University of Michigan Press hits 2022 open access books target with Fund to Mission program

University of Michigan Press hits 2022 open access books target with Fund to Mission program

Forty books (50%) of the new scholarly books published by the Press in 2022 have open access editions. For 2023, the Press is expanding its commitment to open.

In summer 2022, the University of Michigan Press celebrated the halfway mark of its transition to publishing new scholarly monographs open access. Forty titles are being released with open access editions in 2022 and the target for 2023 is sixty - representing 75% of the Press's annual frontlist.

To learn more about the Fund to Mission program and the progress so far, view this update video:

The target was achieved thanks to a major contribution from the U-M Provost's Office and continuing investments in the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection from over 100 libraries around the world.

“The Fund-to-Mission program is exciting and innovative. It demonstrates the University of Michigan's commitment to scholarly knowledge creation and has made them a leader among champions of openly accessible content. This collaborative funding model brings all stakeholders - libraries, presses, authors, and university leaders - together to chart a course for sustainable scholarly monograph publishing and addresses support for the foundational infrastructure needed for academy-owned scholarly publishing. The libraries of the BTAA were early investors in Fund-to-Mission, and we are pleased to see this first phase of the vision reach fruition. We greet this as another step forward on the pathway toward creating a sustainable and scalable open knowledge ecosystem.”

said Kate McCready, Visiting Program Officer for Academy Owned Scholarly Publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance, congratulating the Press on a successful launch. Spanning 11 US states and 14 campuses, the universities of the Big Ten educate more than half a million students a year and spend $11.5 billion on funded research.