Launching an Open Access Model for Books — Lessons Learned on the Road with MIT Press Direct to Open By Amy Harris (Senior Manager, Library Relations and Sales, MIT Press) <aeharris@mit.edu>
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n 1960, when founding Director Lynwood Bryant laid out objectives for what the nascent MIT Press should be, he opined that “the Press ought to be interested in the development of new techniques in the design, printing, and distribution of books. It should be willing to take risks with new methods that a commercial publisher cannot afford to take.” This drive to push boundaries, experiment, and innovate recurs throughout the Press’s history, and its pioneering leaders have frequently pursued ideas on the publishing industry’s bleeding edge.
to move subscription journals to OA received new urgency in the last five to seven years thanks to funder mandates and legislation. Many open access models for journals including Subscribe to Open, PLOS’s Community Action Publishing, and Read and Publish leverage the standard revenue model for serial publications: annual subscription. There’s also a longstanding market expectation that customers will pay in advance for content published in a journal over the course of a year and that they will review and hopefully renew that commitment the next year.
I’ve had the honor of working on the development, launch, and promotion of an initiative that I believe rates among the MIT Press’s boldest and most pathbreaking projects: the new, collective action open access (OA) model for scholarly monographs and edited collections, Direct to Open (D2O). The experience of launching the model and bringing libraries on board has been thrilling but also, occasionally, surprising. Inevitably, despite years of research, dozens of conversations with librarians and stakeholders — despite rigorous analyses of everything from library budgets to title counts to costs — our team has still been rumbled by some unexpected situations and challenges in promoting a nonmarket business model for books.
The market and funding model for books, on the other hand, has been much more diffuse and diverse. Historically, books have been acquired by methods as various as approval plans, firm orders, standing orders, and even orders through vendors that sell primarily to consumers. More recently, libraries have acquired eBooks in collections, via short-term loan (STL), or through demand-driven acquisition (DDA) or evidencebased acquisition (EBA) programs. The mixed wholesale and consumer channels for books and eBooks make it especially difficult to track sales with precision. All of this, in turn, makes it hard for publishers interested in pursuing an open model to identify and engage the institutions that are most likely to participate.
As background, the MIT Press launched Direct to Open in March 2021. Developed over two years with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund and in close collaboration with the library community, D2O aims to • open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections from 2022 via recurring participation fees, • provide participating libraries with term access to backlist/archives (roughly 2,500 titles), which will otherwise remain gated, and • cover partial direct costs for the publication of highquality works that are also available for print purchase. The model was designed to be inclusive and equitable — ensuring access for authors, regardless of ability to pay and providing affordable and fair participation terms for all types of contributing institutions. It also is designed to encourage wide participation, as, once the success threshold is achieved, additional participation reduces the fees for all. Perhaps as a result of its name and its focus on redirecting revenue from traditional sales channels into funding for open access publication, Direct to Open has sometimes been called “Subscribe to Open for books.” However, there are some important differences between the way that books and journals are structured as products and the ways in which they are acquired by libraries that make this comparison misleading and potentially detrimental. Conversations about open access have been dominated by journals, and the subject of how
18 Against the Grain / July 2022 Special Report
Moreover, through there is still a strong tradition of subjectlevel acquisition, librarians (and book buyers in general) tend to think of and evaluate each book individually. Unlike scholarship that appears under the aegis of a journal’s brand and editorial curation, books — even those included in the same subject collection from the same publisher — do not necessarily have the same perceived relevance from year to year, as acquisitions librarians use inputs such as reviews, publisher reputation, and patron demand to choose individual titles for their collections. Though libraries often acquire books consistently from trusted publishers, the formal business practice of annually renewed support does not exist for books in the same way that it does for serial publications. The disparate channels and methods that libraries employ to collect books have not been the only challenge we have encountered in finding interested institutions and partnering with them on an open access business model. There have been structural barriers as well. For example, though many libraries employ scholarly communications librarians or have committees or special interest groups devoted to scholarly communications and open access, we found that there is no consistent degree of interaction or collaboration between those individuals or groups and the collection development side of the house. There are a few libraries where there is a reporting relationship between collections and scholarly communications, but this is relatively rare. More often, these librarians may be working independently and may even have separate budgets and different restrictions on how they can spend the funds they steward.
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