image: Direct to Open from the MIT Press view more
Credit: The MIT Press
November 30, 2021 (Cambridge, MA)—The MIT Press today announced that it has reached the fifty percent threshold for participation in the Direct to Open (D2O) initiative, an innovative sustainable framework for open access monographs. Thanks to the early support of participating institutions, the full list of spring 2022 scholarly monographs and edited collections from the MIT Press will now be published open access. The D2O commitment window has also been extended through June 30, 2022.
D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model, where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. Instead of purchasing a title once for a single collection, libraries now have the opportunity to fund them one time for the world through participant fees.
To date, over 160 libraries and consortia from across the globe have committed to support the D2O initiative, including Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; Bryn Mawr College Libraries; Caltech Library; Carnegie Mellon University Libraries; The Claremont Colleges; Emory Libraries; George Mason University; Gettysburg College Library; Grand Valley State University; Johns Hopkins University Libraries; KU Leuven; Loyola Notre Dame Library; Loyola University Chicago; Michigan State University Libraries; MIT Libraries; NYU Libraries; Rockefeller University; Southern Methodist University; Texas A&M University-San Antonio University Library; University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Library; University of Iowa Libraries; University of Maryland Libraries; University of Massachusetts Boston; Healey Library, University of Michigan Libraries; University of Redlands; Armacost Library; University of Tennessee at Martin; University of Toronto Libraries; University of Washington Libraries; and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The Press has also entered into collective action agreements with Big Ten Academic Alliance; Council of Australian University Librarians; Center for Research Libraries; Greater Western Library Alliance; Northeast Research Libraries; Jisc; and Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation. All libraries that have committed to support Direct to Open for 2022 will receive access to all of the titles included in the model for the calendar year.
Thanks to the early commitment of these participating institutions, the MIT Press will publish its spring 2022 scholarly monographs and edited collections open access. The list includes titles from across the arts, humanities, and sciences, such as Treacherous Play by Marcus Carter, From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis by Marco Grasso, Power of Position: Classification and the Biodiversity Sciences by Robert D. Montoya, and Cognitive Robotics edited by Angelo Cangelosi and Minoru Asada. The support of the partner libraries will cover partial direct costs for these and other high quality works.
“As an academic author, I don’t write for royalties as much as for impact,” said Georg F. Striedter, Professor, Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine and MIT Press author. “The goal is to be of use to as many readers as possible—across the world, rich or poor. Therefore I am thrilled that the MIT Press and a consortium of libraries (including my own at UC Irvine) are making it possible for the electronic version of my forthcoming book to be open access. I believe this is the future of academic book publishing, or at least it’s bleeding edge.”
Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, emphasized the Press’s continued commitment to publishing its full 2022 monograph list open access. “In partnership with the D2O member libraries, we are proud to create a sustainable path for open access scholarship,” noted Brand. “We are thrilled to make the Press’s Spring 2022 monograph list openly available and we look forward to working with the wider academic community to fully fund the model and open our fall 2022 list as well.”
To learn more about Direct to Open, or to sign-up to become a participating library, visit direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open or contact Emily Farrell, library partnerships and sales
lead, the MIT Press.
About the MIT Press
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press publications are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design. Direct to Open (D2O) harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship. When successful, the model will open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections (~90 titles per year) from 2022 via recurring participation fees, provide participating libraries with term access to backlist/archives (~2,300 titles) which will otherwise remain gated, and cover partial direct costs for the publication of high-quality works that are also available for print purchase.
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