Books: open access publishing
Overview
Several publishers, including Elsevier and SpringerNature, offer Open Access options for publishing books and individual chapters as open access, typically charging Book Processing Charges (BPC) and Chapter Processing Charges (CPC). BPCs can reach up to US$17,000, and CPCs can be around US$1,700. These fees are not funded by the Library, however you may factor them into grant applications (contact the Grants team).
Avoiding OA Book Processing Charges
To avoid fees, consider not-for-profit or academic publishers who may offer open access publishing without charging Book Processing Charges.
Examples of Not for Profit publishers which do not charge BPCs:
Examples of academic (University press) publishers which publish open access books with no requirement for the author or institution to pay to publish include:
- ANU Press does not charge a Book Processing Fee, however they do say that authors need to pay for copyediting.
- Monash University Publishing – although not requiring authors be part of Monash University, it does aim to represent the university’s research interests
- eBureau - La Trobe’s own eBureau publishes high-quality open textbooks by La Trobe University academics for online and blended subjects
Publish your work in OPAL to avoid charges
Depending on publisher restrictions, you may also deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript version of you book or chapter into OPAL, the University Repository, for eventual open access. The publisher’s website usually has information about their self-archiving policy. For example Manchester University Press has a policy for deposit in an institutional repository as follows: eighteen months from first publication one chapter can be deposited; three years from first publication the complete accepted version can be deposited.