Beyond the BPC: Collective Funding Model Experimentation and Challenges in Accelerating Sustainable OA Monographs

This presentation was delivered at the Charleston Conference (2024) (in-person on 14 November 2024 and online on 12 December 2024). This presentation was delivered by Tom Grady as part of the panel, "Beyond the BPC: Collective Funding Model Experimentation and Challenges in Accelerating Sustainable OA Monographs". The abstract for this panel was as follows: The last five years have seen a steady shift towards open access for monographs, partially driven by funder mandates, but also by the introduction of several non-Book Processing Charge (BPC) models and pilots. On both sides of the Atlantic there have emerged several OA revenue models based on collective funding that seek to finance OA books equitably, and without author-facing fees. The BPC model is extremely challenging to move monographs OA at scale and BPCs don’t finance the underlying infrastructure of a university press, the ‘plumbing of scholarly publishing’. We will highlight some of the alternative collective funding models in operation at non-commercial organizations. We also explore the challenges these models face, including embedding them at libraries that are dealing with their own shrinking budgets, and attempting to commit to OA support strategically with money that is not just left over at the end of the budget year. We bring together senior library, publishing, and non-profit experts to discuss how the sector can ensure a shift to OA monographs could be sustainable for libraries and publishers alike. The speakers on the panel were Rebecca Seger (JSTOR), Amy Harris (MIT Press), Andrew Barker (Lancaster University) and Tom Grady (Birkbeck University). Tom Grady is a Work Package Lead on Copim's Open Book Futures project and helped to launch the Opening the Future revenue model for open access books.