 Yeah, so just to put some perspective, I'm an economist at Cambridge and with a bunch of other academics at Cambridge, we had enough of being frustrated with the existing publishing model and thought we needed to do something. So what we decided to do was to set up an open access publishing company, publishing monographs, and we'll have a little bit more detail in a second. So it's with that hat that I'm here, looking at open book publishers. Just a little tiny bit of background and it's open access, it's online. So I really do encourage any of you who want to trawl while I'm talking, go online, have a look at the website and I'd really like if you've got any thoughts or feedback and things like that, it's always very gratefully received. But I took a screenshot, rather than try and do this live, I'd seen a couple of presenters previously fighting between the two and I thought, you know what, I'll just do everything with screenshots. So anyway, it's all screenshots. So that's the sort of homepage, a couple of things to point out from it. So at the bottom there, we've got, so far we've published about 118 titles, we've been going about 10 years now. We've got about one in three quarter million book visits for those titles in that time. And it's a global audience that's coming through. So it really, you know, Google Analytics is that there's 217 countries, you know, I don't think there's only about 180 in the world. So I don't know quite how Google Analytics does it, but anyway, there's quite a few that have come through. When you look at those analytics maps, alas, North Korea is still white. So we don't seem to have got anyone from North Korea, but otherwise it's pretty green. So all the books are open access. Now what does open access mean? Mostly it means CCBY. So most of our books are CCBY. Not all of them can discuss about. There's some that are NC and D and we can talk about these various licenses, if any of you are interested. And just as part of the, just to point out, we don't charge authors a publishing cost. So there's no compulsory charge there. We do ask for them to apply for grants if they're aware that any is there, but there's no compulsory payment. So it's not part of the decision process. Just quickly, we're a nonprofit community interest company that we set up just to make sure what we were concerned about was that the good quality, you know, it's a standard thing. I'm pushing it in the open door here, but good quality research, particularly in humanities and social sciences, wasn't being made publicly available because it was behind the payroll. So that's what we were trying to address. So presently we're publishing about 24 titles a year. We primarily publish peer reviewed research and you'll see one that I hope will all interest you and immediately go in and have a look. In fact, many of you might have been contributors to this. So there's a few nodding heads around the audience. So thank you very much. But it's those sorts of works that we're looking to publish. Really good quality, highest quality research monographs. We have a very rigorous peer review process and it's very, very, it's the only traditional part of our model. We really, really want to be publishing work whose alternative outlets would be the very top university presses. That's the level that we're looking for. Okay. But amongst those 118 titles, there are 10 open access textbooks and five works that were created as part of a student and coursework process. And it's those, that area that I want to look at now and think about some of the issues around the open access, the textbooks and then the course content that we've published. Okay. So the textbooks, we've got 10 OA textbooks, three of them are based, are targeted at university level. Two of them at the bottom there in classics which are published in conjunction with Dickinson College in the US and there's a big website that backs though with those publications. One of them is in economics and we've published seven titles now which are targeted specifically at the UK A level students, specific courses and structures within the UK A level. And again, this is primarily where I want to be thinking for the talk now. At the top, we've got one on ethics which is targeted specifically at the philosophy and religious studies courses in A level. We've got one on mathematics which is targeted at the step examination here which is the mathematics exam that sits above A level for people going through to study mathematics. And we've got five in classics, all targeted and you probably can't read but this is like Tacitus, particular segments from these works and those segments correspond to the assigned texts from the ancient civilization course for A level. So these are really, really specifically targeted at A level courses. This is would be the sort of the homepage for these and I'll just quickly briefly show you what happens there. We've got free editions, we've got a PDF reader, online PDF reader, there's HTML, there's a PDF which is free to download. We also have some EPUBs and MOBIs which we're charging for and we've got paper and hardback editions which again we charge for and we can talk about why we do that et cetera later if anybody's interested. But the free editions of our textbooks are like that. On the more recent books we've also got XML which can be downloaded for free as well. We have a facility called OBB customized which allows anybody to come in and customize the title that can be mixed and matched across ourselves or other content can be brought in and we can republish that as whoever wants so that that facility is there. I've got, on all the titles there's a viewing statistic and so here in this case it's saying viewed just over 43,000 times and there's a little details button there that if anybody's interested can go through and it gives a much more detailed breakdown of where the book has been visited. So by a book visit I mean somebody's gone to the PDF reader, downloaded the PDF, gone to the HTML. