Michigan State University (MSU) Press is the latest press to launch an Opening the Future(OtF) open-access (OA) monograph funding program to open titles in African and diaspora studies.
MSU Press joins OtF’s other publishing partners, Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, which implemented OtF in 2021. Since then, they have published nearly forty OA titles, with funding accrued through the program.
The OtF team said they are delighted to partner with Michigan State University Press and support the press in its publishing goals. Since its founding in 1947, MSU Press has remained committed to its mission of catalyzing intellectual, social, and technological change through its publications. Additionally, the press has been publishing OA titles since 2002 and is eager to expand its OA capacity. Partnering with OtF will support this goal, enabling MSU Press to publish titles that are not only free to read but also free to publish for the authors, ensuring that equitable access to knowledge applies to its creation and dissemination.
The press will achieve this via OtF’s funding model: subscriptions to a selection of a closed backlist are used to fund the OA frontlist. Libraries get unlimited, free access to curated packages of the press’s high-quality backlist, with perpetual access after three years. The Press will use the revenue from membership and subscription fees to fund frontlist titles, making them openly available immediately upon publication. Publishing the OA titles will be a rolling process: as soon as they have the funds to produce a title, they publish the next one in line. The more members they have, the more books they can publish OA.
Subject strength
This partnership will focus on monographs on African and diaspora studies, a subject for which MSU Press is well known. The press wanted to focus on this subject because it is a topic that they are keen to make as widely available as possible and which they feel has broad interest in academia and also within relevant communities.
The press will offer a package containing sixty-six backlist titles from across their relevant lists, covering a broad range of fields, including political and social sciences, history, colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as the arts and literary studies. The library subscription funds will then collectively support the publication of new OA frontlist titles in these same areas.
The team at OtF shared their enthusiasm, stating, “We are delighted with this partnership. We are pleased to expand our work, enabling publishers to open up their monographs to new areas, both geographically and disciplinarily. Since we left our initial pilot phase of the project in mid-2023, we have been consolidating our support for our current publishing partners and continuing to refine and advocate for the model. We are therefore very excited to take another step forward by onboarding a new partner. We greatly look forward to working with MSU Press on this project!”
Elizabeth Demers, the director of Michigan State University Press, said, “We look forward to working with the Opening the Future team on this partnership, through which we’ll be further expanding our OA book publishing program. This will allow us to increase the impact of our African and diaspora studies lists and enable them to reach more of their intended audiences, reinforcing our commitment to fostering equitable access to knowledge for all.”
Tom Grady, OtF work package lead at Copim/Birkbeck, University of London, said, “We’re really excited to be working with MSU Press on this launch. We’ve been running the program for a few years successfully with two publishers, so this is a milestone in seeing the model grow to become a real option for sustaining publishing in areas of research around the world and spanning different cultures. The program helps to remove barriers to publishing as well as barriers to reading, and the possibilities are huge for global dissemination of high-quality scholarship.”
Opening the Future is a funding mechanism developed by the Copim Project, a project funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund to create, implement, and strengthen infrastructure for academy-owned scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences. The organization aims to transform OA publishing by enabling small, mission-led publishing initiatives to flourish on their own terms.
To find out more about Copim, see www.copim.ac.uk.
If you’d like to discuss this announcement, please contact Tom Grady and Kira Hopkins at openingthefuture@copim.ac.uk or Elizabeth Demers, the Michigan State University Press director, at sherbur1@msu.edu.