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Public Funding

Some books, such as those relating to education, public health, political or social advocacy, or scientific research, fulfill a public purpose. Publication of these books using a form of open-access will further their public purpose. The costs of production and release of these books can financed by foundations, charities, political action committees, private individuals, or governments.


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European governments have joined together to fund the digitization and distribution of cultural heritage works through Europeana. Funded by the European Commission and national ministries of culture, Europeana acts as a portal enabling distribution of large numbers of Open-Access e-books. In the US, books created by the federal government belong by law to the public domain, but there's no centralized funding of Open-Access e-books or their distribution.

In developing countries, governments seeking to provide textbooks to large numbers of student will eventually find that producing e-textbooks, released for free, is the only scalable method of providing for their national educational needs. Many states in India, for example, already release their state-published textbooks on an Open-Access basis.

A variation on public funding for Open-Access e-books in the context of academic monograph publishing has been proposed by Frances Pinter. Her idea is for libraries to join together in a cooperative, diverting a fraction of their acquisition budgets to fund the fixed costs of producing new monographs by university and commercial scholarly presses, which would then be made open-access. She estimates that individual libraries could save over 75%, depending on the participation rate.

Another sort of public funding model with a long history of use is the "tip-jar", or more profitably, the pay-what-you want model. Here, the creator urges his audience to leave some money as a "thank you" in return for value received. Doctorow reported receiving over $1200 using a donation box at paypal -- http://www.paypal.com -- which actually did better than his print-on-demand offering.