Open Access Week 2024
by Catherine Cocks, PhD, Director, Syracuse University Press
“Community over Commercialization” is the theme for Open Access Week this year—and the SU Libraries and SU Press are both helping to build a scholarly publishing community centered on equitable access for all. In the spring of 2023, the Libraries subscribed to the Path to Open collection at the same time that SU Press signed up to make some of its e-books available through this pilot program. This innovative initiative comes from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in partnership with the University of Michigan Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and JSTOR. It aims to create a sustainable means of making humanities and social science monographs free to all readers.
Here's how it works: participating university presses (more than forty as of fall 2024) offer e-book editions of their forthcoming titles to JSTOR. Using a carefully designed rubric, JSTOR selects about 300 each year and offers this collection of e-books to libraries. If enough libraries choose to subscribe, the books convert to open access after three years. Meanwhile, JSTOR pays presses $5,000 per title to help them recover production costs and to cover lost sales. Print editions continue to be available for sale.
Notice what’s not here: author fees!
Path to Open keeps resources circulating within the scholarly publishing community, from libraries to the aggregator to the publishers, while broadening access to humanities and social sciences research. All can read and all can publish without facing financial barriers. The program is designed to support bibliodiversity by enabling small publishers to join together and offer a sizeable collection of open-access books to libraries.
And the program favors community over commercialization in other ways, too. Path to Open has a Community Advisory Committee made up of librarians, university press publishers, and scholars. The committee’s charge is to guide the pilot and ensure that the program remains responsive to the needs and values of the community.
So far, ten of SU Press’ titles have been accepted into the Path to Open collection. These titles address urgent contemporary issues like peace-building and alleviating poverty. They are:
- The Urgency of Indigenous Values, by Syracuse University professor Phil Arnold
- Beyond Othering: A Gandhian Approach to Conflict Resolution in India and Pakistan, by Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra and Seema Shekhawat
- Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece, by Dmitri Soudias
- Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces, by Taliyan Suciyan
- Erasure and Tuscarora Resilience in Colonial North Carolina, by David La Vere
- Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda, by Maha Abdelmegeed
- The Logic of Cooperation in Autocracies: Political Opposition in the Third Yemeni Republic, by Jens Heibach
- The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey, by Gizem Zencirci
- Mad Scholars: Reclaiming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy, edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai
- Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, edited by J. Michael Ryan and Helen Rizzo