Open access books: from monographs to essay collections and more
Open access first became available in scientific circles way back in 1991, when Paul Ginsparg founded the arXiv archive, which was initially housing only preprints (that is, research pre-peer review and acceptance) for physics research. But it wasn’t until the late 90s that open access really began to take off, with various publishers, collectives, organisations, and funders working hard to make research publicly and freely accessible.
Now, it is common, if not quite omnipresent, to find open access journal articles and datasets. Open access books, meanwhile, have not been as ubiquitous. This is changing now, though, with numbers of OA books increasing.
This could be spurred on by many funding agencies requiring open access compliance for monographs and book projects. While the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the assessment of which is used to allocate funding to universities across the UK, does not yet require book projects to comply with open access policies, other funding sources do, including UKRI, Horizon 2020, and Wellcome Trust.
Just like for articles there are routes to achieving open access for versions of books and chapters through deposit into repositories, and there are publishers offering open access through their platforms.
If you do want to publish your monograph open access but cannot fathom the likely charge, then there are potential funding options. UKRI, for example, holds a dedicated fund for long-form publications, so as to support those hoping to be compliant with their open access policy. The fund will support costs for a range of models that achieve open access, not just direct payments to publish an individual work.
But where does one publish an open access monograph or a collection of essays and articles, and how does it work?
Traditional publishers with open access options
Many of the largest publishers, some of whom are included below, use a hybrid open access publishing model. This means that most items are traditionally sold in ebook or print form, while others have an open access option, the publishing labour of which is usually paid for through book processing charges, still the most common model.
Keep in mind, if you traditionally publish a monograph or chapter with a publisher, there is still sometimes an option to self-archive your material in our repository by depositing it in Pure. This is what’s called green open access, which requires some strategy, communication, and understanding with the publisher, but can make it so you can be compliant with open access policies while also not spending any cash.
Below, I highlight a few that follow these models, including both their open access models, self-archiving policies, and a few St Andrews-related books on their list.
Amsterdam University Press
A founding member of OAPEN, an online library of open access books, Amsterdam University Press (AUP) publishes a third of their book content as open access. This work is largely funded through book processing charges, which at the time of writing, starts from €8950.
An advantage of AUP is their commitment to green open access. If, for example, you are publishing a paywalled e-book, then AUP allows the author’s accepted manuscript to be shared on a repository or website, as long as the original record is credited, along with the ISBN and DOI, if available. There is no embargo, either, making it easily compliant with funding bodies.
Bloomsbury
Much more than being the publishers of Harry Potter, Bloomsbury widely publishes open access material. Slightly more affordable than AUP, Bloomsbury’s charges begin at £6,500 or €7,500 for a monograph of less than 70,000 words.
Green open access, however, isn’t really an option under Bloomsbury’s policy, which does not allow for self-archiving of the whole manuscript, instead only allowing the deposit of a single chapter, and that is after an embargo of 6 months. This would not be compliant, therefore, with most funding agencies, including UKRI, which requires either the final version or accepted manuscript to be made freely available online within 12 months of publication. Not a single chapter though, the whole thing. This limits compliant open access in Bloomsbury to the gold (paid) path – unless enabled through an institutional rights retention policy like the one in place in St Andrews.
Taylor & Francis
One of the largest academic publishers, Taylor & Francis has open access options for many of its journals, and this is true of its books as well. Taylor & Francis book titles, including those under the Routledge imprint, are able to be published open access. The processing charge for T&F open access titles starts at a whopping £10,000.
Similar to Bloomsbury, T&F’s green options are limited, allowing only the self-archiving of the accepted manuscript for a single chapter, and not the whole manuscript. They also host the longest embargoes of the three traditional publishers listed here, with humanities and social science materials being held back for 18 months and STEM books unavailable for 12 months. Such embargoes would run counter to many funding requirements, and, much like Bloomsbury, make publishing open access with T&F limited to the gold model (with caveat as above).
Fully open access publishers
Aside from the larger, traditional publishers, there are those who are fully open access, with all titles being made immediately and freely available upon publication. These publishers also have different funding models, some with author fees and some without.
As these are fully open access, there isn’t really a need for green open access, though often, these are published with licensing that allows for depositing in repositories, which is a good idea for preservation’s sake and for additional distribution.
Open Book Publishers
Based in Cambridge, Open Book Publishers (OBP) has been putting together open access books for over 15 years. A not-for-profit, OBP does not charge any book processing fees for authors. They also are published in a range of digital copies, while also being available as for-sale print and ebook editions.
OBP funds their open access materials through a variety of other means, including the aforementioned print and digital sales, as well as library membership programming, and grant funding some authors are able to provide. For the latter, they also provide guidance on grants that authors could potentially apply for to ease OBP’s publishing costs.
The University of St Andrews is a library member of OBP, and our excellent team provides MARC records to OBP releases.
Open Humanities Press
Open Humanities Press (OHP) is interested in books on critical and cultural theory, and is largely volunteer-led. In 2015, OHP partnered with other publishers and organisations to form the Radical Open Access collective, which aims to foster relationships and connections between open access groups, while also making sure to always provide relevant and constructive critiques to scholarly communication processes as a whole.
OHP does not charge author fees, and books are made open access with a Creative Commons-licensed PDF, or are purchasable in print. They have several book series that researchers can submit to, including Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility, MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW, and New Metaphysics.
UCL Press
Based out of the University College London, UCL Press is a prolific publisher that launched in 2015. UCL Press does charge a book processing charge to non-UCL authors, with fees beginning at £5,500 for books up to 60,000 words in length, though they do offer a BPC-waiver to up to five non-UCL projects a year.
New kid in town: Scottish Universities Press
Finally, there’s another publisher that’s brand new, but very exciting: Scottish Universities Press (SUP). Its first, newly released title, Conversations with Tim Ingold: Anthropology, education and life, is a true collaboration across the community of Scottish universities, featuring extensive interviews with the titular University of Aberdeen anthropologist, as performed by scholars from the University of Glasgow.
SUP is a collaboration between nineteen Scottish academic libraries, including the University of St Andrews, whose crack metadata crew will be providing catalogue records for the press. Initially, publications will come exclusively from researchers with an affiliation with these participating institutions, though the hope is for this eventually to expand.
Other models for OA books
Given the costs involved in publishing monographs, many organisations are looking to alternative models to avoid the high costs placed on individual authors.
The Copim project began in 2019, looking at ways ‘to build a fairer, more open future for scholarly books.’ This work highlights initiatives including ‘Opening the future’ and the Open Book collective.
Open access books from St Andrews authors
In the library this week, you’ll find a display of several open access books you can find from University of St Andrews authors.
I encourage you to check them out to see what kind of work is being done by researchers here and the quality of both the work and publishing of open access titles.
If you have any open access questions, then please reach out to us at [email protected].