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 These, then, comprise the majority of the social scientiﬁc studies of open-access monographs. However, there are also a number of presses who have simply decided to try publishing monographs in an OA format. In the next section, I want to draw attention to several projects with innovative aspects that show signs of emergent and viable economics for OA monographs. It is, of course, impossible to gain full coverage of all the exciting new projects working on OA books but this will give a ﬂavour of the experiments that are under way.

As of mid 2014, a small number of presses, such as Amsterdam University Press, allow green open access deposit for monographs, usually with an embargo of 18–24 months. The central model emerging for gold open access monograph publishing, conversely, is one of book processing charges (BPCs). The current rates requested by established presses under such a system are high and pose real, possibly insurmountable, challenges for unfunded research: $2,450/chapter from de Gruyter; €640/chapter from InTech; £5,900 from Manchester University Press for books of up to 80,000 words; £11,000 from Palgrave; and approximately €15,000 from Springer, to name but a few.47 Each of these presses does, of course, offer a different service: although not exclusively limited to the more expensive presses, the higher end tend to allow more liberal reuse rights by default (CC BY) while others have more restrictive criteria and may not allow ePub downloads (a format for mobile reading devices). One of the central drivers of the introduction of this model has been the strong open-access mandate of the Wellcome Trust, which, in contrast to HEFCE, includes ‘scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or coauthored by Trust grantholders that arise as part of their grant-funded research’.48 The ﬁrst Wellcome-funded OA book was released in late 2013.49

Despite the emergence of the BPC as the model of choice for many publishers, several other economic models are appearing (some of which are experimental), including: print subsidy, freemium and consortia. These models remain immature and unproven but are showing signs of working at the present time within speciﬁc contexts.