Acquiring Open Access Monographs

Moves towards increasing openness for monograph publishing have gained momentum in recent years. Funders have now begun to mandate OA to accelerate this change, with UKRI joining The Wellcome Trust in bringing monographs into the scope of their OA policy from 2024. UKRI funded monographs, book chapters and edited collections published after 1/1/2024 must “be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publishers’ website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication’. At time of writing Research England note that ‘the scope of an open access policy for REF2029 is much broader than the UKRI open access policy’ with OA consultation being undertaken in Spring 2024.

The immaturity of OA monograph business models however acts as a barrier. Those based on book processing charges (BPCs) are characterised by unaffordable and unsustainable pricing with little transparency as to how these costs are calculated. BPCs also threaten bibliodiversity with an underrepresentation of outputs from early career researchers, independent researchers and those from the global majority. A wide range of more innovative models continues to appear and evolve and, whilst libraries are united in their opposition to unsustainable BPC-based models, they have yet to reach a consensus as to the specific model that they are willing to champion/fund.

The Library actively supports many diamond OA monograph schemes and our experience in evaluating and participating in these schemes as well as our experience of facilitating BPC payments for funded authors and for non-funded authors (via the OA monograph competition) has enabled us to develop a set of acquisition principles and acquisition practices for OA monographs.

Our acquisition principles are grouped into four themes:

• Sustainability
• Social responsibility
• Equity
• Transparency

Strategic framework for the acquisition of open access monographs (opens in new window).