The MIT Press has released a report on the development of the Direct to Open model: A roadmap for supporting open access monographs.
The MIT Press Open Monograph Model: Direct to Open, a new white paper published by Chain Bridge Group and the MIT Press, describes a collective model for supporting the open dissemination of scholarly monographs. The report examines the context for designing the framework and explains the logic behind the model’s design.
The MIT Press, supported by a grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has developed and implemented a business model capable of disseminating the Press’s scholarly monographs open access. The framework, christened Direct to Open (D2O), is designed to induce support by balancing the dual motivations of academic research libraries: the value of private benefits, exclusive to contributing institutions, and mission-aligned support for open business models.
Researched and written by Raym Crow, managing partner at the Chain Bridge Group, the report describes the success criteria and strategic objectives that drove D2O’s design. It explores the economic logic and organizational issues that affect the funding of open resources. The report goes on to describe a D2O prototype model that addresses the Press’s specific design requirements. It concludes with a consideration of D2O in the context of other open monograph models.
Launched in the spring of 2021, D2O has already reached the 55% participation threshold against its three-year target, with over 180 libraries committing to making knowledge more open and equitable. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Groningen, and Bowdoin College recently signed-on as a partner libraries. Due to the support of participating institutions, the full list of spring 2022 scholarly monographs and edited collections from the MIT Press will be published open access.
The MIT Press Open Monograph Model: Direct to Open has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Click here to read the original press release.
