Future Prospects for Open Access Books — History and Perspectives from a European Humanities) Press

By Carsten Buhr (Managing Director, De Gruyter) and Steve Fallon (Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Steve.Fallon@degruyter.com> and Christina Lembrecht (Head, Open Research Department, De Gruyter)

Looking Back: How the Open Access Book Journey in Europe Began

Recently, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) announced that it had reached an important milestone: more than 50,000 peer-reviewed open access books, published in more than 90 languages by 560 scholarly publishers, are now indexed in what has become one of the most comprehensive and relevant sources for tracing and understanding the development and the current physiognomics of the global open access book landscape. The DOAB was founded in 2012, in a period that can be understood as the formation phase for open access books in Europe. At that time, the first initiatives were launched to fund open access books (the Austrian Science Fund FWF, which started its OA books program as early as 2009, was a pioneer here). New publishing houses were founded that specialized exclusively in open access publications for the humanities and social sciences, and infrastructure emerged to drive the development of OA books (in addition to the already mentioned DOAB, these include OAPEN and Open Edition). And in summer 2013, a landmark conference entitled “Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences” took place at the British Library in London, with more than 200 participants discussing how to foster open access for books and — more broadly — how the digital change can be used to fundamentally reform the publishing ecosystem and publishing habits in the humanities and social sciences.

In this formation phase of open access book publishing, De Gruyter started to build our open access list. The first two open access books (one in library and information science, one in classical studies) were published in 2010, just two years after introducing eBooks for all new titles. After selling and sending print copies to libraries and end customers around the world for more than two centuries, electronic formats as a first step and open access publications as an (optional) second step have added new possibilities to fulfill our mandate to grow the reach and visibility of our publications.

While the eBook was introduced across the board for all our titles, open access publications initially remained in the clear minority compared to what we today — for lack of an appropriate term — often call the “traditional” publications. We published only a handful of open access monographs per year in the first five years. But from 2015 onward a clear and continuous increase in open access frontlist titles can be observed due to the rise in OA funding in Europe, particularly in the context of larger third-party funded research projects (figure 1).

Figure 1. Development of OA frontlist book publication at De Gruyter 2010 to 2021.

At the same time, we started to open — often in collaboration with partner institutions — backlist and archive titles. As a result, we surpassed the threshold of 1,000 open access books available on our platform in 2017.

Present Times: What the Structure of Our Portfolio Reveals about the State of Open Access Book Funding

In 2021, more than 10 percent of our total book frontlist output were published immediately open access, the large majority in the humanities, where gold open access publications account for up to 20 percent of our publishing programs in select disciplines.

Most of our OA books are funded through publication grants or subsidies, often referred to as book processing charges (BPC), which means that one party — generally the author or their institution — funds the OA publication of the book. Looking at our OA book portfolio over the past two years, just under 90 percent of our OA books are financed through BPCs (figure 2). Just over 10 percent of OA books are non-BPC funded, so there is no direct link between the author and the OA funding source.

Figure 2. BPC vs. non-BPC models share of total OA books at De Gruyter, 2020–2021.

We can distinguish three different funding streams: more than one-third of our OA books published in 2020 and 2021 were financed via regular budget funds of the researcher and/or their institution (figure 3). Just over a quarter of our OA books are funded through third-party research grants (almost entirely from Europe), for which there is often a recommendation or even a mandate in place to publish (gold) OA, and — as in the case of European Research Council (ERC) projects, for example — OA costs are eligible. For another quarter of our OA books, funding applications are submitted (usually by the author) to so-called OA book funds on a national level (Switzerland and Austria). In Germany, OA book funds are established locally at the level of individual universities or research institutions analogous to APC funds for journals.

Figure 3. Funding structure of total OA books at De Gruyter, 2020–2021.

Although enabling our success in developing our open access book portfolio over the past years, this funding model also raises some concerns. The funding structure makes it clear that access to open access book funding is still relatively exclusive. It is limited to scholars granted with major third-party funded research projects, to academics based at institutions that are well-financed and/or have a dedicated open access orientation and policy with established funds to support academic books. Funding depends on the author’s affiliation or nationality. Or, put differently: the BPC model raises questions about equal access to publishing opportunities, especially if funding opportunities for OA books are as limited as they are today. There is a danger that we have substituted a paywall restricting access with a paywall restricting the ability to publish.

