Open Access and the Book

With the rise of open access initiatives around the globe, academics and university presses are exploring what it means to make a book open access while also ensuring that the book still serves its intended purpose. Ideally, Open Access includes some rights that allow others to reuse the scholarship at least for noncommercial educational purposes.

Over the last twenty years, open access publishing in the scientific disciplines is commonplace. Yet the practices for open access publishing in the humanities are still developing.

Monographs, or academic books that present a sustained argument on a research question, have long served as the foundation of academic publishing in the humanities. Traditionally published as print books by university presses, monographs are often expensive to produce and to buy.

Publishing open access books yields a variety of benefits for both the reader and the author. This exhibit explores those benefits as well as the tensions that exist between open access and traditional publishing.