Michigan State University Press continues its commitment to grow Open Access (OA) programs for scholarly works. The press signed its first open access agreement in 2021 with the Read Michigan Program, a statewide e-book initiative designed to enhance information accessibility and promote equity among Michigan residents. Since then, it has joined the Big Ten Academic Alliance Open Books Initiative, which features collections in gender and sexuality studies and Indigenous North America. BTAA is also in the process of creating OA collections in African, Asian, and Hispanic American identities; health disparities and disability culture; and human environmental impact.
MSU Press also participates in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, which opens carefully curated academic e-books after a three-year embargo period.
MSU Press Director Elizabeth Demers said the focus on OA and OA funding will continue to grow. “Open Access is a key part of our mission. Because it increases readership of our books, it is the most effective way to provide equitable access to publishing for authors who do not have access to funding.”
The Read Michigan program was a cooperative effort between the Library of Michigan and the presses of Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University.
Read Michigan Success
The Read Michigan program offers books about Michigan or by Michigan authors, free of charge. They can be accessed by Michigan residents through an online portal. Through this portal, MSU Press books have been viewed a total of 4,766 times since the program started in 2021. The program has resulted in 22,862 views of books overall. Lansing and East Lansing residents are among the largest pool of users of the portal, with over 7,000 sessions logged between the two cities.
The highest usage by city
| City | Sessions |
| Detroit | 6,369 |
| East Lansing | 5,047 |
| Lansing | 2,815 |
| Ann Arbor | 2,234 |
New Open Access Projects
The press has begun working with individual authors to open monographs outside of these programs, where grant funding and other subventions allow. The first project is Race and Environmental Justice in the Era of Climate Change and COVID-19, edited by Tatiana Konrad, published with the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Where to find MSU Press OA Titles
MSU Press OA Books
Below are examples of different open access books from MSU Press.
Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA)
Confessions of a Presidential Speechwriter
By Craig R. Smith
Published: 2014
An avid high school debater and enthusiastic student body president, Craig Smith seemed destined for a life in public service from an early age. As a sought-after speechwriter, Smith had a front-row seat at some of the most important events of the twentieth century, meeting with Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon, advising Governor Ronald Reagan, writing for President Ford, serving as a campaign manager for a major U.S. senator’s reelection campaign, and writing speeches for a contender for the Republican nomination for president. Life in the volatile world of politics wasn’t always easy, however, and as a closeted gay man, Smith struggled to reconcile his private and professional lives. In this revealing memoir, Smith sheds light on what it takes to make it as a speechwriter in a field where the only constant is change. While bouncing in and out of the academic world, Smith transitions from consultantships with George H. W. Bush and the Republican caucus of the U.S. Senate to a position with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. When Smith returns to Washington, D.C., as president and founder of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, he becomes a leading player on First Amendment issues in the nation’s capital. Returning at long last to academia, Smith finds happiness coming out of the closet and reaping the benefits of a dedicated and highly successful career.
Let Burn
By Rachel K. Wentz
Published: 2013
In 1985, desiring a meaningful, high-paced career in public service, Rachel Wentz left her university studies to become a firefighter/paramedic. Only the eighth woman hired by the Orlando Fire Department, a highly competitive department steeped in tradition, Wentz excelled, completing an AS in Fire Science, a master’s in public administration, and numerous specialized training courses to prepare her for an administrative position within the department. Wentz spent eleven years with OFD, experiencing a career that was every bit as exciting and challenging as she had sought. A moving, candid, and eloquent memoir, Let Burn recounts her experiences as a firefighter/paramedic, during which time she witnessed aspects of life and death few people are privy to, experiences that shaped her as a professional and as a person. From the rigorous demands of training to the extraordinary calls Wentz responded to, Let Burn details the gratifying aspects of the field, but also demonstrates the precarious nature of the job: a heated altercation at the scene of an industrial fire leads to Wentz losing almost everything she’s worked for and the dramatic end of a storied career. In vivid detail, Let Burn provides a firsthand glimpse into the hidden world of firefighting and emergency medicine.
Short Leash
By Janice Gary
Published: 2013
Janice Gary never walked alone without a dog – a big dog. Once, she was an adventurer, a girl who ran off to California with big dreams and hopes of leaving her past behind. But after a brutal rape, her youthful bravado vanished, replaced by a crippling need for safety. When she rescues a gangly Lab-Rottweiler pup, Gary is sure she’s found her biggest protector yet. But after Barney is attacked by a vicious dog, he becomes a clone of his attacker, trying to kill any dog that comes near him. Walking with Barney is impossible. Yet walking without him is unthinkable.
After years of being exiled by her terror and Barney’s defensiveness, Janice risks taking her dog to a park near the Chesapeake Bay. There, she begins the messy, lurching process of walking into her greatest fears. As the leash of the past unravels, Barney sheds the defensive behaviors that once shackled him and Gary steps out of the self-imposed isolation that held her captive for three decades. Beautifully written, Short Leash is much more than a “dog story” or a book about recovering from trauma. It is a moving tale of love and loss, the journey of a broken soul finding itsway toward wholeness.
