Charting the US Landscape for Open Access Books

Niels Stern’s August 2025 article “Let’s Talk about Open Access Policies for Academic Books” shares outcomes from the Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area (PALOMERA) project, which “set out to understand the policy landscape of [open access (OA)] books and the challenges preventing research funders and institutions in particular from including books in their OA policies” in the European context. The PALOMERA recommendations are straightforward, including five high-level recommendations and around 40 stakeholder-specific recommendations. The high-level recommendations can be applied broadly, but different nuances emerge depending upon regional context and local practices.

This response considers each of the high-level PALOMERA recommendations from a US perspective. Where do things currently stand for OA book policies? How difficult would implementation be? Who should take the lead? We offer a starting point here for considering these questions and invite stakeholders from across the US scholarly communications ecosystem to further inform these observations with their own knowledge and experiences. We also hope that other countries will examine and share how the PALOMERA recommendations sit within their operating framework.

Recommendation #1: Address OA books specifically in OA policies.

We couldn’t find an example of an OA policy in the US that currently includes books. In fact, most of the policies we found explicitly exclude books. This exclusion stems from the
Good Practices for OA Policies guide from Harvard University, which states: “The policy should not cover scholarly writings that generate royalties (textbooks, monographs) or writings not considered scholarly in the field (op-ed pieces, popular articles). In our experience, widening the policy to require deposit of royalty-producing work or non-scholarly work will increase faculty resistance and decrease the odds that faculty will adopt it.” The reasons for the “faculty resistance” included that OA would strip authors of potential royalty payments, and that depositing manuscripts into institutional repositories, which is the primary OA policy route for articles, was harder to do with books.

While royalties are cited here as a major barrier to creating OA policies for books, we don’t know much with certainty about royalties for scholarly books. Information about royalties tends to be kept private, making data-informed analysis very difficult. Anecdotally, we know that many scholars don’t expect large royalties, particularly for monographs. Rather, they see career advancement as the most significant financial benefit from their books. Still, university press staff note that while typical royalties are quite low and costly to manage, scholars continue to hope that the rare thing will happen: their book will find a larger audience, resulting in robust sales and a big pay out (as happened, for instance, in the case of Tomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published by Harvard University Press). Presses also find that competing for top authors through higher royalties is successful, which fuels a broader competition for institutional prestige.

The underlying concern for authors, and publishers, is that opening a book will inevitably result in lower print sales, and therefore lower royalties. But this assumption has yet to be proven; indeed the recent Ithaka S+R study of the impact of OA on print and digital sales indicates that OA titles still generate significant revenue.

The bottom line is that more questions than answers remain about the impact of OA on both sales and royalties. A study that includes both quantitative and qualitative data is necessary to clarify the financial and operational impacts of OA books, allowing for more productive conversations on the role of royalties in OA book policies.

Recommendation #2: Use simple language in OA book policies.

While the US does not yet appear ready to focus on the specific language of OA book policies, this recommendation is a good one. The effectiveness of conversations about making books available OA at the institutional level will depend on the clarity of the language being used. The challenge here is to keep it simple while addressing the pitfalls that could derail consideration of policy implementation. For example, if authors believe that the potential for royalties is threatened, then policy conversations will likely stall. On the other hand, adding exemptions for royalty-generating books may make a policy more complicated.

Additionally, the tendency to focus on the logistics of OA and its affiliated “flavors” (e.g., diamond, green, gold, as illustrated by Mesotten’s Visual Guide to Open Access Models, 2025) could be driving the lack of engagement, particularly from humanistic scholars. Understanding the array of OA models, and the nuanced debates around their merits and drawbacks, requires professional expertise in the larger systems and relationships that comprise scholarly communications. As a result, authors in the United States often start paying attention to the OA discussion only at decision points for their own publications; similarly, most administrators engage only when presented with funding requests to support a specific open publication or program.

We fully agree that simple language is important. But in the US, we could start by focusing on the positive impact of OA requirements on humanities and social science (HSS) journal articles—for instance, highlighting the use of OA works by the public (as outlined by Ameet Doshi in “Is Open Access for Everyone?”) or their scholarly reach (e.g. that OA materials are cited more frequently than closed works). The reasons for the existence of OA book policies must be just as clear to the US authors and publishers who will be required to follow them as the policy language itself.

Recommendation #3: Raise awareness about OA books at all levels.

