The Open Book Collective: Equity, Diversity and Sustainability in Open Access Book Publishing

At its launch in 2018, cOAlition S announced that its members would, for a “transition period,” fund open access fees for journals covered by “transformative” agreements. That move helped to establish read-and-publish deals as the leading OA business model, despite criticism that the agreements prop up the author-pays APC system. The same author-pays business model has, despite this opposition, also gained traction to fund the publication of OA books (through BPCs).

As cOAlition S recently communicated, the transition period is ending; beginning in 2025, funders adhering to Plan S will no longer support the agreements. What is more, a growing chorus of stakeholders, including the Ivy Plus librarians in the US and a coalition of UK-based researchers, are calling for an alternative, collective funding model for OA. At the same time, collective funding experiments as well as conditional open models (such as Subscribe to Open)—in which neither authors nor readers pay—are reporting promising results around the globe. 

This webinar features perspectives on the emerging landscape of collective and conditional open models from publishers and will be followed this year by a second webinar focusing on the perspective of funders.

The webinar will be chaired by Raym Crow of SPARC and Chain Bridge Group.  Panellists: Vivian Berghahn of Berghahn Books, Evgeniya Lupova-Henry of Quartz OA and Judith Fathallah of Lancaster University. With thanks also to Demmy Verbeke of Leuven University for organising this webinar.