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 4.28. Despite the progress made in retrospective digitisation, the shift to digital formats and online access has been much slower with books than with journals. Relatively few research monographs are as yet available online, and there has been relatively little progress towards the publication of open access. For the health of research in the humanities and social sciences, the difficulties now faced by authors and publishers in developing a secure future for monographs is a matter of concern.

4.29. The EU-funded OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) project is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable OA publication model for academic books in the humanities and social sciences. It is examining publishing and business models, as well as the publishing process itself in an OA context. In the UK, JISC Collections and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have recently established an OAPEN-UK project in partnership with publishers, research councils, authors, researchers and institutions. It is designed as a pilot to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data which will be evaluated to help stakeholders better understand the challenges, and the developments necessary to support open access research monographs.

4.30. Publication fees as yet play relatively little part in the funding of open access monographs, not least because there are no arrangements in place from funders to meet them. Instead, much of the small amount of open access monograph publishing at present depends on subsidies from universities and other bodies that provide cash, facilities, equipment, personnel, or all four. A number of university presses in the US are now operating in collaboration with the university library, which provides the funding to support publishing. In some cases this funding derives from grants from bodies such as the Mellon Foundation. In Australia, the Australian National University Press has established an e-press initiative under which 350 titles have been published to date, along with a print-on-demand service; and other Australian universities have expressed interest in launching similar systems.

4.31. In many cases, free full-text open access editions are provided alongside print-on-demand (POD) editions for which payment is required; and in some cases services such as full browsing functions, full-text search, navigation tools, multimedia content etc. are charged for. The aim is then that such charges should defray, in whole or in part, the costs of publication. A more radical suggestion is that a system should be established under which a consortium of libraries would pool funds to pay for the fixed costs of monographs selected by the members of the consortium. Publishers would submit proposed titles to the consortium, which would disseminate this information to member libraries who would then decide what to purchase, and cover the first-digital-file production costs. Publishers would then make the monograph available open access in a sub-optimal format, again