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 Purdue University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Michigan Press). The basic premise of the pilot was as Look and Pinter described, albeit at a smaller scale. While Pinter had earlier proposed 1,000 libraries, for the KU Pilot a more achievable 200 were sought, with almost 300 libraries eventually participating. This included 137 from North America, 77 from the United Kingdom, 27 from Oceania and 55 from elsewhere.62 The amount requested from each library was capped at US $1,680, which was an average of $60 per book with 200 libraries participating. As the eventual goal of 200 libraries was superseded by almost 50%,63 this was eventually closer to $40 per book, which is substantially cheaper than the cost of most academic books when bought outright, let alone for those that can now be distributed ad inﬁnitum for free.64

Interestingly, although this model for making material open access depends upon the internet for its success, it has been traced far further back by Sandy Thatcher. Indeed, Thatcher notes the afﬁnity with the description furnished by Adrian Johns of seventeenth-century practice: ‘another option, of increasing importance after 1660, was to publish by subscription. . . It involved persuading a number of prosperous individuals to invest enough money in the proposed publication that the project would be sufﬁciently capitalized to proceed to completion.’65 Other projects to implement a model of this kind include the Gluejar initiative, which is designed to enable ‘individuals and institutions to join together to liberate speciﬁc ebooks’66 and my own Open Library of Humanities project, which works slightly differently as the predominant funding is for journals, but working to cross-subsidise monographs.

Concluding thoughts on monograph economics

While book processing charges are the predominant form of current implementation for open-access monographs, they are not to be considered the be-all and end-all. A diverse range of experiments are under way to establish alternative bases upon which gold open access monograph publication could be possible. It is clear that not all of these will succeed and that they should be considered experimental. It is also fair to say, though, that publishers’ revenue models