Open Book Collective 2024-2027 | Jisc Licence subscriptions manager

Open Book Collective brings together publishers, publishing service providers, and scholarly libraries to secure the diversity and financial futures of open access book production and dissemination.

The Open Book Collective is an international group of initiatives working to build a bibliodiverse future for Open Access books. This is a supporter membership, and your support will allow each of the presses and initiatives to publish new book titles with no costs to read or publish. Currently, the following twelve initiatives are included in the Collective with additional initiatives expected to join. Institutions may license individual publishers/initiatives or select packages of content.

The 12 current initiatives are:

• African Minds (publisher)
• Leuven University Press (publisher)
• Mattering Press (publisher)
• mediastudies.press (publisher)
• meson press (publisher)
• OAPEN & Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (publishing service provider)
• Open Book Publishers (publisher)
• punctum books (publisher)
• Thoth Open Metatdata (publishing service provider)
• University of London Press (publisher)
• University of Westminster Press (publisher)
• White Horse Press (publisher)

Packages include:

• Open Book Collective - all 12 initiatives to include both publishers and publishing services providers
• Scholar Led Package - all 7 ScholarLed publishers, comprising African Minds (publisher), Mattering Press (publisher), Open Book Publishers (publisher), mediastudies.press (publisher), meson press (publisher), punctum books (publisher),  White Horse Press (publisher)
• Service Providers Package - the 2 publishing services providers OAPEN & DOAB and Thoth Open Metadata
• University Press Package - all 3 University Press publishers, comprising Leuven University Press (publisher), University of London Press (publisher) and University of Westminster Press (publisher)

Supporting Institutions

In addition to money that is pledged to one or more Supporter Schemes, (the OBC Supporter Contribution) supporting institutions pay an annual 5% OBC Supporter Service Fee that is added to the cost of the chosen Supporter Scheme(s) and goes towards covering the OBC's operating costs.

Licence Durations

Institutions can support either annually with a 4% price cap ( with actual prices to be confirmed 3 months before the annual expiry (ie December 2024).  Or for all three years (March 2024 to February 2027) with a 0% increase. Institutions are able to amend their package requirements annually.

Publishers and Publishing Service Providers

The OBC charges publishers and publishing service providers two distinct fees, subtracted from Provider Supporter Contributions received from supporting institutions: a Provider Processing Fee and a Collective Development Fund Fee.

In the first year of joining the OBC, the Provider Processing Fee is 7.5% of monies received. In each subsequent year, the fee is 5%. The higher fee in the first year reflects the increased labour involved in setting up memberships for new publishers and publishing service providers. This money goes to the OBC's operating costs.

The OBC also charges publishers and publishing service providers a Collective Development Fund Fee of 5% of monies received. This income is used to fund the OBC's grant giving and resource development programme, as described above, and is a critical part of the OBC's community-focused work.

Here is how it works in more detail:

Publishers and publishing service providers offer individualised Supporter Schemes via the OBC. Each open access initiative is scrutinised before joining the OBC, will be transparent about their activities and finances, and will be re-scrutinised on an ongoing basis by the OBC team.

Supporting institutions select the Supporter Schemes they want to support; they can support an individual Supporter Scheme, a self-customised selection of Supporter Schemes, or suggested groupings of Supporter Schemes.

The OBC invoices the supporting institution for the cost of the Supporter Scheme, or programmes, as well as a 5% fee that contributes to the OBC's operating expenses.

Supporters receive benefits offered by publishers and publishing service providers, ranging from annual activity and finances reports, to discounts for print books, to usage metrics, to governance roles, to catalogue records, to interoperable metadata, to access to back catalogue content, and so on.

Resource types

Book, Open Access , Research Content