In 2024 we were fortunate to receive support from more than 250 libraries, a level of commitment that convinced the University of Michigan's Provost Office to convert one-time into continuing funding for the Fund to Mission program. Thank you to the Provost and to all those institutions who showed her that there is real community support from other institutions that benefit from the open access books we publish. While not quite self-sustaining yet, the Fund to Mission program is uniquely promising in open access book publishing at scale because it relies on four pillars of support, as explained in this 2-minute overview video.

The top ten books by usage in 2024 were:

1. Music on the Move
2. Memetic Rhetorics: Toward a Toolkit for Ethical Meming
3. Vidding: A History
4. Writing Workflows: Beyond Word Processing
5. Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism
6. Corpse Crusaders: The Zombie in American Comics
7. Here for the Hearing: Analyzing the Music in Musical Theater
8. The Dictator's Dilemma at the Ballot Box: Electoral Manipulation, Economic Maneuvring, and Political Order in Autocracies
9. A Study of Crisis
10. a tumblr book: platform and cultures

It is encouraging to see that the authors of many of these most-used publications embraced the multimodal affordances of our Fulcrum open-source platform, embedding images, videos, audio files, and interactive features like maps.

Use grew from 2.5 million accesses by 2023 to 4.5 million accesses by end of 2024, as measured by the Book Analytics Service (interactive dashboard here). We added a number of new countries and territories, with 237 reached by the works of over 620 authors. Open access books cannot be published at the expense of quality and a rewarding author experience is essential. A study of UMP authors by intern Brandi Borkosky confirmed a high level of satisfaction, with 93% of respondents likely to recommend UMP to other authors.

With use by robotic AI harvesters growing, it is reassuring to have confirmation that thousands of flesh-and-blood human readers are benefiting from UMP books that are OA. Responses to the pop-up user survey surpassed 10,000 in 2024 and we made a first go at segmenting them in this June 2024 video impact report. Our work included following up with users who offered to talk more, and we heard some inspiring stories from prison educators and community college instructors in the USA and professors and activists internationally, including in many Low and Middle Income Countries. As the US election loomed and then happened in November 2024, we focused on the connections between open access to quality information and democracy with our Dialogues in Democracy collection which already received thousands of uses. This is a theme we plan to keep pursuing in 2025.