COPIM's toolkit for running an Opening the Future programme at an academic press · Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

"In spring 2020, COPIM Work Package 3 started work on devising a new revenue model for university presses and open access books. Through a series of fact-finding meetings, workshops and reports the team gathered lots of information on the business models of scholarly presses with the aim of creating a sustainable revenue stream that would allow presses to publish their books openly, without using unaffordable book processing charges. That research led to us devising and launching an innovative revenue model called Opening the Future in October 2020 with our first partner publisher Central European University (CEU) Press. In essence, it is a library subscription membership programme whereby the press provides term access to portions of their (closed) backlist books at a special price, and then uses the revenue from members’ subscriptions to allow the frontlist to be OA from the date of publication. This model presents a potential route for the mass and sustainable transition to OA of many small-to-mid sized university presses. Liverpool University Press (LUP), joined as our second project partner with their own Opening the Future initiative in June 2021. The programme is proving to be a success and, to date, the two presses have together accrued enough library funding to produce 10+ new OA monographs. Opening the Future continues to grow with both publishers. ..."