Bloomsbury Open Collections – reflections following our pilot year - OASPA

"In March 2023, we launched Bloomsbury Open Collections, a subscribe-to-open type model for scholarly monographs. Our aim was to provide a route for Bloomsbury books in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to publish open access immediately on publication without the need for author-side fees. We were motivated by our long-term commitment to transition more of our scholarly books to open access, and to increase equity in our approach to open access. 

We ran the first year as a pilot. We were aiming to raise enough funds to make a collection of 20 titles open access, the offer included a backlist component as a benefit for participating libraries, and in selecting titles we prioritised authors based in the Global South and excluded those who already had access to funding for BPCs. We chose a collections model rather than title-by-title in part to make a more substantial intervention, but primarily to set up a collective-action approach: that is, many libraries have to act collectively in order for titles to convert to OA. However, we committed to making half the collection open access once we had achieved 50% of our funding target. We originally didn’t have the 50% threshold – it was all or nothing – but we added it based on feedback from librarians we consulted prior to the launch who told us they wanted more of an assurance that their funds would go towards supporting OA. If you’re interested in the fine details of how we structured the model, I’d encourage you to take a look at our website and FAQs...."