Comments from current users of Opening the Future

Hear from staff at Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, who have both been using the model since its inception in 2020. 

[INSERT FROM KAT AND ALICE HERE]

"University presses exist to disseminate scholarship.  A majority of university presses have long-standing programmes rooted in the humanities, disciplines for which the monograph remains a significant vehicle both to conceptualise research and to share it.  Repeated narratives of the decline of the monograph ignore the strength of supply, with an unending pipeline of authors driven by a compelling mixture of intellectual hunger and career necessity. They ignore a growing potential audience, as the drive for impact has created ever more urgent and engaging long-form research outputs.  The problem, of course, is the model.  Open access has for some years served to unite authors with wider potential readership for journals but it has not been systematically adopted for books because of the substantial costs arising from length, complexity and curation.  Faced with the possibility of a well-funded, openly available STEM and a closed-access, narrowly available HSS, scholarly book publishers should be willing to explore new models that maximise the audience for the monograph.

Opening the Future, with its realistic acknowledgement of publisher costs and of the realities of library budgets and policies, offers a potentially sustainable model to reform the dissemination of scholarly books.  Liverpool University Press is ideally placed to test that assumption, as a mission-based publisher operating entirely without subsidy or endowment.  If we can make the model work without a financial safety net then it should be possible for any publisher to make it work.  To test the hypothesis behind OtF we have opted to work at series/discipline level.  This has two advantages:  first, it enables us to leverage an existing strength of the Press in the Modern Languages.  We know who to market to, while librarians know that the LUP imprimatur is a guarantee of quality. OA may in time also serve as an editorial differentiator for prospective authors in our chosen field.  Secondly, working at series level allows for more rapid progress than expensive larger collections but also avoids the inefficiency of title-by-title OA. Funding levels for a series OtF are comfortably within library means, while for publishers it is a minor risk but a major opportunity, with the option to scale up if the model gains traction.”

– Anthony Cond, Liverpool University Press

FOR TOM TO ADD - Graph of the money raised over the years