Bring your OA game | Commonplace

by Agata Morka and Rupert Gatti The end of June 2021 marked the finishing line for the OPERAS-P project, a European Union funded giant, in which multiple institutions came together to carve a path forward for Open Science in Social Sciences and Humanities. As part of the Work Package focused on innovation we investigated innovative business models for Open Access (OA) books. Our goal was ambitious: we aimed to develop, collate, and share knowledge on alternative (non-BPC) approaches to funding and publishing OA books. To fulfill this general goal, we wanted to better understand the perspectives of two crucial stakeholders in the book publishing ecosystem: libraries and publishers. Over the past fifteen months we have been researching, writing, and most importantly listening to the academic librarians and publishers to decipher their needs, hopes, and challenges they encounter when working with OA books. Coming from a publishing background, we felt that we had a relatively good understanding of this stakeholders group, so we started with the one we knew the least about: that of academic libraries. We wanted to know more about how they think, work, and decide for or against innovative projects for OA books.