Though there isn’t a current conversation about OA policies for books in the US, we see this as an issue less of institutional negligence than of perceived (ir)relevance. Recommendation #3 identifies a crucial need—without wider awareness of OA books as a possibility among scholars, readers, and academic institutions, there won’t be any appetite or urgency for creating and adhering to an OA policy. But awareness alone is not enough. We must also reach some level of consensus within the HSS community that OA monographs more effectively further both individual careers and fields of inquiry than closed works do. Expanding conversations in the US about the benefits of opening access to scholarly books is essential to building a foundation for the successful development and implementation of OA policies.

To advance these conversations, we could leverage some recent shifts. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically raised awareness of the potential of OA among US faculty in their pivot from in-person to online teaching. Open educational resources (OERs) have also become widely familiar among teaching faculty and administrators, particularly at under-resourced institutions. The clear good of making course curriculum freely available to learners in this moment of crushing student debt and economic uncertainty is easily understood and embraced. A similar understanding of the potential of opening monographs—expanding the reach and perceived relevance of humanistic research—is a necessary first step to bolstering enthusiasm for OA books.

Libraries in the US have made valiant and effective efforts to facilitate the transition to open scholarship at their own institutions. Publishers and libraries have also collaborated in various ways to provide the funding and technical support that allow some authors to open their scholarship. Now we need to capture the attention of US scholars at a wider scale. Debunking persistent myths about OA as less rigorous, demonstrating the tremendous reach and impact of OA scholarship, and persuading the academy that OA is mission critical are essential milestones to creating a demand for clear OA policies.

Are there better ways to bring faculty into the larger conversations and to deepen our understanding of their perspectives about open publication at both institutional and disciplinary levels? What new narratives might encourage their advocacy for OA as a way to ensure the continued relevancy and vitality of humanistic scholarship? And what might scholarly communications professionals learn from faculty perspectives on conducting research, writing, and teaching in these challenging times?

Some helpful efforts are already under way. The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes, supported by Arcadia and featured in the Katina article “Engaging Monograph Authors in the Open Access Movement,” seek to raise awareness and prestige for OA among scholars while celebrating equitable OA publishing practices. Author success stories, like those included in the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit, offer scholars the invaluable opportunity to learn from one another. And clear evidence for the impressive reach of OA book publishing, through studies like the University of Michigan’s Impact Beyond the Numbers: How Do People Really Use Open Access Books, demonstrate the potential of OA to spread an author’s research well beyond its conventional readership.

Recommendation #4: Consider funding mechanisms for OA books that do not involve book processing charges (BPCs).

The PALOMERA report recommends finding alternatives to fees called book processing charges (BPCs), paid to publishers in whole or part by the author or the author’s institution, for making works OA because they result in the same problems that arise from the use of article processing charges (APCs). In fact, the impacts of BPCs can be even more dramatic, given the stark contrast between the scholars or institutions that can afford them and those that cannot. In the current moment, less grant funding is available in the US, especially for HSS in general and for BPCs specifically.

Fortunately, many publishers and libraries in the US are working to develop alternative funding models. As more models are developed, however, librarians and publishers need to determine together which ones can scale (at the right pace for monographs) and which ones are most cost effective. Which model delivers OA content the fastest? Currently, most models involve a huge lift for publishers in “selling” the OA product and a huge lift for libraries in evaluating the various programs. The required effort and the resulting insecurity are not sustainable for either party.

The models that are currently under consideration in the U.S. include:

Subvention Model:

This model is a variation on the BPC funding mechanism, in which an author’s institution provides an OA subvention to the author’s publisher. TOME: Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (2017–2022), a joint initiative of the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses, is one of the most well-known and broadly adopted explorations of this model. TOME provided funding from the participating authors’ institutions for an OA edition of frontlist titles. It produced OA versions without embargo but required individual institutions commit to funding and title-by-title management. TOME succeeded in creating greater awareness about the benefits of OA publishing on the campuses where the program existed, but as the final report on the initiative observes, the title-by-title/press-by-press solution is not scalable because it requires a unique solution for every volume opened. It also demonstrates the same inequities as the BPC model—only well-resourced scholars can participate.

Individual Press Solution:

These programs—such as Luminos at the University of California Press, Direct to Open at MIT Press, and Fund to Mission at the University of Michigan Press—offer some greater efficiencies, but only one press at a time reaps the benefits of OA: greater visibility for the author, greater access to the scholarship for the reader, more awareness of the press and the work they do. Complicating the individualized approach is that each press uses a different funding model to facilitate opening a portion of its frontlist. And libraries that support such endeavors get the message that these programs struggle every year to make the finances work. In addition to library support, these models often rely on institutional or external support, and the number of authors who can participate is very limited. Presses working together on solutions, such as the aggregator model below, allow for a broader range of presses and authors to publish open access monographs.

