With a three-year $850,000 Arcadia grant in hand, MIT Press has set to work building an open access publishing model that all presses can use. But what are the benefits of one model over another? What elements are most important to authors and publishers? How do you ensure inclusivity, scalability, and equity across a framework? These are the questions Raym Crow, Senior Consultant at SPARC and researcher on the project, must answer in the press’ quest to find a replicable OA monograph publishing model.

Terry Ehling, Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press, joins Crow to explain the difficulty in aligning the philosophical ideals of open access with the practicalities of the academic publishing market. Crow offers a sobering perspective on why current OA models fail: “people will come in and say yes, even of altruistic basis, say ‘yes, we want to participate in this.’ The problem is that kind of support erodes over time because it’s unsustainable, unscalable, and inequitable.”

In this episode, Crow zeroes in on the criteria needed for MIT’s model—immediate access, inclusivity, replicability, and, of course, “the model has to generate sufficient revenue … and that revenue has to be stable over time, and predictable over time.” Crow and Ehling also compare serial models to collective models, and discuss whether or not MIT Press’ inherent focus on STEM titles will influence the framework’s principles.