[Tom Mosterd]

This topic aims to facilitate and provide information around business models for Open Access books. What business models are out there for Open Access books? How are these evolving and are there particular challenges that could be addressed to improve these?

 

[Lucy Barnes]

There are a couple of in-depth posts that have been published in recent weeks by scholar-led presses discussing their business models in some detail (one of which I co-wrote, for full disclosure!) – they might be of interest to this thread:

• The cost of Open Access books: a publisher writes by Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti, 28 May 2020
• We Got the Receipts: The Punctum Books Financial and Activity Report 2016–2019 by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Eileen Joy, and Dan Rudmann, 7 July 2020

[Vanessa Proudman]

Since there is quite some diversity in the OA books community, would love to hear more about the financial or business models that support Open Access books other than BPCs from publishers in countries across all corners of Europe and beyond.

OBP does a great job of being transparent about their publishing costs and about their revenue streams in their blog post of May 2020.

Are you a small or large publisher? What financial / business models are you using? And how do they scale, and do they need to? What lesson have your learnt? Please share here.

[Tom Grady]

@COPIM project (Work Package 3) is just putting the finishing touches to a report containing a comprehensive review of extant OA monograph revenue models – think there are about 17 or 18 models we’ve identified. (Some more practical than others, and I think all of them used in some kind of combination). We will hopefully publish the report next week so I’ll add a link to that to this thread if that would be useful?

[Lucy Barnes]

Yes please @scholtom!

[Tom Grady]

Hi folks, we just published our (quite large!) report on revenue funding models for OA monographs. So, as promised, you can read and download it for free from here:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4011836

If anyone has questions arising from this report then please do get in touch on here – happy to discuss and keep the conversation going.

 

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

I had a look at @scholtom’s report. Very nice work. The section on “subscribe-to-open” lists Language Science Press. I am not sure this is 100% correct. LangSci never had closed content, so we could not possibly do a transition, and we can also not threaten to revert back to that. I can see how we ended up there, but the model is slightly different.

We have published our annotated business model here: https://zenodo.org/record/1286972

Our annual reports including revenue and expenditures can be found here: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/category/statistics/

 

[Tom Grady]

Hi Sebastian, thanks for this feedback. Hmm I’ll have a chat with my fellow authors and see if we can incorporate what you’ve told us here. Looks like we may have misinterpreted something along the way. This is very useful feedback and a great example of how this network works!

Best wishes,

Tom

[Lucy Barnes]

A couple more posts on OA books and business models, all (relatively) recently published:

• State of Open Monographs Series: The Economics of Open Access Monographs and part two State of Open Monograph Series: Open access monograph funding, in which Sara Grimme and Charles Watkinson talk to Lara Speicher and Erich van Rijn
• Making OA Monographs More Discoverable, Usable, and Sustainable by John Sherer, discussing the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP), which is now in its final year. (My eyebrows were raised by the mention of the author who ‘said they were excited about the prospect of their book being widely available, especially in parts of the world that have historically been under-served by university presses. But they didn’t like the cover template, so they declined to participate.’ !!!)

[Tobias Steiner]

MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship has recently advertised its “selective bibliography” on The Economics of Scholarly Monographs:

• Introduction & Framing: https://libraries.mit.edu/creos/research/economics-of-scholarly-monographs/
• Zotero library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2538703/open_monograph_research/collections/G5597FJZ

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Tobias Steiner.

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

I seem to have trouble with that Zotero group. In any case, here are two references which could be incorporated there:

 

Nordhoff, Sebastian. (2018). Cookbook for Open Access books. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1286925

Nordhoff, Sebastian. (2018). Language Science Press business model. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1286972

[Tobias Steiner]

Thanks, Sebastian – I’m afraid I don’t have access to MIT’s Zotero group, but happy to say that COPIM’s Work Package 3 team (Izabella Penier, Tom Grady ( @scholtom) and Martin Eve) have made references from their report available in COPIM’s Zotero group – the WP3-specific Revenue Models collection is available at

• https://www.zotero.org/groups/2384449/scholarled__copim/collections/SEZ3FFLL

and I’ve made sure to include your LangSciPress refs 🙂

All best, Toby

[Tom Mosterd]

On April 7th, OPERAS and OASPA organised a workshop on ‘Innovative business models for open access book publishing – six approaches in Europe’. These six approaches were all applied to small or medium-sized academic book publishers and may be relevant for any small or medium-sized publisher interested in OA book publishing.

A short report, along with the recording of this event is now available here:

http://operas-eu.org/4651

 

[Lucy Barnes]

NEW COLLECTION: Myself and François van Schalkwyk of African Minds have put together a collection of OA book publisher business models, with contributions from a number of presses. The collection is here: https://oabooksbusinessmodels.pubpub.org/

We’re keen to add to it, so if your press might be interested in contributing, take a look at the template questionnaire (https://oabooksbusinessmodels.pubpub.org/pub/template/release/1) and drop us an email (Lucy lucy@openbookpublishers.com, François editor@africanminds.co.za) to discuss.

[Lucy Barnes]

A significant new report has come out from TOME: Report: The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs https://aupresses.org/news/report-the-cost-to-publish-tome-monographs/

I am looking forward to reading this closely and suspect it might generate some discussion! I’d be interested to hear any thoughts anybody has.

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

I read the report. The Association of University Presses finds that University Presses are providing great value and that their average cost per book is 20,000$. Of these, 15,000$ are covered by subsidies and the rest via prints sales etc.

They report 50% of book costs are overhead and acquisition. Work directly related to the creation of a book (editorial, design, production) is about 1/3.  The remainder is marketing.

May I suggest that 10k overhead for a book is too much? What on earth are you doing?

For comparison, the average cost per book at Language Science Press is 4,000€, and that includes some books with more than 1500 pages. Our overhead is probably below 10% (basically rent). Our download figures are approaching 100k for the most popular titles.

What is the acquisition budget spent on? Conference trips of acquisition editors, where University Presses A, B, and C try to outcompete each other? Maybe we can just get rid of carbon-heavy conference jet-set acquisition editors and reduce our costs by a third? Why should the scientific community pay for all those trips? What is the added value here?

I found the Ithaka report out of step with reality. This report follows suit. My working assumption is now that University Presses are some kind of self-serving publishing dinosaurs, trapped in old habits of doing things.

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