Open Access Books 
(Last updated: 25 March 2026)
How to publish your book Open Access
If you want to publish the electronic edition of your book in Open Access, this can be arranged through payment of a fee.
The OA fee is calculated per project and will depend on the type of book (size, complexity of the formatting, etc.) and the expected revenue from print sales. We cannot provide such a calculation without — at minimum — a full book proposal, including a(n estimated) word count. As an indication, current fees are usually in the EUR 7,000-10,000 range (excl. VAT/tax) for an ebook to be published Open Access. To make a book Open Access that was published several years ago, lower fees apply, depending on the age of the book and the sales revenue to date.
Open Access online-only publication of books (without a print edition) also offers possibilities for publishing materials that are not quite book-length (but too long for a journal article).
We need to be informed of the requirement or desire to publish the ebook Open Access in the book proposal or at the contract stage. At the very (very!) latest, we can still process it if the information is provided at the time when the materials are submitted to us for production; in that case, this should be done through an urgent and separate message to the acquisition editor, not as a side note on the manuscript for the production department. If we have not been informed about Open Access publication in time, and the book has already been announced on our website and to distributors, it is no longer possible to change it to Open Access; in that case, the earliest possibility to change the book to Open Access will be at a minimum of 12 months after publication.
For books we prefer to use the CC BY-NC-ND license, but if you require another license, this can be negotiated; please indicate this in the proposal or when you contact us about Open Access publication.
All book proposals and manuscripts will go through a thorough assessment before acceptance for publication, regardless of whether the publication is or is not going to be Open Access. Open Access books are made available on our own JB e-Platform, through the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and on Google Play, as well as on those other vendor platforms that we have agreements with for e-books in general and that agree to host OA books. For all our books, including Open Access books, we have an archiving solution in place with Portico.
Please contact us at proposalsbenjamins.nl with your Book Proposal, or approach your existing acquisition editor contact to discuss further details.
Articles in books
We now offer the possibility of Open Access publication of individual articles in edited volumes (where the rest of the volume is not Open Access). The OA fee for a single article in a book is EUR 1200 (+ tax if applicable). Please note: to make an article in a book volume Open Access, we need to be informed and have the payment arranged before the materials for the volume are submitted to Benjamins for production. At present, we are not able to make an article in a book Open Access after publication of the book.
We are offering a Read & Publish option to institutions for OA publication of book articles by corresponding authors from their institution. More information will become available shortly; for now, we refer to a poster and presentation we did at OASPA 2025: poster (PDF).
For 'green' Open Access/self-archiving options for articles in books, please see the relevant section of our Rights Policy page.