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. And then finally for these classics books and this is one of these reuse components where open access is not just about free to read but it's free to reuse. And so here is the situation where there is in the classics community there's a group, a website called the Classics Library which is a huge wonderful resource where teachers are sharing their content and the Stephen Jenkins who runs that said could he upload these books through a WordPress site onto the Classics Library. So here is the version of that uploaded onto there and of course along with that comes commentary functions and the ability for teachers to come in and supplement or compliment the work in some cases adding videos that complimented it and other cases comments and clarifications and things like that. So here's a really reuse example where the book's being picked up and it's being put up onto another website and engaged with the broader teacher community. So I wanted to think a little bit and we'll come back to that because this for us and what we're recognizing is that that level of engagement is hugely important for the uptake and the use of the work. It needs to be coming into a community. It's no good just us putting up stuff and saying look at CCBY. You know one's got to connect it as well and so that's something which one of the reasons really an excitement of being here is to think about how this high quality content what could or should we be doing not just with textbooks more generally to increase the engagement and the reuse of the work because that is a really important power of what CCBY provides. So here's usage stats for the seven textbooks. So these again all A level textbooks and you can see that the online readership is you know in the 40s of thousands now you know student enrollment for these courses is quite small in the you know one one and a half thousand. So there's a lot of engagement going on here and if we break that down a little bit we've aggregated to talk about usage statistics we've aggregated statistics from a number of different platforms that we're aware of which are hosting this work. So you can see actually the Classics Library is a huge source of traffic for this work. So it's really really been important that upload by them third party upload reuse of it has been hugely important for the engagement of this work with that with the community. We've got our own OBP PDF reader HTML reader PDF downloads Google Books is sitting there again another important source of traffic across all areas. The discovery and use of those works on Google Books has been important. In addition is a primarily French platform and I've got World Reader it's a little tiny percentage in this particular case but World Reader is a wonderful service providing 2G technology for reading books through Africa so that they can be read on mobile telephones. Now you try and read a textbook on a 2G you know it's a pretty miserable reading experience. The fact that people are engaging in doing it shows how much need there is because you know if there was any other option they wouldn't be choosing to read it on 2G. By country you can see there are Classics Books primarily the United Kingdom. Got to look at the time. United Kingdom dominates as you'd expect these are targeted for the UK audience but you know the US is quite large there. We've got another another you know quite a lot of the rest of the world which is engaged with these works one way or another presumably not because they're sitting A-level exams in June and so and the United States and we'll come back to this in a second to some things like the Open Textbook Initiative I think have been important in bringing the work and making it available in some of these other audiences as well. Okay I just want to compare that with the Ethics Textbook. So the Ethics Textbook is again very very targeted at the syllabuses at A-level and actually the stats are really dramatically different here. In fact it's the United States that has picked up on that. So what I should say is that these books because they're very high-level books for a school level they're actually also being adopted at the first year university level in the US. And so what we're seeing here is that actually that Ethics Book and again I suspect it's because of things like the Open Textbook Initiative that those are being made aware and teachers are engaging with them and recognizing those works and beginning to adopt them. So that's a higher proportion than the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom I think on reflection we probably haven't connected to that teacher community as well as we did with the Classics works and that's something that we now need to go away and really think about and any advice would be warmly welcomed. How do we engage with that same community for the Ethics as we were doing with the Classics? Because it's looking like we're not quite making that hit here as we could have been doing. Okay, if we add to the stats sales data one begins to get some process towards a business model here. So you can see that on the whole sales have been around the 1,000 mark, 1,000, 2,000. Now we're very happy and comfortable with that. So it costs us about three and a half thousand, four thousand pounds to produce the book and then with some overheads on top of that we would need to be covering about five and a half thousand, five thousand pounds something like that to cover our average costs. So if we're making, if our markup is around six pounds of book something like that, we're going to need to make sales of about 800 to 1,000 to really start breaking even. And we're doing that with these textbooks. So that's something that I would just want to put down here is there is a business model here that can sustain the production of this content through the sale of the printed works. If we look, I've got down the side, if we've got the conversion rates down there, you know, you guys are used to digital marketplaces. It's not uncommon to have conversion rates at about one and a half, two percent when one's got free content and one's trying to sell premium content on there. If you look at our model in the same way, then we've got the free versions and