UMass Boston

UMass Boston faculty will soon have new opportunities to publish their books as open access through innovative agreements led by Healey Library, making scholarship freely available to readers around the world while raising the visibility of the university's research.

For years, Healey Library has helped faculty publish journal articles as open access, allowing anyone to read their research without a subscription. Now, the library is extending that support to books, an area where affordable open access options have been far more limited.

Steve Smith, associate university librarian for collections and discovery services, said the new agreements grew out of conversations with faculty members who wanted the same open access support for books that already exists for journal articles.

"We're really trying to promote open access and open scholarships. So it's sort of moving away from us paying for access or to own things and rather using our resources to make the things that our faculty are producing open to everyone,” Smith said.

The first agreement with Cambridge University Press Open EBA combines access to Cambridge e-books with a flexible fund that can be used to support open access book publishing. UMass Boston is the first institution in North America to participate in the program and only the second worldwide, following the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

"I've been getting a lot of requests from faculty here that they appreciate the journal articles are able to publish open access,” Smith said. “But they want to do that for their books, too, and how they do that is something I've been talking with publishers about.”

The agreement is one of the first of its kind in North America, following an earlier pilot project in Europe. Smith said it represents a model that better fits institutions like UMass Boston.

"We're a medium-sized public institution," Smith said. "The research focus is more social sciences, and the humanities, which means more of a focus on books in some ways."

A second recently finalized agreement, DeGruyter's eBound UPLOpen program, expands those opportunities even further by allowing faculty who publish with dozens of participating university presses to receive support for open access book publishing. This agreement brings together more than 50 university presses, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Rutgers, the University of California Press, and the University of Massachusetts Press. The expanded network reflects many of the presses where faculty most frequently publish their books.

Making books openly available benefits both authors and readers. Faculty gain broader visibility for their work, while researchers, students, policymakers, and community members anywhere in the world can access scholarship without subscription barriers.

"With these agreements, people all over the world can access the work,” Smith said. “There's a social justice and equity issue in this as well as not just making our scholarship available to the wealthiest people, but to everyone.”

Open access can also increase the impact of a faculty member's work.

"More access for books means more citations and helps faculty promote their scholarship," Smith said.

For many faculty members, publishing a book represents years of research and one of the defining achievements of an academic career. Smith said supporting that work has been especially meaningful.

"They want their book to be read," Smith said of faculty authors. "I think that's just partly why our faculty have been coming to us about this; it just feeds into the mission and the ethos of UMass Boston."

While the agreements are designed to benefit faculty authors directly, Smith said they also strengthen the university's growing research profile.

"Our research focus is leveling up and these agreements help shine more light on that by highlighting what we're doing and making it much more visible," he said.