Practical Routes to OA Monographs - Collaboration, Innovation and Support online seminar 2023

Note all times are BST.

Open access is leading to significant changes in book publishing, with implications for publishers, libraries, and authors—as well as universities, funders, and more! I’ll attempt to give an overview of some of these changes, focusing particularly on community-led projects I’m involved with, such as COPIM’s Open Book Futures; policy changes, including UKRI and the PALOMERA project; and the rise in collective models to support the costs of OA book publishing. I’ll cover some of the challenges these changes pose, but also the potential for a shift that brings many more readers to the academic book.

White Rose University Press (WRUP) is a library-led, non-profit academic press, we are an established Press having opened our doors in 2016. This talk will focus on our development in relation to the OA landscape to this point, and next steps on how we intend to build on that growth, while continuing to support the wider OA community.

WRUP contributes to initiatives like the Jisc New University Press Toolkit, co-created a series of Mythbusting workshops focusing on open access monographs, and is also a founding member of the new Open Institutional Publishing Association; activities which aim to support and drive the OA publishing community. As a Library Publisher, with other institutional and scholar-led publishing initiatives, this talk will hopefully show how we are working together to shape a new way forward.

The truth is paywalled but the lies are free. How do we go about unlocking longform scholarship? UK-authored shortform scholarship now has very high rates of open access. By contrast, UK-authored longform scholarship remains largely unavailable to the UK public that helps fund its creation. At Arcadia we believe that equitable open access to longform scholarship is eminently achievable, given sufficient will. Providing open access to scholarship isn’t just for those with ‘external grants’, it is for everyone. This talk will explore the variety of ways of doing open access monograph publishing.

Bloomsbury Open Collections seeks to spread the cost of open-access books across multiple organisations while providing private benefits to participating libraries. In our pilot year, we are aiming to make 20 frontlist monographs in African Studies and International Development open access immediately upon publication. In this talk I’ll share our aims and motivations, explain how the model works and why we designed it this way, and explore what we’ve learnt so far and what might come next.

Kriterium is a platform for the review, publication and dissemination of high-quality academic books. Kriterium is a way of awarding a quality label to academic research, with a certification that ensures and shows that a scientific publication has undergone a controlled and documented peer review process. Books with the Kriterium label are also made freely available online.

Kriterium is a collaborative venture between Swedish universities and Swedish publishers, with representatives from the Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the National Library of Sweden.

The Kriterium portal is open to academic research from all institutions of higher education and independent scholars. Kriterium is primarily intended for research and researchers with a Swedish connection, and will thus uphold the tradition of academic books published in Sweden.

This session will focus on how the two separate but complimentary infrastructure services, OAPEN and DOAB, have supported and continue to support the transition to OA for monographs

Scottish Universities Press (SUP) is a new library-led open access publishing initiative, which has the support of 18 higher education institutions that are members of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL). This case study outlines the journey of SUP from start-up to plans for scaling up, presenting the rationale for the SUP approach and highlighting lessons learnt that will be useful for other new presses and those considering a consortia approach.