20 October 2024
Thanks to the financial support of nearly 250 libraries and its parent institution, Michigan’s Fund to Mission program continues to make approximately 60 frontlist U-M Press scholarly ebooks a year immediately free to read and reuse worldwide and reports four million readers
The University of Michigan Press offers the seventh frontlist ebook collection (UMP EBC), the majority of the titles open access (OA). Through collaboration with its parent library and non-profit incubator Lyrasis, the Fund to Mission open access monograph model facilitates the conversion of 75% of the 80 monographs UMP publishes annually to open access without ever requiring inequitable author payments. The UMP Ebook Collection is a collection of over 2,200 of the University of Michigan Press’s scholarly ebooks for sale to libraries, comprehensive since 2011 with more backlist being added every year.
The UMP EBC, in addition to many other collections and distributed publishers, is hosted on Fulcrum. Developed by University of Michigan Library and Press, Fulcrum provides a platform and services for small, mission-driven publishers who want to create both traditional and media-rich books in an open-source environment that is owned by the academy. Accessibility is a core value and design component of Fulcrum, and the platform aims to meet the latest WCAG 2 AA Standards (currently WCAG 2.2 AA) and reports compliance through the platform VPAT as well as collection specific VPATs.
U-M Press partners with the Book Analytics Service to provide usage statistics of open access titles from various platforms. While the versions of record are on Fulcrum, the Press’s open access books are widely available through retailers and platforms including JSTOR, Project Muse, and OAPEN. These OA titles have been used more than 4 million times, with the average title receiving 10,000 total item requests. 63% of UMP EBC usage last year was outside of the US.