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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>
In 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The strategic promise of Direct to Open is that it is an opportunity for librarians to use the same collections dollars earmarked for purchasing a single paywalled copy of a book to instead make that same book available, on an open access basis, to the world. It is vital that we interest and engage collections librarians for this model to succeed and be sustainable. However, we often encountered libraries that — due to institutional policies and practices optimized to the procurement of materials under conventional market models — could not spend their collections budgets on anything but paywalled content. Though the product itself was still the same, the fact that we were asking for open access funding rather than payment for restricted access to it raised issues.
For libraries where this was a barrier, however, there was a silver lining. Though the term “subscription access to the backlist collection” is primarily intended as an incentive to drive participation, it also gave some libraries a path to support the model, since they could show that they were getting access to a collection of approximately 2,500 titles that would otherwise remain gated and for-purchase only.
We found that still other libraries had carved out dedicated budgets to support open access projects. In some cases, they felt that Direct to Open made sense to support with that money. In other cases, librarians felt a strong sense of responsibility to maximize the impact of those precious, hard-won funds and wanted D2O to go farther or do more before they would consider it (e.g., include many other publishers or more books). Clearly, libraries in these situations felt bound to spend these dollars in a way that could maximize their impact, and they were judging each project extremely carefully.
There is one other practical, systemic issue that I’ve found both fascinating and dispiriting. Raym Crow (managing partner at the Chain Bridge Group) very thoughtfully designed Direct to Open with equity at its heart. He painstakingly analyzed library budget numbers in an effort to make the model affordable for institutions of all types and sizes. He prioritized keeping fees as low as possible and we adopted a granular, tiered fee structure that recognizes a great deal of variation — not just between doctoral, master’s, bachelor’s, and associate’s institutions, but also between PhD-granting universities with varying FTEs. The participation fees do not cover the full costs of publishing MIT Press’s scholarly monographs, only partial direct costs; if more institutions participate in D2O than are needed to fully fund the program in any year, it does not result in a profit for the Press. Instead, it results in lower fees for participating libraries.
While I’m proud of our focus on equity and feel it is morally right, it has also been a harsh reminder that this approach is a departure from how the book business has historically operated. To navigate the market for books, librarians have become expert negotiators, for good reasons. In the traditional, market-based model, savvy customers are often wise to ask for a deal, but the Direct to Open fees weren’t calculated to bear discounting. Under this nonmarket-based model, the result of giving one library a discount on their fee would be that we would simply need to bring more libraries on board to make up that shortfall.
In the spirit of collective action and thanks to an extremely generous grant from the MIT Libraries, one way that we’ve been able to further reduce fees for smaller libraries without discounting is through subsidy. Using those grant funds, we offered master’s, bachelor’s, and associate’s institutions a reduction in their fees for 2022. As the first year draws to a close, we have been surprised that fewer libraries than we hoped took us up on this reduced fee. Though there are likely numerous factors in play — including the budget restrictions discussed above — did it make a difference that we called it a reduced or subsidized fee rather than a discount? Future conversations may tell.
We are learning a lot from working with Direct to Open, but it is important to acknowledge that we are not alone among university-based publishers1 in exploring a sustainable, values-based future for open books. In the months before and after the launch of D2O, Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press announced that they would be adopting COPIM’s Opening the Future model to open access to collections of their scholarly books, and the University of Michigan Press introduced Fund to Mission — a new open model for their monographs. These important offerings from missiondriven publishers present exciting and affordable options to libraries seeking to invest in making access to knowledge more open and equitable. They may seem new and different. At first, they may not easily conform to systems and processes optimized for conventional market models, but they offer important alternatives to for-profit models and encourage a fairer future for OA. Wide support from the library community will help ensure that they endure, thrive, and ultimately gain adoption by other publishers.
Endnotes
1. I’ve focused on the university press experience here since that is the perspective I have to offer, but also want to acknowledge the innovations and successes of the
ScholarLed consortium and other campus-based, born-
OA publishers like Lever Press that are opening scholarly research and offering non-market-based approaches to academic publishing based on collaboration and partnership.