(17 Jan 2023) JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, and a cohort of leading university presses announced today Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.
Launching as a pilot, Path to Open libraries will contribute funds to enable participating presses to publish new books that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication. The initial pilot will produce about one thousand open access monographs. If successful, it will lay the foundation for an entirely new way to fund long-form scholarship while vastly increasing its impact.
Presses have been experimenting with solutions for several years, but have yet to derive a scalable, sustainable approach. Path to Open originated in conversations between presses eager for alternative models and took shape as presses, librarians, and scholars came together, convened by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), to explore and define transformational approaches and how to scale them.
The press release in full is here.
