Tips for making open access books

We look at six different ways that academic authors at Leiden University have found to make their books open access, and pass on their tips.

More and more academic books are published as Open Access (OA) making them freely available to read without any payment being necessary. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) already includes more than 42,000 peer-reviewed OA books from around 500 publishers worldwide. These books are integrated into most library catalogues. Research funders increasingly demand that output produced as a result of their funding, and which is published in books, should be published as OA. It is expected that in the future, more and more academics will publish their book OA as a lot of publishers are willing to publish books immediately OA.

In this blog post the Open Access Team from the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Leiden University Libraries, interviewed some Leiden academics about how they went about publishing their books OA. These interviews show what you can do to publish a book OA, and also how you can make a book that is already published accessible by open access. The examples are in no particular order.