The Association views Open Access (OA) to scholarship as an ideal fully in line with our mission, and a practice that must align with our values. The majority of member presses continue to explore OA publishing projects, and the Association works to support active learning and productive advocacy around OA modes of publishing.
The Open Access Committee is charged with developing resources, recommendations, and knowledge for our global community. To this end, the committee has published a draft resource list, curated to help university presses navigate the many different models, developing infrastructures, and growing expectations in OA publishing. The Committee has also continued inviting representatives from OA initiatives, such as OASPA, the Books Analytic Dashboard, and OpenStax, to present on their work to the committee. In 2022, on the heels of a new US Office of Science and Technology Policy memo outlining expansive OA expectations for federally funded research, the Committee coordinated a community hangout to share information, ideas, and concerns.
The Association was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the impact of OA editions on print sales of scholarly books, and work continues on the analysis and reporting of data collected through that grant project.
The joint AUPresses/ARL/AAU TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) project, reached its final pilot year. More than 150 books have been published or are under contract through this program. As the pilot comes to a close, the partnering organizations have pursued an assessment of the program’s goals. As a first step, AUPresses sponsored a study of the costs that participating publishers incurred in publishing TOME books. A qualitative look at the experiences of stakeholder groups with TOME projects, with an eye towards continuing a TOME-like model of funding OA HSS scholarship, is expected to be published in mid-2023.