Dr. Frances Pinter is the Executive Chair of the Central European University Press and formerly CEO of Manchester University Press. She advises several small university presses around the world. She was the founding Publisher of Bloomsbury Academic. She is also the founder of Knowledge Unlatched, taking a particular interest in developing sustainable business models for Open Access monographs. Previously she was Publishing Director at the Open Society Foundation and developed the business model for EIFL. Earlier she founded Pinter Publishers that also owned Leicester University Press and established the imprint Belhaven Press.


Event: Building Consistency for Open Science in Europe: Rhetoric and Practice
Title: The Road Less Travelled: Models for Transitioning Books to OA
Abstract: Books have long been the more popular vehicle for communicating research in the Humanities and to a large extent the Social Sciences. Indeed, it has been said that writing the monograph is the research process. However, despite their academic value, books have remained the Cinderella at the Open Access ball.
With limited funding available in HSS and books remaining an important publishing format for HSS researchers, the question of how to move books into open access is gaining more attention. This session outlines general trends in OA book publishing and recent policy developments, as well as the growth of collective funding models for OA books.
CEU Press is a mission driven university press widely recognized for its contribution to research on Central and Eastern Europe. It has recently launched a new model called Opening the Future with COPIM to transition its front list books to open access. Opening the Future is a collective subscription/membership model that uses library spending on backlist access as a leverage to fund future OA publications.

This presentation is co-presented together with Emily Poznanski