Authors: Marta Błaszczyńska, Graham Stone
Reviewers: Jadranka Stojanovski, Ronald Snijder
Welcome on board, scholarly innovation aficionados!
2023 is a very important year for open access books due to the high number and variety of developments supporting them. So, it felt like a great area to focus on with our first blog post from the series Innovation Lab’s Observatory.
While the Lab aims to bring fresh news about novel approaches to different spheres of scholarly communication, we also wish to summarise and present highlights of important initiatives and projects that support innovation.
Today’s topic is open access books, using this opportunity to introduce activities of the OPERAS Special Interest Groups (OA Business Models, Open Access Books Network) and projects (OPERAS-P, COPIM, Open Book Futures, PALOMERA) related to book publishing and the recently published ‘Collaborative models for OA book publishers’ white paper by the OPERAS Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group.
What can innovation mean in the context of OA books?
Innovation in long form scholarly writing has two main pillars: support for nontraditional formats and engagement in open access. Here, we focus on the latter – though it ought to be mentioned that our ‘Collaborative models for OA book publishers’ white paper has been published as a living book on the OPERAS website and so can be annotated by the readers.
When thinking about open access for books, our focus lies on access that is not only open but truly available and reachable to all. The underlying claim is that no scholar with a great research idea and study should be excluded within such a system just because of an economic barrier. In other words, openness in scholarly communication should involve equity: for early career researchers, authors who are disadvantaged due to the funding opportunities and economic situation at their institutional and national levels, and any other groups that may have been systematically discriminated against in the history of science. This means turning away from Book Processing Charges (BPCs), a system in which the author/institution needs to cover the payment for OA (some BPCs are over €10,000), in search and support of alternative solutions.
Hunger for analysis: the story behind the white paper
It is in this spirit that the survey formed by the OA Business Models SIG focused on collaborative models for e-books and shared infrastructures. We took our approach from Adema and Moore who discussed the idea of collaborative approaches, which rely on sharing of information, funds, and infrastructures models. In the context of the white paper, the concept of ‘models’ refers to organised approaches and solutions that publishers, institutions and organisations could apply when financing and sustaining publishing books in OA.
What’s the story behind this white paper? In short: Firstly, we conducted a survey for European publishers in 2021. It was followed with an analysis resulting in a July 2021 paper. However, there was always a hunger for more in-depth insights into the answers collected via the survey. We felt that more could be done and this is where the work on the second version began.
We had two main aims in mind when we began the study:
1) to improve our understanding of the scholarly publishing landscape and of the challenges that publishers face in the context of publishing OA monographs; and
2) to identify main trends (including opportunities and challenges) and the knowledge of collaborative funding and infrastructure models in OA publishing in Social Sciences and the Humanities.
The analysis was based on 74 responses from 16 European countries that we grouped into four regions of the European Research Area (ERA):
- Central and Eastern Europe (Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia)
- Northern Europe (Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Norway)
- Southern Europe (Italy, Portugal)
- Western Europe (Austria, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Netherlands)
This number of responses meant that although we could not identify overall trends by country or region, we were free to delve into free text answers and draw some in-depth key insights based on the information that was made available. The report grouped these into three main areas: collaboration, funding, and support.
Here are some of our main conclusions:
- Collaboration:
Although not opposed to the idea, a majority of presses do not engage in collaboration, specifically collaborative models for shared infrastructure, mainly due to the lack of knowledge and information, or perceived lack of need. This indicates that, for OA books, we are still at the early stage of the adoption curve for collaborative shared infrastructure. It’s important to stress that since the survey was designed by the OPERAS community members, the underlying focus was on such collaborative solutions and not on alternative commercial models or incentives (that could, among other issues, lead to a vendor lock-in).
- Funding:
Most publishers perceive themselves to be somewhat sustainable. For institutional publishers, parent organisations are crucial as providers of financial or non-monetary support of OA. In addition, most publishers stress the need to have more resources and rely on more than one funding source, including grants and subsidies.
