Sustainable Funding for Open Access Monographs: Opening the Future and other collective funding models

Professor Martin Eve pointed out in an article on WonkHE in 2020 that "the biggest blocker to OA seems to be economic. Book Processing Charges at the £11,000 mark will not scale in disciplines where an entire department's book purchasing budget is just £7,000." Three years on and this still seems to hit the nail on the head when thinking about sustainability of funding for Open Access books. So the question is, what alternatives exist today and are they more sustainable than BPCs? Answering this question is becoming more urgent: the clock is ticking on UKRI's policy which will mandate OA monographs and begins on January 1st, 2024. This date will see a shift from a hypothetical future for OA books to a concrete policy with a hard deadline. And you can add to this the forthcoming mandates on OA books from cOAlition S/Plan S in Europe, and potential implications of the next REF in the UK. The COPIM project has been researching and working on alternatives to BPCs for three years: in this session we'll talk about what we've discovered, the alternative funding model we've created called Opening the Future, and why we think everyone stands to benefit from supporting it and other models like it. We also want to hear from the expert audience: we hope to stimulate some useful conversation and Q&A on if/how these models truly can be sustainable in the real world of library acquisitions and collection development.