Choosing a publisher for your open access book

There are some important issues to consider when choosing publishers for open access books, monographs and longform outputs. This section provides an overview of important considerations to make when choosing a publisher for your open access book, as well as useful tools and advice for identifying potential publishers.

Considerations when choosing an open access publisher for your work

Do you need to comply with any research funder or institutional policies?

When choosing a publisher, it is important to know if your research must comply with any funder open access policies. Some publishers will offer routes to achieving open access that do not comply with a funder's policy. For example, the publisher may require that the output be embargoed for a longer period than the funder policy allows.

Open Policy Finder by Jisc is a searchable database of up-to-date information concerning publisher and funder policies and their requirements for open access, publication and data archiving. It is available to access here.

You should also check if you need to comply with any institutional policies concerning open access publishing. The university strongly encourages researchers to make non journal article outputs as openly available as possible via its Research Publications Open Access Policy (RPOAP).

Are there fees charged for publishing open access?

Some publishers may charge a fee (often known as a Book Processing Charge (BPC)) to publish an output open access with them.  BPCs are similar to APCs applied to open access journal articles. These charges can range anywhere from £4,000 to £15,000 (plus VAT) for a book and between £1000 to £1200 (plus VAT) for an individual chapter depending on the publisher and the length of the work. When choosing a publisher, check if there is a cost involved and if you are able to access funding to cover this. ​

It is important to remember that there is no link between the academic quality of an output and the route which has been taken to achieve open access.

What format would you like the book to be published in?

How would you like the open access version of your work to be formatted? The format of the output will differ between different publishers. Some publishers will publish the output as a PDF, whilst others will produce formats such as XML, HTML, EPUB and MOBI. The amount of work required from the author to produce the book in the desired format will also vary between publishers.

Many publishers also produce and sell print copies of open access books and undertake extensive marketing, just like non-open access publications. Authors can still receive royalties for sales of books published in open access formats. 

The OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit have produced a useful webpage with guidance on digital formats for open access books to help you identify suitable publishers, predict and avoid delays, reduce cost and minimise the time it will take you to publish your manuscript.

​Licencing, copyright and third-party material

When approaching a publisher, it is important to be aware of their copyright and licencing policies for open access works. These terms can affect who retains the copyright for the work and how others are able to use and potentially reuse your work based on the licence. Open Policy Finder is an online resource that aggregates publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies.

There may be funder and institutional policies relating to copyright and licencing that you need to comply with as well. For instance, UKRI require all outputs within scope of their open access policy for long-form outputs are published under a Creative Commons Licence. Open Policy Finder is a searchable database and single focal point of up-to-date information concerning funders' policies and their requirements on open access, publication and data archiving.

You will also have to ensure that you have permission to include all third-party materials in your book. These are images, graphs and other materials for which you do not own the copyright and which are not in the public domain. In some cases you may have to pay the copyright holder to include third-party materials or include these materials under a different licence. UKRI have produced a useful guide for researchers on managing third-party copyright for research publications that is also relevant to non-UKRI funded authors.​​​​​​​

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Useful tools for finding open access book publishers