Sustainable and Equitable Scholarly Publishing: A New Vision for Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Open Access monograph initiatives in the humanities and social sciences have shown great promise, demonstrating significant usage around the world. At the same time, creating a scalable funding model that prioritizes equity and bibliodiversity remains a formidable challenge. A group of university press directors, academic librarians, and not-for-profit partners have worked together on an initiative to produce a large-scale shift in monograph publishing. In a proposed new model, libraries could license new university press ebooks at an affordable cost; three years after publication, each title would be released openly to the world, increasing equity of access to valuable scholarly content. Our shared goal: a sustainable and equitable Open Access model that will meet the needs of authors, readers, libraries, and university presses. In this session, the presenter will share their perspectives on the Open Access landscape and lead a conversation eliciting feedback on the challenges and opportunities of this new model.