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Moving Beyond the BPC at Larger Arts and Humanities Presses
By Ros Pyne (Global Director, Research and Open Access, Bloomsbury) <ros.pyne@bloomsbury.com>
Innovative approaches to funding open access for arts and humanities books have until recently mostly been the preserve of smaller presses. What are the implications of offering a subscribe to-open model for books at a larger publisher such as Bloomsbury, and what factors need to be taken into account as a result? What can we learn from existing trends in OA books funding, and where might this funding fit into a future where collective-action or subscribe-to-open models are more common?
The high costs involved in publishing a scholarly book, and the low levels of direct grant funding in the subjects that most rely on monographs to publish to research — that is, the arts, humanities, and social sciences — mean that if we are to make open access a reality for more than a small proportion of scholarly books, we are likely to need solutions that go beyond the prevailing open-access fee model.
Innovative approaches to funding open access for humanities monographs, such as membership and subscribe-to-open type models, were initially led by smaller presses.1 But how will these models work at scale when implemented by multiple smaller publishers simultaneously, or across the monograph lists of larger publishers?
At Bloomsbury, we have been experimenting with a collective-action approach to funding open access for books. In March 2023, we launched Bloomsbury Open Collections, a subscribe-to-open pilot. Our aim was to establish a route for Bloomsbury monographs to publish open access without the need for author-side fees, and thus to offer a more equitable and inclusive open access option. In this article, I’ll share some of the decisions we made in putting together our approach, and through this look at the implications of trying to design this kind of model for a larger press.
Funding Trends for Open Access Bloomsbury Books
Before we launched Bloomsbury Open Collections, we, like many other arts and humanities presses, were already publishing a proportion of our research monographs open access via a fee model. An examination of the funder trends demonstrates the uneven distribution of open-access publishing that results. For context, Bloomsbury has editorial offices in London and New York, and our academic authors are predominantly in the UK, the U.S. and Canada, northwest and central Europe, and Australia.
Funding for Bloomsbury’s OA monographs is highly distributed (Fig. 1). Between 2019 and 2022, 67 organisations were responsible for funding 96 Bloomsbury OA titles. Universities funded approximately half our OA titles, but only four funded more than one title in this four-year period. (“University funding” includes both central OA funds managed by a library or research office and departmental funds.) Public research funders — organisations like the European Research Council and the Dutch, Austrian, and Swiss national research funders — also funded a substantial number of books, and were more likely to have funded multiple Bloomsbury OA books over the time period, an average of two each. The remaining OA fees were provided by private funders such as the Wellcome Trust and Open Society Foundations, or were self-funded or funded by learned societies.
By far, the majority of the organisations funding OA were based in Europe (Fig. 2), as were the authors they funded. We do publish authors based in the Global South, and they are not represented here. Under the fee model, only a small proportion of books are published OA — about 5% of Bloomsbury’s monograph frontlist in 2022. The fee model is thus effectively conferring the benefits of OA on authors who are already in advantageous, well-funded positions.2 See Figure 2 page 24.
Designing Bloomsbury Open Collections
Seeking a more inclusive, more equitable, and more scalable route to OA for monographs, we launched Bloomsbury Open Collections. In our pilot year, our aim was to make 20 frontlist monographs in African Studies and International Development available open access.
• We set a funding target of £160,000. Once we achieved this target, we would confirm all titles as OA and would stop accepting participants.
• Libraries that participated in the programme would receive 12 months’ access to approximately 200 backlist titles in related subjects as a benefit for their own researchers.
• Participating libraries would also receive guaranteed access to all 20 frontlist titles in the collection, either as OA titles if we achieved our target, or on a permanentaccess basis if we did not.
The model asks libraries that are interested in these subjects and that would be likely to purchase these books anyway to commit their funds towards a model that supports OA.
We were not the first publisher to launch a program of this kind — notably CEU Press, MIT Press, and University of Michigan Press had all launched subscribe-to-open type OA book models in the preceding years. But we were the largest publisher to offer a subscribe-to-open model. That difference in scale led us to structure our model somewhat differently.
Subject and Region Focus
It would not be practical or realistic to move Bloomsbury’s entire monograph programme (about 1,200 titles per year) into a subscribe-to-open model at once. We therefore wanted to focus on where a no-fee model could have the most impact. We are known for our African Studies and International Development publishing, and saw a strong ethical need to increase access to research about Global South regions for institutions in the Global South. Institutions in many of these countries are less likely to be able to afford as many of our books as they might like, and local access is valued by authors. When selecting titles for inclusion in the collection, we prioritised authors based in Africa and those who were structurally less able to find OA funding.
