Print on Demand for DIAMOND OA

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I was wondering if members of the community could share their experiences of offering print-on-demand (POD) as a way to generate some revenue to support open-access publishing. Particularly, we are interested in:

-What qualifies a publication for POD?

-Who pays for print, the authors, funders or the institutional press/ neither?

-How have they developed contracts with printers, typesetters, copyeditors and illustrators?

-Has this been viable- i.e. is there a break even in terms of cost which can be reinvested into the University press?

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Hi Emily, thanks for raising this question - a really good one that many presses are grappling with.

One source that comes to mind that might be useful to have a closer look at would be the Open Book Collective’s Toolkit for Small and Scholar-Led OA Publishers, which has collected small presses’ experiences with publishing OA books over the last couple of years 
 This resource has a chapter on “Production”, with the Key Issues section of that chapter providing some good advice on POD services.

With regards to “Who pays?”, I think it’s safe to say that many Diamond OA publishers are making these available as an additional format next to the digital OA version. So in consequence, anyone can pay for their own print copy via POD if they like to have one, as long as the digital version is released freely under a permissive OA license.

Regarding the question of break-even, the toolkit notes

“[while] printing hard copies makes it possible to generate sales revenue which, even if unlikely to wholly cover a publisher’s costs, can make up a substantial part of its revenue mix.”

And the Case Studies listed in that Toolkit’s chapter on “Production” might also be of interest.

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Hello @Eecarter,

At Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / https://www.eusal.es/, we have started producing POD (Print on Demand) via Amazon/KDP, as the transition to 0% paper was very traumatic for the journals that were previously printed.

An example can be seen at ADCAIJ: Advances in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence Journal: Vol. 11 NĂșm. 1 (2022) : Corchado (Dir.), Juan Manuel, GonzĂĄlez, Sara RodrĂ­guez: Amazon.es: Books. It contains the same content as https://doi.org/10.14201/ADCAIJ2022111.

The advantage of Amazon/KDP is that it provides global visibility. In addition, authors can have their article “in print” and also access it in digital formats (Diamonds: pdf, xml-jats, epub, html), which might be a personal satisfaction for the author, but nothing more.

Given the experience of eUSAL and the sales on Amazon, I believe that, as a technical editor, it is not worth the “effort/time” given the number of sales. Only one issue has been sold through POD:

Sales are decisive; editorial effort does not justify it.

Best regards

Ángel REDERO HERNÁNDEZ
Digital Edition
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca
Plaza de San Benito, 2
37002 – Salamanca
Spain
Tel: +34 923 29 4400 – Ext. 5525
Email: redero@usal.es

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We offer POD at Bern Open Publishing, but do not consider it a potential source of income. Printed copies can be useful for reaching specific target groups, but they are no viable source of revenue.

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