Aggregator Model:

The Path to Open pilot program hosted by JSTOR tests a model that sells library access to a multi-press ebook collection, with the understanding that the books will be made openly available after a three-year embargo. During those three years, only the participating libraries have access to the collection. At the end of the pilot, Path to Open will have produced 1,000 OA books from more than 40 university publishers.

Another example is the Open Book Collective, which provides a clearinghouse for libraries to support multiple OA book publishers and service providers in one place. This program requires that publisher participants commit to transitioning a minimum of 75 percent of their frontlist catalog to OA. While the timeline for this shift is flexible, the risk for publishers that rely heavily on sales is often too great—even if they are willing to start making some books openly available. Currently 12 publishers and 4 service providers are participating in this program.

Backlist Conversion Model:

If timeliness isn’t the most important factor to consider when making OA editions of scholarly monographs, then backlist conversion programs should have some traction. One backlist program in the pilot stage is Big Ten Open Books. This program seeks sponsorship funding from the authors’ affiliated institutions to create fully accessible OA versions of works (often 10 to 20 years old) previously published by Big Ten affiliated publishers. The model is replicable and could be expanded.

Another program, the now defunct NEH Fellowships Open Books Program, “support[ed] the conversion of recently published books funded by NEH into eBooks that are freely available online.” The usage statistics (see Big Ten Open Books’ Impact and Usage) for these older books are staggering, indicating that monographs have a very long shelf-life and that conversion is worthwhile even if the book is a not part of the frontlist.

Recommendation #5: Engage in collaboration with related stakeholders.

Conversations about OA in the US often center (and don’t usually expand much beyond) the development of funding and distribution mechanisms. While the clear and data-supported benefits of open publication—including usage numbers that dwarf print sales; cost savings for students; and accessibility in regions where print distribution is not well supported—are rightly offered as justifications for the shift to open, a corresponding HSS culture change has yet to materialize. Understanding why faculty and administrators have been slow to embrace open publishing as the preferred mode of dissemination for books seems a necessary first step in the successful development of higher-level, cross-sector OA book policies.

Public and private funders of humanistic research are clearly important stakeholders with the leverage to drive a cultural shift toward open infrastructure. Indeed, the ability of funders to encourage and directly support cross-sector collaboration offers a very promising starting point for developing OA book policies in the US. But here again, shared understandings about the rationale for and the benefits of open HSS publications—especially books, for which the production and potential impact can span years (even decades)—are key. Funders will likely tread carefully with any new policies or mandates that scholars might perceive as obstacles in an already challenging research environment. Candid discussions about the role of OA publication in bolstering research—particularly where public-facing or community-engaged methodologies and outcomes are prioritized—will allow authors and funders to develop policies that are grounded in mutual values and goals.

We have much to learn from our counterparts in other countries about creating and sustaining healthy OA book policies. Models for such conversations are happening in Canada, and a Policy Forum on OA Books has just been established to further alignment between European policymakers. The Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) is also laying a foundation for future OA policy development in North America. An active group of Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) members that works to “support one another in our institutions’ efforts to develop, implement, and assess open access policies,” COAPI supports working groups and a steering committee that meet and work to advance OA policies. While including OA long-form publications in institutional policies has not been a priority to date among their members, many of their members are engaged in efforts to find sustainable funding mechanisms for OA books.

Conclusion

We know that the advancement of institutional and federal OA policies for scholarly articles in the US launched broad conversations about the benefits of OA and dramatically increased action taken to open articles. We also know that the increases vary strongly by discipline (Severson et al., 2020). As noted by Andrea Chiarelli and Haseeb Irfanullah in the OA Journals Toolkit, “National and funder policies strongly affect uptake: disciplines where policymakers have been actively promoting open access show higher rates of open access publishing (e.g. medical sciences).” Institutional policies are largely voluntary and require author permission. Policies set by funders and governments are requirements. This makes the NEH public access policy, which was launched in October 2025 for scholarly articles, an exciting development for raising awareness in the humanities and social sciences that will help pave the way for OA book policy discussions.

Meaning, we know that policies that require OA for scholarly books will help bring about that reality. Therefore, the time to begin conversations in the US is now. We encourage readers to think more deeply with us about how to advance policy discussions about OA for long-form publications even in uncertain times. Who needs to be part of this conversation, and how do we bring them together?