we're trying to sell the paper versions to cover our costs. These conversion rates are high in that sort of online world if you put it in that online area. So people do want printed versions of free open access textbooks and there is a business model there to be able to sustain that. That's able to sustain it in classics. Now classics doesn't have the biggest student base. So, you know, in some of the subjects that have a much bigger student base, there's clearly more potential there. OK, so just quickly summarizing that bit, as far as OA textbooks are concerned, we're getting a lot of readers. There's a lot of engagement with the work at the readership level. Relatively high conversion rates. It looks like there's a sustainable business model there. We, well, engagement with teachers in third parties and platforms I think is really, really important and something that we are really looking to work on and think about how to develop because that's really how the work starts getting a life of its own is through that sort of engagement. Any advice, any thoughts about how we could be doing that better would be really welcomed. To date, we've had very little use of the OPP customized and what use we've had has not really been structural changes. It's been more cosmetic changes. And so thinking about how people would engage with the content to redevelop it, to take it, to own it, to use it for their own purposes, that's something that we haven't yet seen and we're thinking about how to push that through. Clearly, things like the open textbook libraries, Google Books, these big platforms of discovery are clearly very, very important. As far as some of the difficulties are concerned, the open access, the textbook market in the UK is sewn up by a very cosy relationship between the examination boards and their publishing partners. And so some of the difficulties that we face is that the examination boards give accreditation status to specific providers. Presumably, there is some money transfer that goes one way or another, it is associated with that. And in some cases, teachers don't feel obliged to take the accredited one because they feel that that's the one that will prepare the students the most. So there is a very, very cosy relationship that's developed and I think I would really encourage as a movement, we don't have that K-12 movement in the same way here as we've seen in the US and thinking about how to break that relationship and free that relationship up, I think is really, really important. So for example, the timing of the course content, the actual, I said that many of those classics books were targeted at specific texts. Those texts are known by the examination board, I think about 18 months beforehand, but they're not released to the teachers or to anybody except the private partner that they've made until about nine months before. So to get those books together, you once got to scamper fast, which is not a good way of doing things. So an easy when would be just to say, ask them to make that announcement another year earlier and give the teacher community and the academic community time to develop the resources for it. And finally, just I've been given a three minute warning and these are gonna be long minutes. I'll talk very fast and it'll extend. Commissioning content, we've got a business model that covers costs. We do offer authors royalties, not all of them take it, but we do offer royalties to authors and the royalties are in the low thousands. Now that's not enough to buy you out a job to go and write a book. So if it was gonna do commissioning, one's got to think more carefully or one's got to think if one's gonna have a systematic provision of open access resources, we've got to have another way of coordinating teachers to make sure that we are always providing the content as required. So some sort of coordination device is required to be attracting and assigning works. But there's lots of authors out there who want to do this, not for money, but because they believe in education. And so harnessing those would be valuable. I've got two and a half minutes left. One minute I'm told. Okay, I just wanna talk quickly about the other part of it which is we've got three works that were created as part of the teaching environment. So the first of these was a translation of Dennis Diderot's Ramuse Nephew. It's a beautiful translation by two Oxford academics, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman. The editor wanted to have a lot of biographical and musical footnotes because there's a lot of references that present readers might know. And so they worked with Pascal Duk at the conservatoire in Paris and recorded as part of the program for the musicians and the recorders and the directors. And as part of the student program was to create 14 tracks for that, which we've then embedded in the book and I do have the book, but embedding music into paper is difficult, but we've just got little QR codes so that you can play it on your telephone. But of course all the digital ones, it's all embedded in there. And all that music has been created CCBY so it can be uploaded, hadn't been recorded before most of this. So that's one example. Then Caroline Warman, you'll see there, went on and worked with an anthology of works from the Enlightenment about tolerance. Now this was a direct response to the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. And the French 18th century, French literary society brought out a pamphlet of Enlightenment writings about tolerance. Caroline Warman saw that and said, we should translate it. She took it back and made it and assigned it as the translation course for the second year French students in Oxford. So 100 students plus their tutors then spent the first term translating this work, which was brought out then in time for the first year anniversary in the January 2016, it was then released then. So this was hugely, this was a huge engagement. All the students really engaging in this. And I think it was a very productive educational experience for all involved. And of course it got picked up by the newspapers of the Guardian