OA book policies

Key elements of an open access books policy

Published September 13 2024 | Revised November 26 2024

In 2023, PALOMERA devised a list of policymaking elements for academic books to identify gaps and good policy practices among institutional, regional, national and international open access-related policies. These elements also serve as a framework to help policymakers more precisely pinpoint their expectations, which has the potential to ensure better policy compliance.

As part of a policy-mapping process, the PALOMERA project devised a list of policymaking elements to identify gaps and good policy practices among institutional, regional, national and international open access book policies. These elements will also serve as a framework to help policymakers who are formulating their policy to better describe the specifics of their policy, which has the potential to better ensure policy compliance. The elements focus on a range of areas: from scope to copyright to funding to incentives and monitoring.

Scope This element defines what the term ‘book’ means in the policy, for example books, monographs, edited volumes, scholarly editions, book chapters and other types of longform scholarly publications. It is important to describe what is in scope of the policy and what is out of scope, or exempted. In addition, scope includes to whom the policy applies − for example academics in general or academics from a particular discipline, group or department.

The open access model If the policy prescribes or encourages a particular open access model, it should be specified and described succinctly. For example, this could be the version of record (gold or diamond open access where a book processing charge is paid or a community model is supported) or the author-accepted manuscript (green open access or self-archiving in a repository).

Stipulations on the open access publication

Time of open access publication Stipulate the designated time frame within which you require a work to be made open access under the policy. This can pertain to a final version of the work or to a pre-print or post-print, for example immediately upon publication or within an embargo period if necessary.

Deposited version If you require a particular version of the work to be made open access, specify the version of the work that authors are required to make open access under the policy and/or deposit (i.e. pre-print, post-print, publisher’s version).

Publisher restrictions If authors are required to publish with certain publishers listed on national lists or in registries, you should clearly refer to these with links for reference.

Copyright, licensing and rights retention

Rights retention Provisions should be included that recommend authors to retain sufficient rights to publish open access. In practice, this means that authors should not transfer their copyright by default to publishers or make a non-exclusive publishing agreement unless this allows the author to publish open access. Please note that this cannot be done retrospectively after the author has signed the publishing contract, which would likely be an exception to the policy.

Licensing If you encourage open licensing, specify the type of open licence recommended or required for open access publications under the policy, for example CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND. Refer to the Creative Commons info page on licensing for more information:

Funding If you provide a funding mechanism/s to cover the costs of publishing an open access book or part of it, please specify this, including the application procedure, if relevant, the time frame and any limitations or caps. For example, is there a maximum funding level for book processing charges (BPCs) and are alternatives to the BPC funded, for example diamond open access.

Exceptions The policy should outline specific circumstances or scenarios in which certain rules or requirements may not apply and thus do not require authors to publish open access.

Monitoring and incentives Stipulating the processes that assess and verify open access policy compliance will help ensure policy compliance.

Defining incentives or benefits can encourage compliance. Alternatively, to discourage non-compliance, the consequences or penalties for those who do not follow the requirements should be described clearly and succinctly, including to whom they apply and when.

Policy document information

Policy review schedule Ideally, indicate the time frame of this policy and when it will next be reviewed, updated and revised, including the date if possible.

Policy licence Indicate whether the policy document itself is released under a specific open licence. This is useful in terms of how the policy text can be used, shared and modified by others who may want to build on this policy or translate it.

Creative Commons License
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.