This is my personal reflection, and not an official position of the University Library Could you use library book budgets to fund open access monographs? This was a question raised some people at the recent Critical Issues in Open Access event at Goldsmith University. Steven Hill from Research England responded to one of these comments by saying the classic policy answer would be to have a matched funding scheme for a set period. This suggested that policy makers have thought about this model, even if this isn’t the route they would go down in the end. Ideas for re-purposing library budgets for open access have been floating round for some time, primarily from people who want to move away from article-processing charges (APCs). The consortia led-model for open access journals is built on a version of this idea e.g. as used by Open Library of Humanities . The model, recently proposed by Martin Eve , to transition learned society journals to open access also works this way...
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