3 November 2025
Boydell & Brewer has announced the launch of the new Opening the Future (OtF) program to fund open access publishing at the press. In partnership with Fulcrum and Lyrasis, this collaboration aligns with Boydell & Brewer’s commitment to expanding open access publishing in a sustainable way, ensuring that more high-quality content can be made accessible globally.
Boydell & Brewer is an independent academic publisher specializing in the humanities and social sciences, founded over 55 years ago and employee-owned since 2015. They are the first non-University Press to take up the OtF model, opening the pathway for other mission-driven, scholarly publishers. Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, who originally devised OtF said “When we first launched this program as a pilot with one press in 2021 we always hoped that other scholarly publishers would take it up and use OtF to fund more OA books. This partnership between Fulcrum, Lyrasis and Boydell & Brewer is an important step in sustaining and normalizing the model beyond the original project start-up phase”.
The program enables libraries to invest in open content without placing a disproportionate burden on any single institution. It increases their local collection through perpetual, DRM-free access to curated backlist books at discounted prices. Titles available are on medieval history and literature, music, African politics and economics, and film and theatre across the Hispanic, Lusophone, African, and Germanic worlds. The membership revenue is used only to produce new OA monographs, enabling greater equity for authors that don’t have funding of their own.
The backlist books will be hosted on Michigan Publishing’s community-based, open-source Fulcrum platform – seamlessly delivering accessible content into library catalogues. The program is supported by the trusted non-profit library consortium Lyrasis based in the USA, and membership is open to libraries worldwide.
Sharla Lair, Lead Strategist for Open Scholarship at Lyrasis said “Opening the Future offers libraries a practical and strategic way to support open book publishing. Whether joining for the first time or building on existing OA investments, participating libraries contribute to a diverse and resilient scholarly ecosystem. By helping to sustain smaller, mission-driven publishers like Boydell & Brewer, libraries uphold authors’ choice and the long-standing relationships that sustain their disciplines, strengthening both bibliodiversity and the vitality of scholarship.”
Charles Watkinson, Associate University Librarian, University of Michigan Library states: “Non-profit publishers do not have a monopoly on virtue. By committing to values such as financial transparency, perpetual access, and equitable open access for its authors, Boydell & Brewer has shown itself to be a mission-driven publisher that deserves library support. University of Michigan Library is proud to be its partner”.