CEU Press Announces Innovative Open Access Funding Model

October 22, 2020

In line with international movements towards making academic content Open Access (OA), both for journals and books, and in keeping with our mission to disseminate quality scholarship widely, CEU Press is launching a new partnership programme with research libraries worldwide. The Opening the Future project is a membership scheme for libraries who can participate either from their OA funds or their acquisitions budgets. This is an alternative to author-facing OA charges for forthcoming books that do not have research funder support. With this pilot scheme CEU Press is introducing a model that will reduce costs to libraries while opening up books to readers around the world.

We know that our books have a wider readership than we can reach through print or gated ebooks. Here’s why….. 

The benefits of OA became evident in the first months of lockdown as many academic presses opened up their ebooks for a period of three months. On Platform MUSE, just one example, CEUP made 279 titles open to anyone with internet access. Our downloads were phenomenal! Books that normally sell only to a few libraries were downloaded over 350,000 times in 129 countries.

CEU Press is grateful for the support for the pilot phase of Opening the Future from the COPIM project, an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits and by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Additional partners include Project MUSE, Lyrasis and OAPEN.

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