints. They need flexibility and time to experiment with and blend the different revenue models that already exist, and infrastructure to enable these to scale sustainably.
Book publishers cannot transition to OA revenue models successfully without the proactive support of authors.
- Many authors are enthusiastic about OA book publishing as it can advance their disciplines, broaden access to research, and promote global scholarship.
- However, authors are also confused by conflicting information and terms and want flexibility to choose how their works are used and shared.
- Some authors remain sceptical about the quality of OA publishing. This is a problem of perception, as there can be good publishers and poor publishers under any revenue model. The good news is that stakeholders perceive this challenge is perhaps waning.
Book publishers cannot transition to OA revenue models successfully without the proactive support of library customers.
- Free to access does not mean free to produce. Ongoing funding to support OA book publication is needed.
- Librarians reported that a primary driver for them is to add books to their collections at no cost, and fewer than a third helped to fund OA book publishing by authors at their institutions.
- Predictable sources of OA book publishing revenueare essential in order for book publishers to transition to OA.
- There are scalable and sustainable revenue models that can enable a publisher to flip one or more existing titles to OA, or to publish titles, collections, or their entire portfolio OA.
- Deciding upon the correct mix of revenue models can be challenging as much of the current guidance is confusing and sometimes more geared to born OA publishers or publishers much further in their transition. Practical guidance is needed.
- Many of the revenue models depend on financial support from libraries.
- Direct interaction with library customers is not something many smaller and specialist book publishers have any experience of, or practical prospect of achieving, because this is not scalable for either librarians or publishers.
Librarians face challenges too in the transition to making OA book publishing the norm. All the librarians we engaged with were supportive of OA in principle. The key challenges they face are financial and practical. Many aspire to transition to OA and expand publishing opportunities for their researchers within the confines of their existing budgets. This is extremely aspirational and extremely challenging from a financial perspective. Most are in the early stages of transitioning to prioritise OA book acquisition. There are different workflows for open access and traditional books which creates extra administrative burdens and is a barrier to transitioning their normal purchasing processes to support OA.
The OA revenue models that are the most promising for a transition to OA right now are:
- Consortial funding models have many positive aspects. Publishers gain visibility, awareness, and ongoing financial support through a distributed network of supporters. Libraries gain the ability to select the publishers and book collections they want to support through a central platform. Authors do not need to provide funding to support OA publication of the book. At the moment, the challenge with them mainly concerns their limited availability and scope, as well as potentially slower decision-making about titles to be made OA due to governance and decision-making processes outside the direct control of publishers or authors.
- BPCs can work usefully, especially in the short term, because each published title can be priced to cover its direct and indirect costs. There is a growing body of data on how different publishers are pricing their BPCs[2]. This approach works well for funded authors; however, many book authors are unfunded, and many funders, librarians, and publishers are increasingly concerned about the equity of this revenue model.
- Print sales with online OA models are widely deployed. Offering this option requires minimal inventory capacity or risk, as print can be provided on-demand.
- Green OA models are a compromise on many accounts, as the book needs to be sold in traditional ways to cover costs, and the author’s unpublished manuscript is made available OA with a reuse licence. The OA version may compete with sales. In the short term, this can be a functional solution for enabling compliance with OA mandates while other approaches to funding OA book publishing are tested.
- Digital format freemium models are where the publisher provides one digital format OA and sells other digital formats. These models are widely deployed, although attention needs to be paid to ensure the OA version does not undermine sales. Some freemium models, for example, only offer ‘view’ access to an HTML version of the OA book with a restrictive licence, so that it is challenging to download a copy and transfer it to an e-reader (e.g. OpenEdition) or share it.
The supply chain needs to evolve to enable OA book publishing and funding/purchasing at scale. We consistently heard three different use cases, each important but distinct, being conflated: discovery of books by libraries who can make purchases or provide funding to make them OA, discovery of OA books by readers, and discovery of OA books by those tracking compliance with OA mandates. It is the first of these use cases that is most problematic in the supply chain.
Improvement requires both grassroots change and change in the systems through which libraries purchase books. Without evolution here, smaller publishers are likely to require more support from larger publishing partners. This would give them the ability to scale, but inevitably means that their choices of revenue model will be limited to those acceptable to the larger publishing partners.
Scale is essential if all academic books are to transition to OA, especially with expanded opportunities for OA book publishing by scholars. Key challenges in the supply chain include:
- New open infrastructure is being added alongside or on top of existing book supply chain infrastructure but does not replace the need for the existing systems.
- This is because the transition to digital is happening alongside the transition to OA, and therefore print books need to be produced and managed alongside their digital counterparts.
