CEU Press announces first OA book funded entirely by our library membership programme | Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Back in October 2020, COPIM WP3 put forward a new idea for a collective funding model. In a blog post entitled “Backlist to the Future,” Martin Eve outlined a monograph subscription model in which libraries would pay a modest annual membership fee to a Press to gain access to a curated list of (closed) backlist titles. In return, the idea was for the Press to use the revenue from the backlist subscriptions to fund new frontlist monographs to become open access. This model aims to allow university presses to use their existing backlist to fund an open-access frontlist.

The idea built on existing successful library membership programmes at pioneering OA presses such as Open Book Publishers and punctum books. The Central European University (CEU) Press came forward early to volunteer as a pilot to run such a programme. From there, Opening the Future was born: the website went live for memberships in January 2021.

Since then, the scholarly publishing world has seen some similar-but-different initiatives in the offing (MIT Press’ Direct 2 Open launched this year, and others are in the pipeline). Nonetheless, we reached a critical COPIM milestone this week: CEU Press has already reached the threshold needed to begin funding their first titles in open access. Getting to this point is a tremendous achievement. We owe this success to several early-adopter libraries worldwide who now have access to between 50 and 150 backlist titles (depending on the packages they have chosen). As a result, they have boosted their collections while supporting new open-access scholarship. The pricing is ultra-affordable with a combined frontlist/backlist combo aggregate average price of 10.67 EUR (about $12.50 USD £10 GBP) per title per library, if CEU Press hits its targets. The absolute cost of participation is less than half a single APC at a commercial journal publisher.