Beyond BPCs: Towards fairer, more sustainable futures for Open Access books

In this talk, Joe Deville will explore some of the challenges in the dominant funding models for publishing Open Access books as well as introducing a potential alternative. He will focus in particular on Book Processing Charges (BPCs), suggesting that BPCs not only exacerbate existing inequalities in the scholarly publishing landscape, but represent a failure of infrastructural imagination. The talk will then move on to discuss the work of the Open Book Collective, a new charity working to deliver alternative funding streams to Open Access book publishers and infrastructure providers, via collaborations with libraries.