Libraries have played an important role in facilitating the transition to open scholarship within their institutions: providing advocacy, advice and support for funder open access policies, and developing research data management and open scholarship services.

However, much of this support for, and attention on, open access has been focused on journals. Unlike journals, monographs are still predicated on print having not yet passed the tipping point in a transition to digital (Johnson & Luther, 2007). It is therefore unsurprising “that there is still much to do on open access books” (Holzer et al., 2020). This is never truer than in the library supply chain. Open is not embedded into the culture, workflows and practices that form the book acquisition process.

The transition to open access for monographs in Europe has moved forward slowly but steadily, with just a handful of early adopters in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Wellcome Trust in the UK. The Swedish Research Council has also signalled the intent to extend its policy to monographs and book chapters at a future date. In 2019, an unprecedented number of reports and briefing papers were published on open access monographs and books (Adema, 2019; Fund et al., 2019; Grimme et al., 2019; Kember, 2019; Pyne et al., 2019; Science Europe, 2019; UUK, 2019a,b; Wennström et al., 2019). In addition, Knowledge Exchange’s work on open access monographs culminated at the 2019 LIBER conference with a call to action for libraries, publishers and funders (Adema et al., 2019), which was more clearly defined in a 2020 blog post (Holzer et al., 2020).

Momentum is now gathering. In June 2020, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) announced its renewed policy for open access monographs together with a funding scheme (NWO, 2020). This will be followed in 2021 by a new monographs-inclusive policy from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, 2020) and cOAlition S guidelines on their policy regarding open access monographs (cOAlition S, 2019).

In this paper, we ask whether library acquisitions units are ready for this increase in open access content, and address the cultural changes that may be required. The paper is based on a series of workshops leading up to the 2019 LIBER conference. Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on libraries and access to collections. Many were forced to close for an extended period, with print collections shut off from researchers and students. Many print monographs were simply not available as ebooks and could not be digitised by libraries. Although some publishers provided temporary access to their collections, including monograph publishers (e.g. Brill, 2020), this free access has largely been curtailed. We are now entering a period of unparalleled uncertainty, with many libraries modelling drastic budget cuts, at the same time as having to provide support for a mixed model of teaching and research, where online access will dominate as a necessity. The authors of this paper argue that a move to open access (for books) is more urgent than ever.

While libraries have absorbed open scholarship activities into their remit, the teams that support this area are often specialist and may not be integrated with longer-established collections management and acquisitions teams. As open content becomes an increasingly significant proportion of scholarly outputs, the authors argue that libraries should be rethinking their organisational structures and collection management and development policies, at both institutional and national level, to redress the balance between acquired and open access content. Furthermore, this paper recommends how these issues should be explored and addressed in academic libraries, at both a strategic and practical level.

Comments from practitioners were gathered at a workshop held at the 2019 National Acquisitions Group (NAG) collection development meeting (Thompson & Stone, 2019a,b). Input has also been collected at the strategic level, via the 2019 Research Libraries UK (RLUK) conference (Ball & Stone, 2019) and 2019 LIBER conference (Ball et al., 2019). Comments from all three sessions have been combined and expanded to identify the strategic approach required as a sector. The paper concludes by considering this at a European level and the potential role for sector organisations such as LIBER to support cultural change.

In this paper the terms open access books and open access monographs are used to mean long form scholarly works (usually around 70,000 words). These works may be written by a single author, joint authors or could be an edited collection.

Key studies on open access monographs have shown that open access has a positive impact on usage, discovery and dissemination (Ferwerda et al., 2013; Montgomery et al., 2017). However, a recurring problem for the growing number of New University Presses (NUPs) and library- and academic-led open access monograph publishers is that of library discovery, particularly in the traditional library supply chain – the channels that library acquisition departments use to buy print and ebook content.

Some of these issues centre around metadata quality (Adema & Stone, 2017; Neylon et al., 2018). However, the obstacles that open access publishers face in accessing the library supply chain are much wider. For example, Rupert Gatti of Open Book Publishers commented that it would be helpful to have a service that “looks at how to bring academic content into the catalogues and the digital learning environments of the universities and to allow universities to also relate back to the publisher, so that there is a flow of information going back both ways” (Adema & Stone, 2017). In the United States, the Mellon-funded mapping the free ebook supply chain report found that workflows were designed to lock down, not open up books, that the amount of open access content was still small and that there were unresolved questions about sustainability and lack of awareness (Watkinson et al., 2017). Furthermore, Grimme et al. (2019, p. 11) observed that there is little incentive for commercial intermediaries at the centre of the supply chain to make a free or open access version of a book available to libraries who may buy the print copy.

Jisc’s 2018 community workshop (Stone, 2018) surfaced some of these issues with key stakeholders from NUPs, academic-led presses, book suppliers and distributors, metadata suppliers, libraries and other experts in open access publishing. Delegates discussed the problem statement that OA publishers have difficulty accessing the channels that library acquisition departments use to buy print and ebook content. The workshop identified a number of themes (metadata; the library supply chain; and non-traditional monograph output), which projects, such as the Research England and Arcadia Trust funded Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project (COPIM, 2020) and Jisc’s Plan M project (Grindley, 2019) have begun to address.

