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Surveying the Landscape of Open Access Publishing: Open Book Publishers

This guide is for the purpose of sharing articles, reports, and studies that are related to open access academic monograph publishing.

Description

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.

Suggest A Resource for this Guide

Open Access Monograph Publishers - a selected list

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.

Crowdfunding

Two initiatives that use a model of crowdfunding to "open" previously published works. 

  • Knowledge Unlatched - Launched in September 2012, the intention is to work with publishers, create a list of books to be made freely available, and then work with a consortium of libraries to pay the publication costs.  Pledging libraries receive a print copy and ebook versions are available to the world.
  • UnglueIt -  works to support authors, publishers and other rights holders who want their ebooks to be free.  When funding reaches the level of the cost agreed to by the copyright owner, the work is made openly available.  However, the version that is made openly available does not necessarily include all the original content of the original.