University of Westminster Press is delighted to have been accepted as a member of the Open Book Collective (OBC) – a new charity set up to help non-profit, community-led open access publishers like UWP attract funding for book publishing activities from libraries across the globe. This provides an alternate route to funding OA books that isn’t reliant on the dominant Book Processing Charge (BPC), the funding mechanism favoured by commercial publishers. The BPC has come under much criticism in recent years and OBC’s approach will help create a more sustainable and equitable ecosystem for OA book publications.

UWP’s membership of OBC comes at a crucial time: as the Press has grown beyond expectations since its founding in 2015, having published our 56^th book in February this year alongside 6 journals, our business model has come under increasing pressure. Our home institution’s commitment to providing wide access to education, and to equity and inclusivity, means that at UWP we too are committed to ensuring not only that our publications are free to access by readers but also that opportunities to publish with us are available to as wide a constituency of academic authors as possible and are not limited by the need to charge author facing fees. Imposing fees for publishing via a BPC unfairly impacts researchers who don’t have access to funding, or who are based in the global South, as well as those working in non-STEM disciplines.

For us, membership of OBC means being able to continue to provide a fee-free publishing venue for researchers in the arts, humanities and social science disciplines, which is central to our mission and our values.

But membership of OBC is not only a matter of finances for UWP. It is significant because it is another step in building the infrastructure needed for a new type of scholarly communications ecosystem, one that is, according to Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore, forging new relationalities, developing mutual reliances and shaping new kinds of collaboration. New networks and infrastructures, based on new approaches to co-operation within the system, are vital in challenging the for-profit status quo in academic publishing and realising a vision of a more equitable and ethical future.

UWP is one of the first university presses to have joined OBC, alongside University of London Press and Leuven University Press. Libraries can support us as part of a ‘University Press Package’ or as individual initiatives. We hope this is just the start and that we see many more likeminded institutionally based open publishers joining us as members. 

• Open Access