- There is an unmet need for infrastructure/services to enable many libraries to contribute small amounts to enable specific books or collections of shared interest to be published OA, to discover what books could be commissioned and published OA if only the publisher knew that money were available, or to generally commit their OA financial support to a small or specialist publisher in transition to OA in advance of publication.
- Visibility of flipped titles is a challenge. Publishers need to be able to clearly and quickly communicate when they have received funding to retrospectively convert a book or chapter to OA, and libraries need to be able to quickly receive and act on this information.
- All of this requires additional metadata, and work with additional metadata partners. Formats and editions need to be differentiated at collection, title, and chapter levels. Employers and funders need to be acknowledged to enable OA payments and reporting. Information about the relevant licence needs to travel through the supply chain, both independently and with the full text.
- Infrastructure and services are needed and need to be affordable and sustainable for all stakeholders.
Hybrid edited volumes are particularly problematic. This approach can provide flexible options when some contributors to an edited volume need to publish OA and others do not. However, there are many practical impediments to their discoverability:
- Publishers use title management systems, digital distribution systems, and metadata management systems. These typically operate at a single book title level where each book has a unique ISBN identifier which is used to track sales and usage. Layering in an OA business model at a chapter level is beyond the capabilities of many publishers and their book production systems, and the OA status of individual chapters can therefore be difficult – even impossible – to communicate effectively internally much less across the book supply chain.
- Librarians are not keen on hybrid books. Incorporating an OA chapter, and not the other paywalled chapters, in their catalogues is potentially confusing to users, and causes users to seek out the rest of the book which the library may not have purchased.
- It is therefore questionable whether there would be a sustainable financial incentive to invest the sums required to enable publishers and supply chain partners to create and communicate high-quality chapter-level metadata.
About UKRI
Launched in April 2018, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
UKRI brings together the seven disciplinary research councils, Research England, which is responsible for supporting research and knowledge exchange at higher education institutions in England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
About ALPSP
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) is the international trade association which supports and represents not-for-profit organizations that publish scholarly and professional content and those that collaborate with them. ALPSP has over 320 member organizations across 35 countries. Our diverse membership encompasses society, university, and traditional publishers, alongside their associated communities, thereby representing those who uphold the principles of accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness in information dissemination.
About British Academy
The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It represents the interests of the humanities and social sciences, including those of the many learned societies and subject associations in those disciplines. The Academy is also a funder of research and provides opportunities for dissemination of outputs from that research through its own publishing programme (including some open access options).
About OASPA
OASPA is a diverse network of organisations engaged in open scholarship. Our membership includes scholar-led and professional publishers of books and journals, across varied geographies and disciplines, as well as infrastructure and other services. To fulfil our mission of encouraging and enabling open access for scholarly outputs, our focus is on collaboration – sharing experiences, helping to develop industry standards and collectively discussing and enabling solutions to support a sustainable path for open access publishing.
About Information Power
Information Power is a consulting company skilled in driving change through successful cross-stakeholder collaboration. This focus is coupled with decades of combined management experience, unique spheres of international influence, expertise in qualitative and quantitative research, and a very successful track record. For more than 15 years we have helped funders, libraries and library consortia, and publishers benefit from new opportunities.
[1] SPA OPS 1.0 delivered a report on how stakeholders can support society publishers to transition their journals to OA (https://wellcome.figshare.com/articles/online_resource/Society_Publishers_Accelerating_Open_Access_and_Plan_S_-_Final_Project_Report/9805007?backTo=%2Fcollections%2FSociety_Publishers_Accelerating_Open_access_and_Plan_S_SPA-OPS_project%2F4561397&file=17591039)
SPA OPS 2.0 delivered a report specifically on how to enable society publishers to engage in transformative agreements (https://wellcome.figshare.com/articles/online_resource/How_to_enable_smaller_independent_publishers_to_participate_in_OA_agreements/14731308/1?file=28300371) and a commitment from international organisations to support them to do just this (https://www.coalition-s.org/enabling-smaller-independent-publishers-to-participate-in-open-access-transformative-arrangements-a-commitment-from-key-stakeholders/).
SPA OPS 3.0 delivered a toolkit to help society publishers participate in transformative agreements and included model agreements, a data template, and other resources (https://wellcome.figshare.com/articles/online_resource/SPA-OPS_Transformative_Agreement_Toolkit/9805043?backTo=/collections/Society_Publishers_Accelerating_Open_access_and_Plan_S_SPA-OPS_project/4561397).
[2] OpenAPC has been set up to track expenditure on journal APCs and is used by over 400 contributing institutions around the world. As of May 2024, 61 institutions had also contributed BPC data for books. See https://treemaps.openapc.net/apcdata/bpc/.
