Material Detail

Beyond the multiple options for creating and disseminating open-access books in new forms, OA monograph publishing projects are driven by the value of releasing scholarship in forms that are free and available to anyone.

We are in an era of significant change in the United States and Canada for publishing open-access (OA) scholarly monographs. Since most monographs are published by university presses, and most copies are purchased by research libraries, this article focuses on that community. The bulk of OA titles are older or out-of-print works, many funded by the Mellon/NEH Humanities Open Book (HOB) program, which enabled free access to backlist scholarly works. Under that program, about 2,500 books from 28 publishers are now OA. Meanwhile, new OA-only book publishers are, together with traditional scholarly presses and libraries, exploring innovative business models and technologies.

Precise numbers of new OA books are hard to calculate. In a 2017 survey, the Association of American University Presses found that 18 of 61 reporting members (out of 140 total member presses) had published new OA books.1 A few examples include MIT Press, which published its first OA book in 1995 and continues today with MIT Press Open.The University of Michigan Press and Library launched Digital Culture Books in 2006 and now publish new OA books on their library-supported platform, Fulcrum. Athabasca University Press was the first (2007) OA publisher in Canada, with a current list of more than 140 titles. In 2015 the University of California Press began the Luminos OA book program, which now includes more than 60 titles. Other recent examples include Concordia University Press (2016) and the University of Cincinnati Press (2017). Lever Press (founded in 2014) is unusual as it is governed and funded by a membership group of some 50 liberal arts colleges.2 In addition, many other publishers have released an occasional OA title, often by posting a free downloadable PDF on their websites.

This will delete the comment from the database. This operation is not reversible. Are you sure you want to do it?

Thank you for reporting a broken "Go to Material" link in MERLOT to help us maintain a collection of valuable learning materials.

If you feel this material is inappropriate for the MERLOT Collection, please click SEND REPORT, and the MERLOT Team will investigate. Thank you!

You are being taken to the material on another site. This will open a new window.

Do not show me this again