A Plan S for books: Voices from the Community | Open Access Books Network

What should a Plan S for books look like? This is a question we’ve been thinking about at the Open Access Books Network (OABN) — and we want to hear from as many members of the OA books community as possible as we seek to answer it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with Plan S, the policy developed by a group of funders in the form of cOAlition S to ‘make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality’. It currently applies only to journal articles based on research funded by its signatories, but books will be included in the near future: ‘cOAlition S will, by the end of 2021, issue a statement on Plan S principles as they apply to monographs and book chapters, together with related implementation guidance.’

The academic book publishing community is a broad, diverse and complex landscape. If we look only at the UK’s national research assessment exercise, the REF, in 2014 there were 1,180 unique publishers associated with the books submitted to Panel D (Arts and Humanities), and the top 10 publishers made up less than 50% of submissions — which gives an indication of the breadth and variety of academic book publishers operating today, and the extent to which the publication of long-form research depends on a large number of different presses rather than one or two dominant players. Academic book publishing varies across countries and continents — compare, for example, the strong university press culture in the US with the more distributed network embodied by SciELO Livros in Latin America.

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