KU Leuven Libraries Artes has signed up for Sidestone Press’s library program. Sidestone Press is an academic publishing house founded by scholars, for scholars. They have one clear ambition: to make scientific information available to all. Through their digital e-book library they provide free online reading worldwide (in HTML format). Researchers and students affiliated with KU Leuven can now also freely download the PDF format of all publications and buy a print copy with 25% discount. By joining the library program we also further support their mission to continue to provide free access to their books worldwide.

Sidestone Press mainly publishes in the field of archaeology but they have a growing portfolio in other Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines. All books can be accessed via our library catalogue Limo or directly via the publisher’s website, where KU Leuven users will also see the option to buy a print copy with discount.

Opening the Future is a collective subscription model for OA books. Libraries can sign up for its membership scheme, which implies that they grow their collections and support Open Access at the same time. The objective is to raise small contributions from a large number of academic libraries, so that no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.

How does it work?

A library subscribes to a backlist package of non-OA books offered by a publisher. The publisher makes this backlist package of non-OA books available to subscribers only (in other words: books in this package remain non-OA), but uses the subscription money to publish new books in OA. These new books are thus made available to everyone in OA, benefitting scholars and institutions around the world.

How it started and how it’s going

Opening the Future was launched by the COPIM project: an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits, and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The Central European Press (CEP) piloted this model and was recently joined by the Liverpool University Press. Both programs are funded by  KU Leuven: membership for the  CEP program is financed by KU Leuven Libraries Artes, whereas membership for The Liverpool University Press program is funded via the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA.

In June 2021 it was announced that Opening the Future has been shortlisted as a finalist for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) is the international trade association which represents non-profit scholarly publishing. The winner of the award will be announced during their annual conference on 15-17 September.

Are you interested in publishing your book in Open Access? Did you know that at KU Leuven we have a fund that partially covers the publication costs of OA books published by Leuven University Press? Well, now you know! The KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access welcomes proposals from everyone interested in publishing their book in OA with Leuven University Press. Authors affiliated with KU Leuven typically apply for a subsidy amounting to two-thirds of the OA costs charged by LUP; authors who are not affiliated with KU Leuven can apply for a subsidy up to one-third of the costs. The video below explains every step in the application process. The website also contains detailed information about the procedure.

You can find an overview of all the books published with the support of the fund here, with readership data for every book. We thought carefully about how we wished to display this data and, as is evidenced in another blog post, this is not just one simple number of total online readers. While I recognize that readership data comes with various concerns and difficulties, I nevertheless do think it’s valuable to communicate this data in order to provide both authors and interested users with a transparent and nuanced record of readership information. Moreover, these metrics underline the added value of publishing in Open Access venues, as the numbers clearly show the high impact and wide reach of the publications. Continue reading about readership data.

In order to boost Open Access publications, the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access helps finance OA books published by Leuven University Press. Professor Martin Kohlrausch shares his experiences about publishing his book in OA.

Your book is published open access thanks to the support of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. How did the open access publication process go? What makes open access so attractive for you/your book? Have you thus far noticed that your book reaches a wider audience?

There were mainly two reasons why I decided to go for open access. First, I expected that with open access my book could reach a much broader audience than a print edition and, as its theme, ‘modernity’ is global, also a global audience. Second, I was hoping for a quick ‘absorption’ of the book. Judging from the very high download numbers my expectations have been outmatched. Moreover, these numbers provide me as the author with quite telling insights into where the book is downloaded (and hopefully read). I still believe it is important, however to also have a print edition and to be able to communicate the results of my research the ‘classic’ way.

Whereas academic journals that offer Gold OA options have become widespread in the last decade, the transition to Open Access for academic books is lagging behind, despite the fact that monographs are still the leading publishing format in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In order to boost the publication of OA books, KU Leuven Libraries reserved a substantial part of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access, established in 2018, to help finance OA books published by Leuven University Press (LUP).

We are happy to see that the Fair OA Book Fund is a great success, not only in the amount of books we are able to help publish, but also in terms of the reach of these books which is demonstrated by the readership data that we now share online for each OA book published with the support of the Fund.