These concerns are why we and other publishers have started to explore new approaches that avoid the use of book processing charges. These models are often referred to as non-BPC models or diamond models. In one way or the other, they intend to translate one of the significant advantages of legacy publishing into the open access publishing ecosystem. Many institutions are paying a small amount to finance open access publications. The call for collaboratively funded OA books is by no means new. At the London conference in 2013 mentioned above, Francis Pinter already presented her thoughts in this regard, which resulted in the foundation of Knowledge Unlatched; and Martin-Paul Eve introduced the membership model underlying the Open Library of Humanities. While we participated in the pledging rounds of Knowledge Unlatched until recently, we started to work in 2019 on launching our own collaboratively funded OA book projects in the German market. For the third time in 2019, we built a library consortium for OA books, enabling the transformation of approximately 30 monographs and collected volumes from the humanities to OA per year. We are now expanding this approach to the global, English-language market by collaborating with JISC on the Purchase to Open pilot. While collaboratively funded models currently enable only a little over 10 percent of our OA books (figures 2 and 3), the model is significant for us as a publisher. It enables us to publish more authors who do not have access to OA funds. It also gives us, as a publisher, an active role in shaping the OA transformation for monographs and collected volumes.

Moving Forward: Bringing Accessibility, Sustainability and Digital Formats Together

Looking at the notes from the London conference in 2013 these days is quite revealing. Many of the questions around open access for books have lost none of their relevance. While the open access book landscape has evolved significantly since 2013, the discussion around business models, the cost for sustainable OA book publishing, commercial v. noncommercial players, and dissemination and metadata standards, among others, continues to be very much alive. And almost 10 years later, it is still a given that the funding landscape for OA books is limited (especially compared to the journal market), even though research funders, especially in Europe, have been providing funding for OA books.

The funding options available to date are far from sufficient to advance and enable the OA transformation in the book sector on a global scale. In this sense, the German Science and Humanities Council stated in a position paper on OA at the beginning of the year that the open access transformation in the book sector could only be expected in the medium to long term.

For us as a publishing house, committed for centuries both to the humanities and social sciences and to the publishing of highly specialized research monographs and edited volumes, obligations arise from the in-between space in which we find ourselves: between an old world of scholarly publishing that still exists and a new one that is only very, very slowly emerging. In this space, our task is to work with other stakeholders in scholarly communications to continuously find the right balance between accessibility, economic sustainability, and digital formats. We need to respond to the following challenges:

(1) While immediate open access is undoubtedly the gold standard to strive for — and we will continue to expand our gold OA book share and experiment with new models for this purpose — it is equally vital that we continue to keep an eye on our traditionally published books, which still represent the majority of scholarly output. Maintaining and improving their accessibility and dissemination within the given framework conditions is vital to avoid drifting apart and creating a two-class society in scholarly publishing. The question of whether and what role green OA or delayed or retrospective OA can play here remains to be answered with a view to sustainability considerations.

(2) The use and distribution of the research monograph in the humanities and social sciences must be examined from a holistic perspective. The interaction or coexistence of print and digital formats and comparing

OA books to traditionally published books must go beyond an analysis of usage and download statistics and sales figures.

(3) We should discuss and also actively test, for example, in pilot projects, how the potential of digital publishing can be made more fruitful for the further development of book publications in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the benefits and costs of digital features should be compared and evaluated, also with a view to the economic viability of highly specialized books in the humanities and social sciences. With a view to the goal of making all results and process steps of a research project openly accessible, solutions are also needed here that correspond to the publication culture, structures, and funding of the humanities and social sciences, not only for data sharing and publishing.

These are just some of the tasks ahead. Our task as a publishing house is to actively and responsibly help shape the changes in scientific publishing — and to do so in a way that is in the best interests of academia.

Carsten Buhr is Managing Director of De Gruyter, a familyowned international publishing house headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Steve Fallon is De Gruyter’s Vice President Americas and Strategic Partnerships. Christina Lembrecht heads the publishing house’s Open Research department.