Cultural change in the acquisitions process was the fourth theme identified in the Jisc workshop. This theme was also explored in discussions on how best to integrate open access books into the collections of academic libraries by LIBER’s Open Access Working Group, which held a workshop in June 2019 to address the support required by libraries to make open access books more visible and to raise their profile (LIBER, 2019a,b). A survey of European libraries carried out by the working group showed that while many libraries are now including open access books within their discovery systems (80%), fewer are proactively requiring providers to include open access content in their services or products (42%). This demonstrates that although there is an acknowledgement of the importance of including the discovery of open access content within libraries, this still exists at only a passive level.

There is not yet a coordinated proactive approach to engage with suppliers in order to reposition this content as an essential part of the scholarly communications ecosystem. The LIBER survey also showed that while libraries are actively supporting researchers with publishing their own monographs via open access, they are not systematically considering open access options when acquiring content. The survey identified a number of proposed activities, which libraries indicated they would like to learn more about, including a need for a user experience (UX) approach to better understand how users find open access content.

At the NAG practitioner event facilitated by the authors (Thompson & Stone, 2019b), delegates were invited to respond to the following questions about cultural change:

This stimulated discussion about how open access is yet to become a mainstream activity in libraries. It is still usually, organisationally as well as perceptually, considered to be ‘specialist’. In the journals space, this has presented challenges for teams who are now dealing with transformative agreements that combine the work associated with both subscriptions and open access payments. However, as noted above, this issue is exacerbated in the ebooks space where there is, as yet, no transition to open. In addition, individual monograph purchases do not come under the same scrutiny as new journal subscriptions, which often have to be signed off by a collection development committee. A further complication is time; libraries at the workshop reported that if an open access copy was not found in their supplier database of choice, they lacked the time and staff resource to check additional sources for open access monographs as part of the ordering or pre-ordering process. The coverage and quality of information about open content in knowledge bases was also a concern.

The collaborative responses of delegates at the NAG event can be distilled into two core themes: cultivating a culture of openness, and demonstrating the value of open content. Both are explored further in the discussion below regarding leadership and strategy, policies and practices.

The COVID-19 crisis, and the ensuing imperative to make as many resources as possible available online has moved libraries closer to the tipping point from print to digital books. Within the UK, the split in library book budgets between print and digital is now 50/50 (NAG, 2020). Although some way from a full transition to open access, emerging funder policy in this area requires libraries to be prepared for the digital shift, while maintaining a ‘hybrid’ collection to meet the demand for print monographs from many scholars, especially those in arts and humanities disciplines.

To effect change throughout the academic library, and embed and incorporate open access books within library collections, the strategic importance of open content needs to be understood, valued and clearly communicated internally across the library. Furthermore, the ensuing policies, practices and structures must accurately reflect this new strategy. This requires leadership at the individual library level, to effect and cascade the necessary changes within the library.

Leadership is also required to effect change within the wider institution, reimagining and re-presenting the library to our academic communities from being primarily identified as the providers of access to information as an end product, and position ourselves further upstream to engage with the scholarship process.

Libraries must capitalise on their power to drive change within the sector through purchasing power and consortial influence. The scale of libraries’ purchasing power on books should not be underestimated; a study from 2017 estimated that UK academic libraries alone spent £12.4m on research monographs each year (Eve et al., 2017).

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the extent to which the library community is connected. By coordinating the realignment of their policies and practices around open access, libraries have potential to change the current system. For example, Science Europe (2019) recommends a number of activities that libraries should undertake to support the transition to open access books, including repurposing part of their acquisitions budget towards open access of both journals and books, encouraging the conversion of ebook packages to open access (such as via library consortia), and participation in cooperative funding models for open access books.

Science Europe’s recommendations also call for institutional and sector-wide buy in to support open access for books. Otherwise, it warns, open access for books will remain aspirational, a ‘nice to have’ (Science Europe, 2019). In the UK, RLUK’s 2018–2021 strategy (RLUK, 2017) identifies that while models for open access articles are well established, there are fewer options for books. Their response to this states, amongst other things, that they will support members to develop their own presses and seek collective solutions in order to drive down costs and create an open environment for monographs. Furthermore, in 2021, UKRI is expected to announce its policy for open access monographs, edited collections and book chapters and begin consultations on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise after REF 2021 (UKRI, 2020). This will be followed at the international level by a cOAlition S “statement on Plan S principles as they apply to monographs and book chapters, together with related implementation guidance” (cOAlition S, 2020).

LIBER’s Vision for the research landscape in 2022 sees a world in which open access is the predominant form of publishing (LIBER, n.d.). Although this statement refers to journal publishing, funder intervention will see the volume of open access monographs increase rapidly over the next few years. However, without the corresponding adaptations to library policies, practices and structures, or leadership and advocacy from the library sector, a transition to open access books is in jeopardy. This article has set out a manifesto for cultural change: it is up to both national organisations and those at a European level, such as LIBER to support and enable libraries to implement this change at a sector level and make open access for books a reality.