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Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it. This document provides some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books.The guide was written by the Wellcome Trust, which extended its open access policy to include monographs and book chapters in October 2013. Section 4 of this guide sets out Trust policy, but otherwise the recommendations made here are intended as helpful suggestions for best practice rather than requirements.We recognise that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and we invite publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document.

"The open access model for publishing monographs by the members of the Spanish Universities Publishers Association (UNE) is analyzed. The study focused on production data from 2015-2017, as well as the positioning and arguments of the editors in relation to the open access movement, publication, related policies, and financing modalities. Data was collected by a questionnaire (with a response rate of 58% of the publishers associated with UNE) and includes in-depth interviews with seven of them. The results show that 75% of UNE members publish titles in open access, most consider open access a good way to increase the dissemination of monographs, and that there are no differences in content quality with non-open access works. Publishers do not see that publishing in open access is compatible with the commercial exploitation of printed copies. Publishers consider the most effective financing channels to be institutional payment (i.e., the university), followed by publisher's self-financing, and payment by the author."

"Author's note: With my colleague Karen Barch and the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I have been working on a project to determine how many books university presses publish, and in particular, how many of these could be termed original monographs in the humanities. The full report is available below as a PDF and also on Scribd. The text of this blog post is a slightly edited version of the report's Introduction. For the quantitative aspect of the study, I refer you to the full report.]"

"At a conference last week, I spoke of the intent to extend the open access (OA) requirements in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to include long-form scholarly works and monographs in 2027. Some seemed to think I was making a new announcement, as a fait accompli. In fact the overall intention was signalled more than a year ago - and it will take much more discussion and consultation to develop the policy details and finalise the conditions."

"In 2014, my Mellon colleague, Helen Cullyer, and I sat in on a roundtable discussion of deans of humanities divisions in about 25 research universities in the U.S.  Of the questions that occupied them, one directly concerned the future of the monograph.  Wondering how they could make the humanities more interesting to their students, the deans observed that the present generation is immersed in the interactive web of multimedia to a degree that makes it harder for them to appreciate the book-based humanistic traditions. "

"The Manifold team is delighted to launch a public beta of its new publishing platform for interactive scholarly monographs: http://staging.manifoldapp.org/."

"While there are new and enabling conditions for university presses to increase production and to widen distribution, the question remains: How can African university presses make the most of these opportunities? Most likely, the answer lies in deploying the technological changes in production, distribution and marketing made possible by digitisation and network effects of the internet.  At the same time, propelled by a growing perception in academia of 'robber capitalism' on the part of publishers as they protect their oligopoly in the face of dissolving spatial barriers and diminishing value add, we are witnessing a contrary trend: the emergence of the knowledge commons. However, this emergence takes place in an institutional context long dominated by an editorial logic and, in more recent times, by the logic of the market.  A holistic way of approaching the question of how African university presses can reposition themselves in support of the broader shift of some African universities towards a greater focus on research, is to consider shifts in the dominant institutional logic in the academic publishing industry. Based on a baseline survey of university presses in Africa, in-depth case studies of selected university presses, and an analysis of the publishing choices made by African academics, this research project examined the opportunities and constraints faced by university presses in Africa.  It provides an overview of the African university press landscape and shows that there is a small, active group of university presses. University presses in Africa are not yet making use of technological advances to reconfigure their production, distribution and marketing processes, nor are they experimenting with new publishing models such as open access. While case studies of selected university presses surfaced unsurprising challenges (such as scarce resources and limited capacity), they also show that university presses in Africa are constrained by institut