Identifying the many OA revenue models in use today, in the context of today’s challenging publishing environment - from COVID-19 and budget cuts, to print sales, funder mandates, and research evaluation.
The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) has released a major new report analysing the open access economic models in use today in scholarly publishing.
The report builds on a decade of studies written by OA advocates and consultants around the world, and updates that research to describe the environment and economics of OA publishing in 2020. It will eventually become one component of a practical ‘toolkit’ that COPIM will produce on how presses might transition to sustainably publishing OA monographs.
COPIM Work Package 3 leader Martin Eve (Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London) described the report as:
An important component in understanding how a transition to OA monographs will be possible for publishers large and small. We have examined open access publishing revenue streams in detail and appraised their various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats -- we then present them alongside current examples of their implementation. This report is also the first to appraise revenue models for open-access monographs in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COPIM project is collaborating on various work packages, including developing consortial and institutional funding systems; examining production workflows and monograph metadata; and looking at experimental publishing and OA book archiving. Work Package 3 will next build on this week’s report by partnering with two publishers to launch two pilot cases and transition their current business models to a sustainable open access model.
You can read and download the report at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4011836
COPIM welcomes feedback on the revenue model report and/or on any other aspect of the project. Please contact [email protected] regarding the report and publisher case studies. For general project enquiries please email [email protected].
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Image: Wire frame, open book on folding stand, CCO - Creative Commons (CC0 1.0), Smithsonian Gardens, Horticultural Artifacts Collection.