In the article “Subscribing to Open Monographs” from a recent issue of Inside Higher Ed, UVA Open Access Librarian Dave Ghamandi gives his assessment of efforts by MIT to use an $850,000 grant from Arcadia—a charitable fund of philanthropists Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—to create a business model for publishing open-access monographs.

MIT has expressed interest in Subscribe to Open, a program created by non-profit publisher Annual Reviews. According to Kamran Naim, director of partnerships and initiatives at Annual Reviews, the process involves the publisher contacting its institutional subscribers and offering them a 5 percent discount if they renew their subscription. “If every institution commits to renewing their subscription, the journal will be published openly. If subscriptions drop, the journals will remain behind a paywall.”

Ghamandi, however, prefers the Open Library of the Humanities publishing model, which he says is more collaborative than Subscribe to Open. “That model is a lot more appealing to me. You get to be a genuine partner. No one is holding content hostage and saying they require a certain number of subscriptions for the open-access model to kick in.”

For more about open-access publishing, read “Subscribing to Open Monographs” (Inside Higher Ed 10/22/2019)