Finding funding for your OA book

Published August 7 2020 | Revised September 26 2024

If your publisher requires that you provide funding to support the publication of your open access book via a book processing charge (BPC) or open access fee, you may be able to access funding from your institution or a grant-making organisation. You or your publisher could also organise a crowdfunding campaign.

Institution

Funding may be available through your institution:

  • Your institution may have a special fund for supporting researchers publishing books in open access (see, for example, Springer Nature’s ‘Funding for open access books’ or the overview collated by the Radical Open Access Collective).
  • Your research office, college/faculty and/or department might be willing to fund the publication, either through an established intramural grant programme or a one-off request.
  • Funding may be available through Research Grants:
  • If you have active research grant funding, your funder may allow you to use grant funds to make your book open access. Alternatively, if you are entitled to a portion of the ‘indirect costs’ for a current or past grant, your institution might allow you to use these to support the publication.

Grant-making organisations:

Funding may also be available through grant-making organisations:

Crowdfunding

Finally, crowdfunding can help engage an audience of readers and provide funding to support publication:

  • You or your publisher could organise a crowdfunding campaign to support the publication of the book (see an example from the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter).
  • You or your publisher could register as a rightsholder on Unglue.it, a crowdfunding platform specifically for books.

If you are writing an open access book with co-authors, you may wish to find out if they are able to secure part of the funding. You should also consider whether your publisher will permit the funds to come from more than one source.

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