Community-Led Infrastructures for Open Access Books: A Sustainable Model and Platform

Abstract

This paper introduces two major outputs of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project, the Open Book Collective (OBC) and platform and the Opening the Future publishing model. The OBC, a charitable entity, will host an infrastructure and revenue management platform for the support, access, distribution, and promotion of open access (OA) books beyond models relying on book processing models. I then discuss a revenue model for publishers who wish to flip to an OA model without book processing charges. This ‘Opening the Future’ model has already been successfully implemented by two publishers, the Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press. This paper relates to the conference theme of sustaining positive change. The international move towards OA book publishing must be approached through models that render OA books equitable and accessible to the widest variety of international readers and authors. This necessitates thinking beyond book processing charges and the potential monopolisation of the OA landscape by major publishers, supporting a diversity of approaches in a networked model we call ‘scaling small.’