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Business Models for Open Access Books

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    • #33124

      Tom Mosterd
      Participant
      @tommosterd

      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?

       

    • #36132

      Lucy Barnes
      Participant
      @lucybarnes

      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:

    • #36732

      Vanessa Proudman
      Participant
      @vanessaproudman

      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.

    • #36760

      Tom Grady
      Participant
      @scholtom

      @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?

    • #37059

      Tom Grady
      Participant
      @scholtom

      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.

       

      • #37378

        Sebastian Nordhoff
        Participant
        @snordhoff

        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/

         

        • #37421

          Tom Grady
          Participant
          @scholtom

          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

    • #37374

      Lucy Barnes
      Participant
      @lucybarnes

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

    • #39328

      Tobias Steiner
      Participant
      @flavoursofopen

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

    • #40552

      Sebastian Nordhoff
      Participant
      @snordhoff

      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

      • #43971

        Tobias Steiner
        Participant
        @flavoursofopen

        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

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

        All best, Toby

    • #44440

      Tom Mosterd
      Participant
      @tommosterd

      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

       

    • #57230

      Lucy Barnes
      Participant
      @lucybarnes

      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.

    • #60467

      Lucy Barnes
      Participant
      @lucybarnes

      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.

    • #60831

      Sebastian Nordhoff
      Participant
      @snordhoff

      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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