Open Access Week

Open access is not just for journal articles; monographs can also be made openly available in their ebook form. Major university presses and ebook platforms are now piloting new business models for making chapters and entire academic monographs freely available online. Read on to learn how the University Libraries are investing in OA monographs, and how to identify OA options for your next book project. 

Some early initiatives in OA monograph publishing relied on author-facing fees known as subventions or book processing charges (BPCs). As the publishing costs for a typical academic monograph run over $15,000, however, BPCs prove inaccessible for many academic authors.  

Beyond author fees, academic presses have relied on a combination of grants, print sales revenues, library membership programs, and cost reduction strategies to fund OA publishing. Small, independent OA presses such as punctum and Open Book Publishers, founded in 2011 and 2008, respectively, have modeled these approaches, while also modeling transparency in reporting on the cost of OA monograph publishing. 

Today, OA book publishing is the site of some high-profile experiments in cooperative funding. One approach invites libraries to make an annual contribution that funds publishing the next year’s frontlist – that is, all titles published by that press in a single year – as OA ebooks. MIT Press’s Direct To Open and University of Michigan’s Fund To Mission are leading examples of this model. More recently, JSTOR launched an OA option called Path To Open, which will make select peer-reviewed university press ebooks openly available after a three-year embargo. JSTOR’s model incentivizes library contributions by offering participating institutions immediate access to the ebooks. 

The University Libraries has opted to invest in MIT Press D2O since 2021. The STEAM (STEM plus Art & Architecture) title list represented excellent value for Mason, first because D2O participation cost less than our typical annual spend on MIT Press books in these fields, and second because we gained access to MIT Press’s previously published ebooks in these fields. By participating in D2O, we reduced our spending while both expanding our access to MIT Press content and supporting global access to their forthcoming books. Mason Libraries is monitoring developments in OA to identify other meaningful investments that contribute to a sustainable and equitable book publishing ecosystem while also bringing immediate benefits to our university community. 

To learn more about OA book publishing for academic works, browse this toolkit maintained by the nonprofit OAPEN, or browse for existing OA monographs in the Directory of Open Access Books and in JSTOR’s open and free content search.