1. Introduction

Scholarly book publishing stands at a crossroads. Look one way, and observe a path that is broader and more well-trodden, characterised by the continuation of an entrenched publishing system, in which a small number of large commercial publishers are seen by a majority of academics as leading arbiters of quality of reputation, often selling books at a price often only affordable by wealthier academic libraries, and placing similar barriers to access to these same books’ digital incarnations. Look the other way, towards a narrower path that is gradually starting to emerge from the surrounding context, and see a heterogeneous collection of publishing operations, many of whom are making their work available for free via open access, in which markers of reputation and prestige are built not through techniques of market dominance and the invocation of tradition, but by a broad scholarly community, including academics, universities and libraries.

This image broadly represents the state of book publishing in the contemporary academy as we see it, as well as two of its possible futures. This is, of course, a simplification. There are many examples of publishing operations that weave in and out of the pathways that we invoke here as a binary. Nonetheless, our aim is to contribute to the work of strengthening the routes that lead towards a more rich, diverse and open world of scholarly communication.

We are broadly hopeful that this more diverse world can come to pass. There have been some key shifts recently in the terrain of open access book publishing. One shift relates to the attitude of major funding bodies. Currently, open access for monographs is mandated by only a few funders (see Ferwerda, Pinter, & Stern, 2017), such as the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Wellcome Trust in the UK (although this is a charitable foundation rather than a state funded institution). However, it is a rapidly evolving landscape. For example, in 2018 there were two major announcements concerning an open access mandate for monographs. In the UK, Research England (formerly HEFCE) announced its intention to consult on a policy change regarding open access books, while in France, Frederique Vidal, the French Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation announced France’s National Plan for Open Science at the LIBER conference (Vidal, 2018). This indicates an increasing commitment to open access for scholarly books across Europe. Furthermore, the recently published report on the Visibility of Open Access Monographs in a European Context (Neylon, Montgomery, Ozaygen, Saunders, & Pinter, 2018) shows a growing commitment on a European level via collaborative efforts such as the EU-funded OPERAS project. The project is aimed at scholar- and library-led publishing actors and encourages collaborative development of relevant standards and services for open access books in the region. And perhaps most significantly, now we have Plan S. It is an ambitious plan that was initiated and launched on September 4, 2018, by the cOAlition S, a consortium involving more than a dozen national research funders (Science Europe, 2019), charities including the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council. Although the primary focus is on journal publishing, monographs are explicitly acknowledged as a challenge for open access to address, while suggesting that more time will be needed for this format to transition to open access. As things stand, the stated aim of cOAlition S is to “issue a statement on Plan S principles as they apply to monographs and book chapters, together with related implementation guidance” by 2021 (cOAlition S, 2019a, p. 2). Within the context of Plan S, it is most likely that open access books will in one way or the other be mandated at some future point, at least by the funders involved in this coalition.

These developments, however, exist within a landscape of open access scholarly book publishing that is already changing largely independently of support from national funders. A combination of the increasing role of the digital in academic life and the rise of the open access movement has seen a resurgence of the university press and university or library-led scholarly publishing – sometimes referred to as ‘New University Presses’ (NUPs) – as well as the emergence of independent, academic-led publishers (ALPs). These have variously harnessed digital infrastructures and the ethical and practical injunctions of open access to allow them to publish a diverse range of scholarly works, including both journals and books, as well as a range of other less conventional formats of scholarly output.

Some of these developments have been captured in recent reports that have highlighted the growth of new innovative publishing operations in Europe. In the UK, Jisc’s Changing publishing ecologies landscape study (Adema & Stone, 2017) showed a discernible increase in new publishing initiatives and academic-led presses in recent years. As highlighted above, many of these new scholarly communication models are closely linked to university libraries, and almost all are committed to open access journal and/or book publishing. The Knowledge Exchange landscape study on open access and monographs (Ferwerda et al., 2017), which compared and contrasted funding regimes for open access books across eight European countries, concluded that there was reason to be at least cautiously optimistic about the future of open access monographs.

Despite these positive developments, those working in this field, including the authors of this paper, are often confronted by concerns about the lack of professionalism and quality of open access book publishing. These concerns are sometimes expressed by academics, sometimes by those working in publishing or in funding agencies, and, less often, by librarians. It is also common for such views to be articulated more explicitly. This includes at events addressing the practice of publishing, for example in some of the discussions at the second University Press Redux Conference, held in February 2018, and at Open Access Monographs: An Event for Learned Societies and Subject Associations hosted by the Universities UK Open Access monograph working group and the Arts and Humanities Alliance (AHA) in September 2018. Or in reports produced by major disciplinary bodies, as in a 2018 position paper by the British Academy, which states that:

A further risk that needs to be taken into account is the equivalent in the domain of book publishing of the proliferation of new online journals with lower standards of peer review and editing that attended the move to OA for articles. It would be unfortunate if OA for books came to be associated even to a small degree with a new form of vanity publishing (British Academy, 2018).

Furthermore, the Academic books and their futures report, produced at the end of a two year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council expresses concerns about the fact that many of the newer academic publishers are still relatively small scale startups with a low staff count, producing only a small number of journal and monograph publications. A particularly contentious assertion is that “at present, [these publishers] have more in common with the world of self-publishing than with the more established presses” (Jubb, 2017, p. 44).

This article challenges such perceptions. In doing so, its predominant focus is on new models for open access book publishing that are academic- or library-led, and are thus distinct from commercial publishing, including commercial university presses. We define library-led NUPs as a “set of activities led by college and university libraries to support the creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works” (Lippincott, 2016). We also understand ALPs, in line with Janneke Adema (Adema in Stone, 2017a), as those that are “set-up and run by academics.”

In making a positive case for these presses, we do not wish to suggest that they have solved all the problems of publishing without access to the considerable resources of large commercial publishers. Our aim, rather, is to collate and assemble evidence of the multiple ways in which this new wave of open access publishers are seriously and often highly successfully developing the platforms, procedures, and forms of expertise required to publish consistently high quality, field changing work, as well as to indicate where emerging work in this direction is being pursued.

To do so, the authors, all of whom have direct experience with academic publishing, outline four interrelated sets of challenges, which are often referred to those by questioning the viability of new university and academic-led publishing ventures. They are: (1) professionalism, (2) scale, (3) quality, and (4) discoverability and dissemination. We provide examples of how, albeit differing in size, form and ambition, these new presses are not just mirroring conventional standards and practices in seeking to address these challenges, but are often developing innovative publishing practices that raise questions about long standing publishing norms. Although the focus is on book publishing, given that many of these challenges are very similar to those faced in journal publishing, we also draw on experiences/data with journals where relevant, while also highlighting key points of difference.

Finally, it is worth noting that we do not directly address what is a key challenge for many NUPs and ALPs, which is securing sustainable funding, although this issue sits in the background of various other challenges we cover. We see an immense variety of funding models, with revenue coming from sources including direct sales, book processing charges (BPCs), subscriptions, institutional funding, and grant funding (although not all publishers draw on all models; many are, for instance, opposed to relying on BPCs). We do not dwell on the challenge of funding open access book publishing for two reasons. First, this issue has been comprehensively examined elsewhere (e.g. Adema & Stone, 2017; Ferwerda et al., 2017). Second, our primary aim is to address the challenges that these presses experience, or are perceived to experience, over and above their particular funding situation.