Open Access Monographs: where we are now and how to make mandates a reality (November 8, 2022 3:00 pm (GMT)) | National Acquisitions Group

In early 2022 the major research funding body in the UK (UKRI), released a policy statement mandating OA monographs, with an implementation date of January 1st, 2024. This date will see a shift from a hypothetical future for OA books to a concrete policy with a hard deadline. Add to this the forthcoming mandates on OA books from cOAlition S/Plan S in Europe, plus potential implications of the next REF in the UK, and it is clear that there is a pressing need for libraries and academic book publishers to understand how the sector will meet the challenges of implementing these policies. In this session we will outline the current state-of-play and discuss how we can move to meet these imminent OA mandates. With a mix of presentation(s) and Q&A we will invite the audience to discuss what the transition to open access for scholarly books will look like, and to question the challenges and opportunities. Who is at risk of being excluded, on the library and the publishing sides? How do we get from where publishing and libraries are today, to making these policies a workable reality in 2024? And how will all of this be paid for? We’ll demonstrate how Book Processing Charges (BPCs) worsen inequality by favouring the most wealthy institutions and authors and will then highlight some collective library models that seek to spread the funding of OA books so that no single institution bears a disproportionate cost. Programmes in use today range from the large and well-funded publishers like MIT and their Direct 2 Open, to much smaller publishers like OBP and punctum books. We’ll also highlight the COPIM project’s Opening the Future model and the Open Book Collective. With the clock ticking on policies, conversation is urgently needed on the practicalities of making mandates reality. What can libraries do to meet the challenge, and how might supporting programmes like those launched by COPIM ensure that the transition to OA is a sustainable and bibliodiverse one? The transition to OA should not leave smaller and medium-sized presses behind; nor should it rely on paying BPCs, which risks excluding any author without funding. And the transition must also be sustainable for libraries.