Open EBA: Open for feedback – Open Access Books Network

"The author of this post, Samuel Syddall, Digital Sales Manager from Peter Lang Group, is seeking feedback on the Open EBA model presented in the post. Please add your thoughts, comments or questions using the ‘Comment’ function on the blog and Sam will engage with the responses....

The way EBA [Evidence-Based Acquisition] works is that a library pays a sum of money up front, and in return is granted access to a catalogue of titles for 12 months. At the end of the 12 months, the library uses the money they paid up front to purchase titles in perpetuity for their library. The titles they purchase will be informed by the 12 months of usage data they have acquired, allowing them to pick the best titles in the catalogue. This model offers advantages for libraries in that it ensures that they are making informed decisions about how they grow their collection, offers 12 months of access to a broad catalogue, and is comparatively easy to administer compared to other models. For publishers, the benefit is that an EBA is usually worth more than collection sales, and it is an attractive end of year purchase with leftover library funds.  

This model has been highly successful for over ten years, and any new model would need to compete with EBA before it could succeed. At Peter Lang, we asked: what if we took EBA, a model which has been successful for years, and seek to adapt it to enable universities to fund Book Processing Charges, all from the same pot and within the same model?  

Peter Lang’s Open EBA model keeps the same basic structure as EBA: libraries pay a fixed price to access our full catalogue of eBooks for 12 months, and then they can use the money they paid at the start to permanently purchase titles for their library. What is special about Open EBA is that we will introduce the flexibility for libraries to also allocate Book Processing Charges (BPCs) within the model, with the price of the BPC coming off the final balance used to purchase titles in perpetuity. For example, if the starting balance was £40,000, and the library spent £16,000 on BPCs through the year, there would now be £24,000 left over at the end of the year to purchase titles with. The price your institution pays will be dependent on the University’s size, but our pricing is competitive with traditional EBA models offered by other publishers...."