and the BBC and things like that all started reporting about how Oxford students were responding to the Charlie Hebdo attack. So it was a very positive experience I think for all involved. So much so that it inspired one of her colleagues to do a similar thing about anthologies, about the idea of Europe for the Enlightenment. All again in this case targeted, it came out in three different languages in English, German and French. And the releases were targeted for the elections. There was the national elections in France and in Germany and there was a Brexit vote here that some of you might remember. And so this was brought out in time for those to try and bring through and reinforce what the underlying concept of Europe was. In a way, it was a coordinated effort across a bunch of universities and students across Europe to try and reinforce the very processes that they were doing. Again, an extremely powerful learning process for all those involved. Okay, minus one minute. So I'm talking backwards but some quick lessons here students do wonderful things if you give them good tasks and good direction. The second is that it's catching. Once you've done it, you wanna do it again because it works so well. All of those projects worked really well because the primary academic behind it was deeply engaged with it. And their credibility and their academic rigor was going to be lying on the final work. And I think that was really important. It really engaged the students because there was deep involvement by the academics involved. And of course, in this day and age if you're gonna get academics to put that much effort into it, you've gotta reward them. And so there needs to be some recognition system for that type of process in the promotion structure. Caroline Warman was awarded the teaching excellence, teaching engagement awarded Oxford because of the work that she'd done on the tolerance volume. Okay, so that's it. There's some contact details for both open book and for me and a quick plug, the person who creates all our digital content is going back to Italy and we're looking for another one. So anybody who knows anybody who wants to work doing that sort of thing, please tell them to get in touch. Such a fantastic presentation, Rupert. Thank you very much for sharing all that with us. Lots to take away about open textbooks, about open business models. Again, I'm inspired that there are people out there that are making, creating and sharing open content. Their actual job and paying the bills with it. I think this is incredibly encouraging. So despite you almost self-censoring yourself as regards timing, we've got plenty of time for questions. So do please, if there's anybody in the audience who has got a question that they would like to ask, please raise your hand. Right at the back there. I'm afraid I can't see who that is. I'm sorry if you could start with letting us know your name and where you're from. It's Anna Thomas-Quinn, I'm from the Open University. Hi there. Hello. I'm interested in the translation initiatives that you have presented at the end and what was the cost of getting those books published through your company for the teachers or for the institutions and how was that funded? So as far as the direct publishing costs was about the same as the others. In fact, we ended up doing quite a lot more work because we put links through to the original content. So the translations were there but then within OBP we then linked it back to the original content so you can travel from there. So there was a little bit more work in there so it was probably a little bit more expensive than what I was saying but it's in the order of about 4,000 pounds. It cost us to be able to produce those works. As far as what the... Again, what we've got is a model that says if you have grants, then please apply for them. I think that we got a grant, but I can't remember if it was a full grant or not. I probably should know. From the 18th century French Literature Society that put some money in. So there were contributions that came through but I would have to check whether they were full contributions or not but it's that sort of order. We just ask for people to apply for whatever they can and we take whatever we can. But if it's 100 pounds, we say thank you very much. If it's 1,000 pounds, we still say thank you very much. If it covers the whole cost, we still say thank you very much. But it's not a requirement, it's not part of it. We're not saying we will only do this if you come up with some money. I mean, I guess I could just say there's three strands to our business model. The one is those grants that comes about a third of our net income comes from that. We get about a third of our net income from the sales of printed works. And we have a library membership scheme that academic libraries join up to. It's about 300 pounds a year. There's some benefits that go with that but that supports also what we do and that's about a third of our income stream as well. Have we got any further questions from the floor? It looks like people are realizing that the bar is in fact open. I, however, have a final question. Have you come across the work of Martin Eve at Open Lib Hums? Absolutely. Do you work with those guys? Yes, yes, we do. At present, the Open Library of the Humanities is not doing books. They have a, originally when they set up, I'm not sure if the plan has changed, it was to involve four publishers in book publishing, of which one of them was us. And in fact, we've published a book by Martin Eve. So one of our works is by him. So yes, fantastic. Exactly the community that we need to be building and working with. A lot of really encouraging work in Open Access and Open Publishing, especially in the humanities and social science, where the research culture is around the monograph. I'm just rambling and asking my own questions. I could very easily do this in a different room and let you guys go. So I'd like once again to thank Sam and to thank yourself for two excellent and inspiring talks to close the conference on. So thank you very much for that. Could be an usual way. We've now got a short.