For Publishers

Part of OtF’s aim is to help shift the current industry-wide acquisitions process from acquiring local collections with repeated one-time spends, to supporting and enabling an open global collection through ongoing spend.

In essence, it is a library subscription membership program whereby a press provides gated access to portions of their (closed) backlist books at a special price, and then uses the revenue from members’ subscriptions to allow the frontlist to be OA from the date of publication.

The model was devised to enable small-to-medium-sized "legacy" or "traditional" presses that wish to move in good faith towards OA publishing: the model leverages their backlist books that for all intents and purposes cannot be flipped themselves. Flipping a closed backlist is tricky due to the complications, uncertainty, and prohibitive costs associated with gaining retrospective permissions, and logistical difficulties like digitisation and conversion to accessible formats. Instead, OtF uses the closed backlist as a lever to allow small/medium presses to systematically and incrementally move away from paywalled publishing in a low risk manner. It also enables them to move away from one-off, author-facing fees like Book Processing Charges being their sole option for publishing OA books. Ultimately, OtF gives a press a mechanism by which they can gradually move towards being fully OA. It is designed to encourage and sustain bibliodiversity and to allow small/medium-sized presses to operate at the scale, pace and level of risk that suits them.

Incremental OA

OtF scales dynamically and is designed with smaller publishers in mind. Your press doesn't need to wait until you have 200 libraries on board (for example) to start making books OA. Open access publishing can start once you have around 10 or 15 members (though this number will vary depending on individual press publishing costs). The moment you have accrued enough OtF membership revenue, the next book in your pipeline can be published open access instead of behind a paywall. Then you wait for the revenue to build again, and so on.

It's quick and easy to launch, hosting the backlist books on the community-based, open-source Fulcrum publishing platform.