(apologies for any cross-posting)

With the new year beginning, the Opening the Future (OtF) team at Copim felt the time was right to provide a little round up of 2023, and a look at what 2024 will hold.

Books published through OtF, new members joining, and a milestone

• Both of our participating publishers, CEU Press and Liverpool University Press, published several new OA books in 2023, entirely funded by the OtF membership scheme. LUP were able to publish OA frontlist books contributing to their Hispanic and Lusophone studies collections, while CEU Press’ 2023 new frontlist titles expanded their offerings on the historical, political and cultural context to the Russia-Ukraine war, Eastern European political history, and genocide studies. CEU Press also reached a landmark tenth publication funded this way. 2024 promises to be a busy year at both publishers, with many more fully funded titles forthcoming between them. We thank the participating libraries for enabling this with their support. 
• The number of OtF member libraries in the UK, Europe, Australia and US also grew in 2023, and CEU Press are now contacting early adopting members to encourage them to renew their membership for another 3 years. As each member comes to the end of their 3 year membership they retain perpetual access to their subscribed package, so to give libraries greater choice and relevant titles for their collection, CEU Press created a new subscription package (available to current and new subscribers) called East Meets West, which provides a highly relevant perspective on modern Russian imperialism and its 20th century history. Liverpool University Press will be looking to renew their earliest members too, a little later this year.

OtF news

• OtF hosted several webinars on equitable and sustainable OA book funding, including one with Project MUSE that had 300+ international attendees. We also presented the model and hosted discussion on sustainable funding for OA monographs at the Jisc UKRI Monograph Series of webinars, a National Acquisitions Group (UK) seminar in May, and a workshop at the Norwegian Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in November. Contact us if there’s a burning topic you’d like us to consider running a session about with our network.
• UK library members in particular may be pleased to learn that our collective model is eligible for UKRI funding under the terms of their new policy guidance. We look forward to hearing more from UKRI on the details and continue to collaborate with our colleagues at Copim to understand how it’ll work in practice.

Expanding Participation

• One of our chief aims in 2024 is to expand our publisher participation, while continuing to work closely with our current publishing partners. If you have any recommendations of small/medium sized scholarly presses anywhere in the world that are interested in trialling our collective funding model, please get in touch with us at [log in to unmask]. We’re also always looking to expand library participation and help Liverpool UP and CEU Press open up more scholarship to a global audience, so please check out openingthefuture.net if you want to know more about how your library can increase its own local collection with relevant titles, while simultaneously funding new OA frontlist titles.

Once again, we’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to, or taken an interest in OtF in 2023, and hope you will continue to support us in 2024 as we scale up and contribute to and help steer the developing OA book funding landscape. 

Leveraging the collective contributions of academic libraries worldwide, OtF funds presses to publish new OA monographs, while libraries simultaneously benefit from access to closed content, and no single institution bears a disproportionate burden. For a modest annual fee libraries get DRM-free, unlimited access to a closed-access selection of the press' backlist, with perpetual access after three years. The press then uses the membership revenue solely to produce new OA monographs, moving towards an affordable, sustainable model for academic publishing and creating a collection of OA books that are open for the world. More info: openingthefuture.net

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Tom Grady

Work Package Lead

Opening the Future with Work Package 3 @ COPIM Open Book Futures project

Birkbeck, University of London

Twitter: @ScholTom  |  COPIM on Twitter: @COPIMproject  |  COPIM blog