University of California signs up to Opening the Future program through CDL

Posted by Tom Grady on May 5, 2022 at 1416

CEU Press and Liverpool University Press are pleased to announce that nine University of California (UC) campuses have signed up through the California Digital Library (CDL) to their Opening the Future collective funding programs. Under the terms of the deal, nine University of California campuses will receive unlimited, perpetual access to curated selections of the two publishers’ backlists: the support will enable both publishers to publish new, frontlist books in Open Access (OA) format.

Launched in 2021, Opening the Future is an innovative funding model that can be freely adopted by any publisher: libraries subscribe to access a curated package of backlist books and enhance their local collections, and in doing so their subscription pays for the dissemination of new scholarship, freely available to anyone. This program does not require book processing charges (BPCs) to finance Open Access monograph publishing, and it promotes a business model that enables publishing scholarly monographs without paywalls. The University of California’s participation is an important milestone in the program and underlines the UC’s ongoing strong commitment to opening up access to knowledge globally.

The agreement will provide nine University of California campuses with access to titles on the history of communism, transitions to democracy and Central European history and culture through CEU Press; and books on Hispanic culture and language, literature, theory and history with Liverpool University Press. Project partner LYRASIS is ensuring billing is seamless for the CDL.

CEU Press Executive Chair, Frances Pinter said “We are so pleased that UC has chosen to support our initiative. It is through forward-thinking libraries like these that we are able to move towards an Open Access global collection for all.”

Those sentiments were echoed by Liverpool University Press CEO Anthony Cond, “With nine UC campuses becoming members of Opening the Future we have hopefully reached something of a tipping point - showing that libraries can work together to fund OA collectively, where no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.”

Lidia Uziel, the Associate University Librarian for Research Resources and Scholarly Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said, “We are very pleased to support the Opening the Future program, including these two presses. With this participation, UC libraries enhance their own research collections while simultaneously supporting new OA publications on topics relevant to their research areas. In becoming subscribers, we are supporting a sustainable, open, equitable, diverse, community-owned, and community-governed publishing ecosystem, and promoting publisher-librarian partnerships around Open Access book publishing.”

If you’d like to know more about Opening the Future and how the program can benefit your library, more details can be found on www.openingthefuture.net and contact details for an informal conversation are: Frances Pinter at CEU Press PinterF@press.ceu.edu and Anthony Cond at LUP A.Cond@liverpool.ac.uk.

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