This guide is intended to be a survey of the literature on open access publishing as it pertains to academic open book publishers. Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review was created in 2014 by Giancarlo F. Frosio a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK and is recommended as a starting point for literature prior to 2014. For literature published after 2014, this will be a selected list of resources, although we encourage users of this guide to suggest missing resources for addition. Priority has been given to resources that are openly accessible as opposed to those behind paywalls.
The intended audience for this guide are the pledging members of the Lever Press, but others may find the guide of some use for a review of current literature.
A current list of Open Access Publishers produced by Simmons College lists 162 open access publishers as of September 2016.
This list focuses on non-profit, university presses, or grant-funded initiatives that are in various stages of development for the purpose of creating new open access digital monographs focused on the academic market.
Two initiatives that use a model of crowdfunding to "open" previously published works.