Announcing the first Liverpool University Press OA books funded through Opening the Future

Posted by Tom Grady on May 26, 2022 at 0918

The team at Liverpool University Press are thrilled to announce that our Opening the Future library membership programme has reached the threshold needed to begin funding its first two titles, made fully open access through subscribing libraries’ memberships.

Opening the Future is a collaboration between Liverpool University Press and COPIM, with support from LYRASIS and Jisc, and was launched in 2021 to harness the power of collective library funding to support the open access publication of monographs.

The first two books that will be published from the initiative are Empire Found: Racial Identities and Coloniality in Twenty-First Century Portuguese Popular Cultures by Daniel F. Silva, Associate Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies and Director of Black Studies at Middlebury College, and Football and Nation Building in Colombia by Peter J. Watson, an early career Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds. Further titles will be announced soon and advance notice will be given for each title when the subscription threshold is reached.

As a leading international publisher in the field of modern languages, the focus of the Liverpool Opening the Future scheme is to make books that focus on Latin American Studies and Hispanic and Lusophone Studies open access. Libraries purchase gated access to a high-quality digital collection comprising of titles in those fields and LUP utilises the collected revenue from those transactions to publish an entirely open access frontlist in two series.

Words in support of Opening the Future

“It is great news to hear that Empire Found is one of the first titles to be made open access by Opening the Future. The scheme promotes a more equitable, diverse and community-owned publishing system for authors, publishers and libraries, allowing us to be part of a more sustainable OA publishing model.” - Dr Daniel F. Silva, author of Empire Found.

“I am delighted for Football and Nation Building in Colombia to be one of the first titles made open access by the Opening the Future model. This scheme demonstrates productive support for open access publishing in the humanities, allows libraries of all sizes and budgets to support OA monograph publishing in a sustainable way, and for books like mine to become more accessible and widely read.” - Dr Peter Watson, author of Football and Nation Building in Colombia

“We are very pleased to support the Opening the Future program. 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.” - Lidia Uziel, the Associate University Librarian for Research Resources and Scholarly Communication at the University of California

“The University of St Andrews supports the development of a broad and vibrant ecosystem of affordable publishing and is delighted to see the emergence of new and innovative business models. Opening the Future creates a new democratic foundation to support open access monographs, reflecting the challenges facing monograph authors under existing OA models where a ‘Book Processing Charge’ is required. As well as supporting open access book publishing costs, Opening the Future provides perpetual unlimited access to a range of ebooks from the existing back catalogue. It truly is a win-win for all concerned.” - Director & Open Research team, University of St Andrews Library

More Information

For libraries or other institutions that want to support the move to immediate OA, without author-facing charges, more information can be found at lup.openingthefuture.net. For further details on the pricing and structure of the model, see the FAQs and resources web pages or contact OpeningTheFuture@copim.ac.uk.