A new model for open access monographs

Open access brings important benefits to scholarly books and their authors. Research shows open access publication can substantially increase and diversify monograph readership, supporting and amplifying a worldwide interest in scholarship in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. But, while open access provides greater equality for readers, the prevailing fee-based models exclude many authors. To address this challenge, Bloomsbury is this year launching a pilot scheme that aims to offer open access for books in a way that is sustainable for us as a publisher, but which does not rely on fees paid by individual authors’ institutions and funders. Through the Bloomsbury Open Collections project, we aim to accelerate our open access book publishing, and make open access an option for a wider range of authors. In this poster we share details of how our open access monographs pilot will work in practice and how we went about developing the model. We provide insights into how feedback from librarians shaped our approach, and how we have sought to incorporate transparency into the model. We also discuss the principles we used to select titles for inclusion in the pilot, and share some early feedback from our author community.