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Open Access for Scholarly Publishing

DePauw University's faculty passed an Open Access Policy in 2014 (the first college in Indiana to do so) and this guide is meant to point faculty towards resources to guide them in publishing open access and making their work available to a wider audience

What are OA Books?

Monographs, or books that present sustained arguments on single subjects, remain the foundation of humanistic scholarship. They are typically, though not always, written by a single author for a specialized audience, and they submit to a formal peer review as part of the publication process.

Like their conventional counterparts, digital monographs are peer-reviewed publications that present a long-form argument. But their presentation extends the bound book by integrating digital content, functionality, or distribution. Authors who adopt digital presentations for their monographs often do so as a way to reach wider audiences, both within and outside the academy. The creation of a digital monograph tends to be openly collaborative, particularly for works that require a high level of technical complexity.

From Emory University

Open Access Books Publishing

Open Access Book Publishers often do not charge authors fees to publish OA. Below are listed just a few broad-spectrum publishers; please be aware that there are other subject-specific Open Access publishers.

Enhanced OA monographs are similar in many ways to OA monographs. They are typically structured like conventional books, and a print book is normally published alongside the enhanced digital edition.

But as the name implies, enhanced OA monographs take advantage of the online environment to extend the functionality of the digital edition. Enhanced OA monographs might integrate audio and video clips, dynamic maps, or interactive data visualizations that cannot be included in the print edition. Another common feature is the inclusion of additional and/or color illustrations that were excluded from the print book due to space and budget constraints.

In recent years, many university presses have experimented with two publishing platforms that support enhanced OA monographs, both funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:

  1. Fulcrum, developed by Michigan Publishing, and
  2. Manifold, developed by the University of Minnesota Press, in collaboration with the CUNY Graduate Center and Cast Iron Coding.
  3. Quire, a publishing platform developed by Getty which is optimized for the display of images.
  • Palgrave Open is a model proposed by Palgrave Macmillan, one of the largest traditional publishers of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. 
  • Brill announced Brill Open, its Open Access model, to include books – monographs and edited volumes.  
  • SpringerOpen charge an upfront fee at the beginning of the publication process. 
  • Pickering & Chatto offer authors and their funders an Open Access option under the Creative Commons Licence CC-BY-NC for monograph submissions, subject to a publishing fee. 
  • Cambridge University Press offers authors the option of publishing their work as gold open access to allow them to make their works freely available online without compromising any aspect of the publishing process.
  • Publishing Open Access With Bloomsbury ('Gold OA'), they provide open access (OA) publishing services for monographs, edited collections, and research handbooks.

There are a few publishers that allow author self-archiving of book chapters. There is a maintained list of what publishers allow in terms of open access to chapters and books. Some permissions and restrictions are below:

  • Cambridge University Press
    • Generally, according to their Green Archiving Policy for Books page the submitted manuscript under review is allowed to be posted to multiple places, but the rules change once it is accepted for publication. 
  • Emerald
    • Emerald permits authors to deposit their chapter in their institutional repository 'immediately post official publication', according to their 'Author rights' page
  • Oxford University Press
  • Palgrave MacMillan
  • Routledge/Taylor & Francis

This section was created using resources from University of California San Francisco, Florida International University and Emory University.