14 April 2020
The MIT Press has published its first open access (OA) monographs on the MIT Press Direct platform. Supported by a grant from the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the project is part of a larger initiative to explore alternatives to the traditional market-based business model for professional and scholarly works on specialised subjects.
In 2019, the MIT Press received a three-year $850,000 grant from the Arcadia Fund to perform a broad-based monograph publishing cost analysis and to develop and openly disseminate a durable financial framework and business plan for OA monographs. As part of the project, the Press will also undertake a pilot programme to implement the resulting framework for scholarly front and backlist titles.
The following open access books are currently live on MIT Press Direct, the Press’s institutional e-book platform, with more due to be released in the coming months:
- The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America edited by Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone
- Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation by Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris
- When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence by Ilene Grabel
- The Cybernetics Group by Steve Joshua Heims
- Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics by Harold Abelson and Andrea diSessa
- The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
At the conclusion of the Arcadia grant, the MIT Press will openly share an OA model that the university press community can adopt and adapt.