Considering the usefulness of prestige in academic book publishing | Blog @ Open Book Publishers

"While authors continue to flock to the legacy presses, there is little incentive for them to change their approach, regardless of its effectiveness.

There is, though, an alternative ecosystem of non-profit, scholar-led and university presses who have embraced Open Access for books (in fact they are often born-OA publishers). Adema & Stone (2017) note the existence of four Open Access university presses and thirteen scholar-led Open Access publishers operating in the UK or publishing for the UK market.

These are presses invested in getting high-quality research to as many readers as possible, and in developing business models such that cost is not a barrier either for readers to read, or for authors to publish. Examples include Open Book Publishers and punctum books, who have a growing reputation for innovative processes and publications (whether in terms of business model, content, or format), high standards in research and production quality, and a focus on the wide dissemination of academic work in the service of the scholarly community.

This non-profit and collaborative approach has led easily to cooperation, and therefore to the creation of partnerships like ScholarLed—a consortium of five academic-led, non-profit OA book publishers developing powerful ways for small-scale OA presses to flourish—and the COPIM project, a major £3.5 million international partnership of researchers, libraries, the ScholarLed presses and infrastructure providers, which is building  open, non-profit, community-governed infrastructure that can support a wide range of publishers of different sizes to create a resilient and diverse ecosystem for OA book publishing...."