Funding open access monographs

"The increasing demand for monographs to be made OA has the potential to reshape the way research in HSS is disseminated. But the “legacy” business model, based exclusively around sales revenue, seems unlikely to be feasible for OA publications. Commercial publishers have little alternative to charging high OA publication fees to authors or their institutions.

What OBP demonstrates is that social enterprises and nonprofits can play a leading role in the drive to make research openly accessible. We have shown that it is, indeed, possible to reduce the production and distribution costs significantly for academic monographs from the levels adopted by legacy publishers, and to enable OA monograph publishing at no cost to authors. By embracing digital and OA technologies, our experience demonstrates that there are substantial cost efficiencies achievable in academic monograph publishing."