(1 Dec 2021) The MIT Press has reached the fifty percent threshold for participation in the Direct to Open (D2O) initiative, an innovative sustainable framework for open access monographs. As a result of 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.
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.
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