Our business model

Open Book Publishers is a fully open access (OA) press that does not charge its authors a fee to publish open access (also known as a Book Processing Charge or BPC). We believe that charging authors is an unsustainable and inequitable way to fund open access, so we have developed a mixed business model that does not require such fees.

We are a not-for-profit publisher, so our incomings only need to match our outgoings for us to be sustainable; any surplus goes back into the business and enables us to publish more books.

In addition to our publishing arm, OBP also has a research and development (R&D) arm. All our R&D work is grant funded, and therefore financially separate from our publishing arm. We focus our R&D efforts on open source projects that contribute to the wider OA book ecosystem, developing tools and infrastructures that other presses can freely use to publish OA books. Our intention is to help lower the barriers so that more presses can publish OA without charging author fees. This is part of the 'scaling small' approach we have adopted.

Publishing costs

We publish between 40-50 books per year. Our average costs per title (last updated in 2022) are as follows:

Final proofreading and indexing	£2,100
Typesetting	£1000
Cover design	£150
Generating digital editions & website maintenance	£350
Distribution and retailing	£300
Marketing	£500
Overheads	£1,100
Total	£5,500

Publishing revenue

A number of revenue streams cover our costs. The figures below are from our most recent complete financial year (2022-2023), during which we published 49 titles (35 monographs, 15 edited volumes and 2 textbooks):

Sales: All our books are available to buy in paperback, hardback, and EPUB at modest prices, as well as being freely available in HTML and PDF formats from the date of publication.

Title grants and donations: We ask authors, if they are able, to apply for grant funding to defray the costs of publishing their book. This helps us to publish more books by authors who have no funding. Publishing decisions are made on the basis of peer review only: funding does not guarantee publication and if a book has no funding attached but passes peer review, we will publish it. In 2022-2023, 35 of the books we published had no funding attached; 4 had partial funding, and 10 were fully funded. We also receive grants and donations as a press, unattached to a particular book. Many individuals donate to us to support our work: please join them if you wish!

Library Membership: our Library Membership Programme has grown from strength to strength since its beginnings in 2015, and we now have over 250 library members from all over the world. Member libraries pay an annual contribution to the press in exchange for various benefits and to support our work. Their support is essential for us to be able to publish OA books without charging authors. Find out more and become a Library Member.

Non-standard production charges: we charge a small fee for non-standard tasks. Find out more information about our non-standard production charges.

Research and development

In 2022-2023 we received £217,000 in grant funding for our R&D work. Our outputs include developing the metadata management system Thoth as part of Copim, which now handles all our metadata and underlies our book catalogue. We have also developed our own website, the code for which we plan to release as an open source white label site that other publishers can adopt for their own operations.

Our financial figures

You can view our company accounts at Companies House.

For a more in-depth discussion of our business model based on our figures from the 2019-2020 financial year, read this case study. It is part of a compendium of business model case studies from a range of OA book publishers that is available to view. You can also read this blog post that examines our model using figures from 2018-2019.

Donate to us

If you would like to support our work and enable us to publish more OA books without charging authors, you can do so via our donations page.