- Support:
Awareness-raising and targeted support and training could be used to engage the presses but further incentivisation may be required to encourage publishers to collaborate more widely.
We see this survey as a starting point for recommendations for further projects and invite you to read it and join the conversation, either by commenting via this blog or taking part in contributions to the living book! It’s also a moment for a general discussion around open access for academic books, the current initiatives and struggles and hopes for the future.
OA books… everywhere!
The white paper is part of a wide selection of activities for open access books, which have for a long time been sidelined in open science conversations. Other activities and initiatives in the ERA deserve highlighting.
OPERAS has two Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that both focus on open access books. The Open Access Business Models SIG explores sustainable business models for open access Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) publishing. This includes understanding the costs of running an OA publishing operation as well as price transparency and revenue infrastructure models required to support open access funding. The SIG looks at both journals and book publishing. However, the focus is very much on the innovation in OA revenue models currently happening with OA books, for example, models coming from North America, such as MIT’s Direct to Open and Michigan’s Fund to Mission. The SIG is interested in how these models can be transferred to book publishers in the European Research Area.
The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is OPERAS’ newest SIG. Formed by Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers/COPIM), Agata Morka (SPARC Europe) and Tom Mosterd (OAPEN), OABN is a dedicated space where the OA books community can come together in the form of events, resources, discussion boards and more to engage around the OA book publishing landscape. OABN continues to publish a series of OA myth busting videos as well as Open Cafe style events. The OABN is also an integral part of the PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project (discussed later in this blog post).
The two SIGs collaborate closely and their latest project is to build on the methodology of the recent TOME report, which looked at the large established US presses by investigating the costs of OA books among small presses/born-OA presses in Europe.
Of course the COPIM project deserves a mention. The 3 year project wound up with an end of project conference in April. The COPIM team describes three main project outputs as:
“the Open Book Collective (OBC), a UK charity governed by its members that brings together open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable sustainable collective funding for open access books without charging authors; ‘Opening the Future’ (OtF), a revenue model which enables the transition of legacy publishers to OA by offering their closed access backlist to libraries via a subscription scheme, and using the revenue to fund new OA books; and Thoth, an open dissemination system that enables publishers to share their open access books much more widely, by easily creating high quality open metadata in a wide variety of formats.”
However, the big news is that a new project, Open Book Futures has received funding for a further 3 years. Starting on 1 May 2023, it builds on the work conducted within COPIM and aims to accelerate the development of its outputs.
Moreover, a great amount of groundwork has been conducted as part of the OPERAS-P project that greatly informed the white paper by OA Business Models SIG.
The book’s future is collaboration!
One thing that comes to mind when reading all the analyses and recommendations is collaboration.
Rupert Gatti and Agata Morka write of a potential for “wide consortia funding model for OA books” at the same time stressing that there are great discrepancies between European countries and while approaching this from a regional perspective could be valuable, there will never be a single solution that fits all the needs. This reflection should be taken into consideration when building international collaboration.
It’s in this spirit that a great deal of work is being done on national levels, for instance with the OPERAS national node in Poland (OPERAS-PL) running a design thinking workshop for academic publishers to map their main pain points and prototype possible solutions. While the initiative was inspired by the work already conducted by the OABN and Open Access Business Models SIGs, the brainstorming formula allowed the Polish community to search for its own priorities.
Finally, the two-year Horizon Europe funded PALOMERA project began in January 2023, indicating that the eyes of Europe are now turned towards books. The project will focus on ensuring that academic books and monographs are not neglected in open science and open access policies. The project is currently collecting policies created by funders and research performing organisations and will soon analyse them in order to shed some light on the policy landscape.
How to follow OA books news and initiatives?
Has this blog post left you both curious to learn more and/or slightly overwhelmed? You’re not alone! Joining the discussion at the Open Access Books Network can help – see for instance helpful resources on open monograph schemes. Do check out the Innovation Lab’s Zotero library with helpful papers and links used in this blog post (and many others!).
We are also looking forward to hearing your thoughts and predictions for the future – please comment!