Open Access Policy


Our Approach to Open Access

At Lived Places Publishing, authors and their institutions do not pay a fee to publish their work. There are no book processing charges.

The Lived Places Publishing revenue sharing model extends to open access: 5% of each sale is pooled to funding open access titles.

The Cost of Funding Open Access

Every six months we track the average cost of producing the titles we published during that time. This includes all aspects of book production, including the team’s time spent on production tasks. It excludes acquisitions, marketing, and sales costs because of the way effort into these areas often has an effect that reaches beyond single or even specific titles. The average cost to produce those books is then used to determine how many open access titles can be published from the 5% of revenue set aside in the same six-month period.

These six-monthly average production costs are made available here on this open access page for everyone to see. Transparency is the only pathway to trust. Our stance is that a fair revenue sharing model benefits all stakeholders: authors, institutional customers, and individual book purchasers.

Total costs include:

  • Overheads, human resource, and other one-off costs that are shared between titles
  • Direct production costs, including editorial, typesetting, design, etc for each title published

Average production costs do not include any costs associated with general commissioning, marketing, and selling of titles – only those that are involved with the actual production of individual titles.

  • Average Production Cost FY 2023: $2,544 USD per title.
  • Average Production Cost H1 2024: $2,947 USD per title.
  • Amount Committed to Funding Open Access Lifetime: $6,878 USD.

[Last updated Sept 5, 2024] 

If you have any questions about how we calculate our average production costs, please get in touch with us at support@livedplacespublishing.com

Open Access Titles Funded
  1. Advocating for Queer and BIPOC Survivors of Rape at Public Universities by Taylor Waits, Kimiya Factory, and Coreen Hale
  2. Irish University Students with Mental Health Difficulties: Experiences, Challenges, and Supports by Emma Farrell
  3. Getting Out of South Carolina’s Juvenile Justice System: Education for Young Incarcerated Offenders by Kimberly Nolan
Who Can Use Our Open Access Model?

Any of Lived Places Publishing’s authors can opt in to having their book considered for open access publishing. If they opt in, they will forgo royalties on the open access products (print books will still be sold, and royalties will still be payable on these). Titles are published open access on a first in, first out basis, except when the editorial board, comprised of collection editors, feels that a particular title is time-dependent or relevant to a particular issue of the day.