'Opening the Future' – A Reliable Funding Model for Open Access Monographs: Introducing an Innovative Approach to Publishing OA Books Through Library Membership Funding
Creators: name: Grady, Tom
name: Hopkins, Kira
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: Publishing
Open Access
Monographs
Libraries

description: In this presentation, Kira Hopkins and Tom Grady outline the work of two university presses (Liverpool University Press and Central European University Press) who are, with assistance from Copim (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs), running an innovative revenue model to fund open access monographs. Called Opening the Future (OtF) this model builds on library subscription models: giving library members access to a highly-regarded backlist, with the revenue then used to make the frontlist openly accessible to all.

Given the current global library environment and budget pressures, a consortial model of funding promises a cost-effective solution for OA that means no single institution bears a disproportionate burden. The OtF model, then, appeals to both those who wish to pay for subscription-access content (more traditional university acquisition models) and those who support OA initiatives. It brings many institutions together under one roof for an affordable route to open access books, and offers the publishers a reliable revenue stream with which they can plan ahead.

OtF was developed to enable smaller publishers to foster a community of libraries: to enable presses to seek library support to publish OA books without using Book Processing Charges which do not scale, and which favor the well-funded researcher and institution. To date, it has been successful in enabling OA publishing that is not only equitable, but global; connecting presses in the UK and Austria with supporting libraries from Europe, North America, and Australasia. Copim’s work is about community-building over profit-driven centralisation; and the growing and safeguarding of open accessibility to academic books for global readers without barriers.
description: Author Bios

Tom Grady is a Work Package Lead on the Copim project where he helped to launch the Opening the Future revenue model for open access books. Prior to joining Copim, Tom worked in many areas of libraries, academic and public, and was a founding team member of the UK's first jointly-run and library-led open access publisher, White Rose University Press. He can be found on X/Twitter (while it still exists) @scholtom.

Kira Hopkins is a Scholarly Publishing Outreach Officer with Opening the Future at the Copim project. Prior to that they worked at Ubiquity Press, a Uk-based OA publisher.

Funding

The OBF project is co-funded by Arcadia and Research England Development (RED) Fund (UKRI). Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1 billion to organizations around the world. Research England Development (RED) Fund (UKRI) is a fund supporting institutional-level innovative projects in research and knowledge exchange including collaborations between education providers and between education providers and business.