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 including ‘large proﬁts’.58 Many publishers would deny, however, that the ‘large proﬁts’ to which Vardi and Baraniuk refer actually exist in the sphere of research monographs. All of which is to say that it remains unclear as to whether additional services with premium features (‘value added’ in management terminology) will cover the costs inherent in monograph production.

Collective funding

The ﬁnal model that I want to discuss here is one of collective, or collaborative, funding. The most substantial cost for monograph production in a digital or print-on-demand environment is getting to the ﬁrst copy; the costs of subsequent reproductions in the digital domain are comparatively slim and warehousing/inventory management concerns are substantially lessened.59 Back in 2010 – an age ago in digital publishing terms – Hugh Look and Frances Pinter proposed a model for collectively underwriting the risks and costs based on ‘aggregating demand in the form of a consortium and paying publishers for getting to ﬁrst copy stage’. Look and Pinter continue:

if, say 1,000 libraries paid into a fund that ‘bought’ the non-commercial open access rights to a book that carried, for the sake of the arithmetic, a ‘getting to ﬁrst copy’ cost of $10,000, then each library would contribute $10.00. The average monograph today costs approximately $80.00. This would not only get libraries eight times as many titles online, it would be truly contributing to making knowledge accessible globally. If, say 5,000 libraries subscribed to the scheme (although we feel this is unlikely) the cost would be $2.00 a title, representing a 97.5% reduction on the current print or eBook price.60

While Look and Pinter acknowledged the difﬁculties of establishing new models in the midst of extant markets, this proposition came to fruition in 2014 under the auspices of Pinter’s ‘Knowledge Unlatched’ (KU).61

Knowledge Unlatched’s pilot collection consisted of twenty-eight new books from thirteen renowned scholarly publishers (Amsterdam University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Brill, Cambridge University Press, de Gruyter, Duke University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Liverpool University Press, Manchester University Press,