Collection vs. Title-by-Title
An early consideration was whether we should confirm titles as OA one by one as we secured additional funding commitments, or if we should only confirm OA once we had secured enough funding to convert a collection of titles. We ultimately chose a collective approach: we wanted to approach the model with ambition, and as a larger press, this model seemed most likely to enable us to publish more of our books OA over time, thereby supporting a faster transition to OA. We were also influenced by arguments about the role of collective action in limiting the “free-rider” problem: that is, we wanted to establish a model in which libraries would need to act together in order for all to benefit, with a relatively large number of libraries contributing a relatively small amount.3
We fixed the pilot collection at 20 titles. This would allow us to retain subject focus and avoid straying into a “big deal” or asking institutions to contribute to OA for titles that were less relevant to them, while still representing a meaningful intervention. There would be the potential to scale up by offering different subject collections in the future.
Backlist Benefits
We also considered whether to offer the full backlist for a year or to offer a smaller number of backlist titles on a permanent basis. We were aware that some libraries would see a time-limited backlist offer as a disadvantage. However, we in turn had concerns that if we were to give away the backlist permanently, we would reduce the likelihood of future participation. Ultimately, we decided to offer backlist benefit for the participation year only. However, assuming the pilot was successful and we were able to offer a second African Studies and International Development collection, our intention was to offer the same backlist collection as a benefit for that year’s participants, embedding the “subscription” aspect of our model.
Funding Targets and Pricing
Our total funding target is equivalent to 20 x our standard monograph BPC (£8000 / $10,000). We modelled this in detail, looking at the digital sales that we would lose across library, aggregator, and direct consumer sales, and also factoring in a loss of print sales, as on average our OA books do achieve lower print sales than our non-OA books, and print is declining in general.
We created a tiered fee structure based on FTE, taking into account the effective price per title that institutions would be paying. We also pledged that once we achieved our funding target for the collection, we would stop accepting participants, meaning that funding per collection was capped. This was intended to provide reassurance about the transparency of the fees. It also meant that libraries would know upfront what their contribution would be.
Our aim has been to create a trustworthy model. But also, with an eye to the possibility of scaling up in future, we are trying to keep things as simple as we can.
Authors with Access to Independent OA Funding
We excluded any African Studies and International Development titles with access to independent OA funding from the pilot collection. Much dedicated OA book funding is provided by funders that mandate open access; subscribe-toopen models cannot guarantee OA, so are not the best choice for titles that are subject to a funder’s OA requirement. However, an equally important consideration was that we wanted to focus the benefit of our collective action model on books and authors that did not have access to funding. This approach also enabled us to retain funder subsidies in the system, allowing us to publish more books open access.
Responding to Feedback
We held focus groups with librarians in the U.S. and UK, and made some adjustments to the draft model as a result. Notably, we committed to making 10 titles OA once we achieved 50% of the funding target, rather than requiring the full funding target to be achieved in order for titles to be made OA. Authors from the Global South would be prioritised in this scenario. Participating libraries would receive permanent access to any titles not made OA. We also agreed that libraries participating in the pilot would be consulted about subjects offered for future Bloomsbury Open Collections. Finally, in response to feedback, we added a price tier for community/FE colleges to support the widest possible participation.
Final Thoughts
This piece summarises a talk I gave at the Fiesole retreat in May 2023 and reflects our thinking as we were developing the model. The participation period for the pilot ended in December 2023, which means we now know the outcomes. We achieved 50% of our funding target and as a direct result over the next year we’ll be making 10 frontlist African Studies and International Development titles open access immediately on publication — titles that otherwise would not have been available open access. While we didn’t achieve our full goal, this still represents a partial success and a first step to diversifying our open access options beyond fee models. You will find my more detailed reflections on what we learnt from the pilot elsewhere.4 For now, I will note that we are committing to offering a version of this model again for 2024/25, and expect to expand it to further subject areas, with a continued focus on lists where there is an ethical imperative to increase access, and on authors who would otherwise be unable to publish open access.
Subscribe-to-open and purchase-to-open models for books are becoming more common, but it is yet unclear what the effect of this expansion will be. Will we all be competing for limited “open access” funds in library budgets? Or will we see a more transformative shift from libraries and consortia to reallocate existing eBook budgets to support open access models? Ultimately, this shift will be critical if we are to see a more sustainable and wide-spread transition to open access for scholarly monographs and for research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Endnotes
1. “Business models for open access book publishing,” OA Books Toolkit, accessed January 5, 2024, https://oabookstoolkit.org/lifecycle/article/10432084-business-modelsfor-open-access-book-publishing.
2. On the usage and citation benefit of OA for books, see Cameron Neylon et al., “More readers in more places: the benefits of open access for scholarly books,” Insights 34, no.1 (January 2021), 27. https://insights.uksg.org/ articles/10.1629/uksg.558.
3. On the role of collective action see for example Raym Crow, “MIT Press Open Monograph Model (Direct to Open),” Chain Bridge Group and the MIT Press, last modified 20 December 2021. https://direct.mit.edu/ books/pages/direct-to-open-report
4. Ros Pyne, “Bloomsbury Open Collections: Reflections on our pilot year”, OASPA blog, January 23, 2024, https:// oaspa.org/bloomsbury-open-collections-reflections/.
