A report by the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) analysing the open access economic models in use today in scholarly publishing. The report examines academic monograph publishing in the context of today’s challenging monograph publishing environment: from Covid-19 and budget cuts, to print sales, funder mandates, and research evaluation. Launched in 2019, and funded by Arcadia and Research England, the COPIM project is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access (OA) book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is fostering community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable OA book publishing to flourish. This project report builds on a decade of studies written by OA advocates and consultants around the world, and updates their research to describe the environment and economics of OA publishing in 2020. The report will eventually become one component of a practical ‘toolkit’ that COPIM will produce on how presses might transition to sustainably publishing OA monographs.

Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.