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 Association works to support active learning and productive advocacy for university press initiatives around OA modes of publishing.
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. The results of that study were published in September 2023. Co-principal investigators John Sherer (North Carolina) and Erich van Rijn (California) were joined by research consultants at Ithaka S+R and project staff at AUPresses to gather and analyze data from 26 member presses on 976 OA book titles.
One of the key insights from our study is that print sales can be a significant contributor to offsetting the costs of publishing OA monographs, with median print sales of close to $6000—and (excluding outliers) average sales of nearly $8000. The report looks more closely at disciplinary differences, high-sales outliers, print format choices, and the potential for consumer ebook sales for supporting OA book publishing programs. The research scope did not extend to collecting comparable non-OA monograph data from participants; however, the OA-titles data set has been made freely available as a valuable tool for publishers to study their own lists and sales data.
The joint AUPresses/Association of Research Libraries (ARL)/Association of American Universities (AAU) TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) project, completed its 5-year pilot. More than 150 books were published OA though this innovative program. The partnering organizations published an assessment in August 2023 to close the pilot. This was 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. Several of the TOME funding institutions have decided to continue their commitment to this model of faculty OA book funding, and the partners have continued conversations for a potential future organizational home for TOME.
In an April 2024 Times Higher Ed opinion piece, “For open monographs, collective library subscription is key,” President-elect Anthony Cond (Liverpool) and President Jane Bunker (Cornell) explore unanswered questions arising from the UK Research Excellence Framework’s proposal for opening long-form humanities scholarship and suggest a better model: that of collective subscription, which university presses are already piloting.