Fulcrum Package
Race and Environmental Justice in the Era of Climate Change and COVID-19
Edited by Tatiana Konrad
Published: 2025
Informed by transdisciplinary research in social and environmental justice, Race and Environmental Justice in the Era of Climate Change and COVID-19 is a contribution to the scholarly discourse as well as a form of activism for environmental, climate, and health justice. Using race and Indigeneity as an analytical lens, the book explores how justice in the era of climate change and COVID-19 is envisioned, depicted, and achieved. With a focus largely on humans and environments, its explorations of (in)justice illustrate the wide health and safety gaps between individuals, communities, and even nations living under different environmental conditions. The volume also moves beyond the human toward justice for all beings. This book foregrounds voices from world communities, provides solutions to environmental and health crises, and advances environmental justice.
Read Michigan Package
Absentee Indians and Other Poems
By Kimberly Blaeser
Published: 2002
Absentee Indians and Other Poems evokes personal yet universal experiences of the places that Native Americans call home, their family and national histories, and the emotional forces that help forge Native American identities. These are poems of exile, loss, and the celebration of that which remains. Anchored in the physical landscape, Blaeser’s poetry finds the sacred in those ordinary actions that bind a community together. As Blaeser turns to the mysterious passage from sleeping to wakefulness, or from nature to spirit, she reveals not merely the movement from one age or place to another, but the movement from experience to vision.
Deadly Voyage
By Andrew Kantar
Published: 2009
This is the harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1966, the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell was caught in a deadly storm on Lake Huron. Waves higher than the ship crested over it, and winds exceeding sixty miles per hour whipped at its hull, splitting the 603-foot freighter into two giant pieces. Amazingly, after the bow went down, the stern blindly powered itself through the stormy seas for another five miles! Twenty-eight men drowned in the icy waters of Lake Huron, but one sailor—26-year-old Dennis Hale—miraculously survived the treacherous storm. Wearing only boxer shorts, a lifejacket, and a pea coat, Hale clung to a life raft in near-freezing temperatures for 38 hours until he was rescued late in the afternoon of the following day. Three of his fellow crewmates died in his raft.
In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar recounts this tale of tragedy and triumph on Lake Huron. Informed by meticulous research and the eyewitness details provided by Hale, and illustrated with photographs from the Coast Guard search and rescue operation, Kantar depicts one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history.
Eight Mile High
By Jim Ray Daniels
Published: 2014
In these linked stories, the constants are the places—from Eight Mile High, the local high school, to Eight Miles High, the local bar; from The Clock, a restaurant that never closes, to Stan’s, a store that sells misfit clothes. Daniels’s characters wander Detroit, a world of concrete, where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem. Even when they leave town—to Scout camp, or Washington, DC, or the mythical Up North, they take with them their hardscrabble working-class sensibilities and their determination to do what they must do to get by. With a survival instinct that includes a healthy dose of humor, Daniels’s characters navigate work and love, change and loss, the best they can. These characters don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves, even when they stumble. They dust themselves off and head back into the ring with another rope-a-dope wisecrack. These stories seem to suggest that we are always coming of age, becoming, trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in this world, attempting to figure out a way to forgive ourselves for not measuring up to our own expectations of what it means to lead a successful, happy life.
Minong
By Timothy Cochrane
Published: 2009
Minong (the Ojibwe name for Isle Royale) is the search for the history of the Ojibwe people’s relationship with this unique island in the midst of Lake Superior. Cochrane uses a variety of sources: Ojibwe oral narratives, recently rediscovered Jesuit records and diaries, reports of the Hudson’s Bay post at Fort William, newspaper accounts, and numerous records from archives in the United States and Canada, to understand this relationship to a place. What emerges is a richly detailed account of Ojibwe activities on Minong—and their slow waning in the latter third of the nineteenth century.
Piece by piece, Cochrane has assembled a narrative of a people, an island, and a way of life that transcends borders, governments, documentation, and tidy categories. His account reveals an authentic ‘history’: the missing details, contradictions, deviations from the conventions of historical narrative—the living entity at the intersection of documentation by those long dead and the narratives of those still living in the area. Significantly, it also documents how non-natives symbolically and legally appropriated Isle Royale by presenting it to fellow non-natives as an island that was uninhabited and unused.
The War of 1812 in the Old Northwest
By Alex R. Gilpin
Published: 2012
This engaging narrative history deftly illustrates the War of 1812 as it played out in the Old Northwest — Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and bordering parts of Canada. From the stirrings of conflict in the area beginning as early as the 1760s, through the Battle of Tippecanoe, and to Michigan Territory’s role as a focal point in prewar preparation, the book examines the lead-up to the war before delving into key battles in the region. In this accessible text, Gilpin explores key figures, dates, and wartime developments, shedding considerable light on the strategic and logistical issues raised by the region’s unique geography, culture, economy, and political temperament. Battles covered include the Surrender of Detroit, the Siege of Fort Meigs, and the battles of River Raisin, Lake Erie, the Thames, and Mackinac Island.
Woman in the Wilderness
By Nancy Bunge
Published: 2010
Woman in the Wilderness is a collection of letters written between 1832 and 1892 to and by an American woman, Harriet Wood Wheeler. Harriet’s letters reveal her experiences with actors and institutions that played pivotal roles in the history of American women: the nascent literate female work force at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts; the Ipswich Female Seminary, which was one of the first schools for women teachers; women’s associations, especially in churches; and the close and enduring ties that characterized women’s relationships in the late nineteenth century. Harriet’s letters also provide an intimate view of the relationships between American Indians and Euro-Americans in the Great Lakes region, where she settled with her Christian missionary husband.