New Open Access book pilot: Flip it Open
29 June 2021
Last update: 01/07/21 09:20
In books, the most established model for funding publication of Open Access (OA) titles is still the gold model, in which an author and/or a funder pays an upfront fee known as a Book Processing Charge (BPC). Open publication means the title is freely available for anyone with an internet connection to access and view, wherever they are in the world.
Most Academic publishers currently offer the gold route in one form or another. We offer it ourselves at Cambridge University Press. We have published, to-date, almost 100 books through the Gold OA model and we are very proud of our established Gold Open Access publishing program, which subjects our OA books to exactly the same publishing vetting, quality control and approval processes as all our other books. We are also keenly aware of the limitations of the model; it is a route to OA, but it cannot be the only route. Funding for Gold OA Books is scattered and complex, is often not well-understood, and inevitably favours certain subjects, author affiliations or book types. We want to launch a program and funding mechanism which is broader, scalable, and very importantly more inclusive and equitable.
All of this has led us to launch our exciting new Open Access books initiative, Flip it Open. We will publish and sell a selection of 25+ books through our regular channels, treating them at the outset in the same way as any other book; they will be part of our library collections for Cambridge Core, as well as being sold as hardbacks and ebooks. The one crucial difference is that we are making an upfront commitment that when each of these books meets a set revenue threshold we will make them available to everyone Open Access via Cambridge Core.
At the point where titles go OA, we will also be releasing an affordable paperback edition. Both the digital and paperback new editions will contain a page calling out and thanking the institutions who have bought the book at the outset, thereby funding the flip to Open Access.
We want to find a model which is more fundamentally geared towards demand, and this point is very important. By making selective books OA directly in response to their being purchased, we are flipping the traditional publishing model upside down. Publishers have historically been most proprietorial about their most popular and most-used titles. With our model, we are saying that those sought-after titles are the books that should be freely available first, because they are the ones that most people are likely to want to access.
The model means that libraries know upfront that they are buying a title that might flip, and this is our way of asking our customers, mostly institutional libraries, to become actively involved in the funding to flip them to Open Access. Libraries are paying to get the book early, and to fund a wider program that will benefit them, their customers and the wider Academy directly.
There are a few important things which our program is not. It is not a program in response to any particular government, funder or society mandate. Rather, it is the implementation of the core OA principles of availability, inclusivity and dissemination because we believe in them. It is also not a mechanism for funding all our publishing. We are asking our customers and partners to buy what they would want to buy anyway, in the knowledge that by doing so they will have the additional bonus of helping those books to reach a wider audience.
We have had extremely positive feedback from our library partners, and we very much hope to be in a position to start flipping these books soon. So watch this space, and check in for updates.
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This is a really curious funding model for open access that seems to assume that demand should precede openness. It’ll be interesting to see which books will become open given their demand, and conversely, what books and information will be lost or remain behind doors. My concern is that this funding model really only supports institutions and players that have funding and money to begin with, and will keep a lot of interesting and useful content inaccessible to those who literally cannot afford to wait for it.
Thanks for your comment Sarah, and for raising this concern. I hope that this won’t be the case. What we are trying to do here is experiment with ways in which OA Books can be scaled up within the current ecosystem. Libraries’ needs vary, and we are not asking them to change their buying patterns, so I hope that we will be able to flip a diverse range of books here, which would otherwise not be made Open Access.
So presumably this means that libraries will have to pay the roughly $200 for an ebook, as the $30 paperback won’t be available until you’ve met your threshold. I’ve found your ebook pricing frustrating and tended to buy paper because of the huge difference in the price of print versus electronic, even though your platform is much better than many others. OTOH, I’ve bought plenty of ebooks from other large academic presses, as the premium for an ebook is much smaller.
Hi Jeff. Thanks for your comment. The books here are all monographs, and the standard library price for these titles is $140 each, for unlimited access. If the initiative is successful we will be able to publish a paperback much earlier than we would otherwise (on top of the benefit of making these titles OA).
Hi Ben, thank you for your blog post. How does Flip it Open or these new Open Access programs work with titles that have been published in the last 5 or 10 years? Can an author request that a monograph published in 2014 (already in paperback and digital formats) become part of these OA programs?
Hi Pablo, thanks for your question. A key aspect of the Flip it Open initiative is the fact that buyers make a purchase knowing from the outset that the plan is to make these titles OA. It is also currently only available for a defined cohort of 28 newly published titles. We will doubtless learn a lot from this initial batch of books, and we want to run the program for a while and gauge the reactions before we decide whether and how to broaden it.
The model looks interesting and I think it has potential. However, the initial title selection represents quite niche monographs, and these being made open, will not have a big impact on availability and teaching. It would be informative to see the model applied to premium content titles in subjects like accountancy, nursing, health, medicine, chemistry, business, computing etc. Different purchasing thresholds could be explored. I would also like to see authors having a choice of whether to make their title available under this model.
Thank you for your message Jason. We have launched the pilot with research titles because OA conversations around books have so far been very centered on research publishing. I agree that it would be interesting to explore other types of book, and this is something we will consider as we see how the project develops. I also agree if the project is a success, longer term it would be great to have this model available as a choice for authors.
Any further updates on this model?