Open Access Books and Book Articles

(Last updated: 3 June 2026)

This page is about OA books and OA articles in books. There is a separate page with information about OA articles in journals.

Books

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, incl. notes and references. As an indication, current fees are usually in the EUR 7,000-10,000 range (+ VAT/tax if applicable) for an ebook to be published Open Access.

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, 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 current editorial contact at Benjamins to discuss further details.

Articles in books

We 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 (+ VAT/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. When the volume editors of the book inform you that your article has been accepted for publication in their volume, please inform them that you want to make the article Open Access, and that they need to inform their editorial contact at Benjamins about this.

We have started to offer 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.

A note on tax/VAT

We are obliged to add 21% VAT if the invoice is made out to a private person, to a company/institution within the Netherlands, or to a company/institution within the EU that does not provide us with a VAT ID number.