The cost of Open Access books: a publisher writes | Open Book Publishers' blog

By Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti

The cost of Open Access (OA) book publishing has been the topic of some discussion in the UK due to UKRI’s consultation on its Open Access policy, which proposes that all UKRI-funded research published in book or chapter form should be Open Access from 2024.

One of the biggest objections to the plan is that it will be too expensive to fund the OA publication of academic books—some of the more breathless coverage has speculated that this policy might herald the end of the monograph as a viable format for scholarly work.

At Open Book Publishers (OBP) we have published all our books Open Access since our founding in 2008—so we disagree. Our books are rigorously peer-reviewed, award-winning, innovative, and available in multiple Open Access editions (PDF, HTML and XML) as well as physical and ebook editions. We do not charge authors ‘Book Processing Charges’ (BPCs) to publish with us—quality is the only factor that determines whether or not we publish a book.

It can be done.

But many of the conversations about the financial viability of Open Access book publishing are predicated on a single business model—that of the BPC—and they assume there will be no revenue when a book is published OA.

The debate is usually held on these terms because up-to-date, detailed information about how much it costs to publish an OA book, and the revenue streams that are available to meet these costs, is sorely lacking. Such information is rarely made public, in part because commercial presses are reluctant to do so on the basis that it will put them at a competitive disadvantage. Recent estimates have therefore tended to be drawn from the charges some well-known publishers levy to produce an OA book—but price is not the same as cost.

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