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Opening the Future Quarterly Update (July 2024)
It’s been a busy few months at OtF with new library sign ups, the start of membership renewals, new books published, and other developments.
Published onJul 24, 2024
Opening the Future Quarterly Update (July 2024)
It’s been a busy few months at OtF with new library sign ups, the start of membership renewals, new books published, and other developments. In this newsletter we provide some updates on those as we go into the second half of 2024.
We want to launch OtF with 3 more presses!
Our funded project team is ready to devote its time to launching OtF with more presses before the end of next year. We’re in talks with some already but keen to speak to a range of small/med scholarly publishers. If you know of a publisher you think would be interested in discussing a low-risk model for OA books, with dedicated support from the team that implemented it successfully twice already, then please contact us on [email protected]. (For more details of our plans to scale up, see our blog post earlier this year.)
CEU Press/LUP progress update and renewals
CEU Press
We have some information about the OtF/CEU Press publishing schedule for the rest of 2024 and beyond, and how this is responding to the start of the first subscription renewal phase. Firstly, we’d like to sincerely thank our subscribers, without whom CEU Press would not have been able to publish 24 books open access so far since the initiative began in 2021.
They are planning to publish a further eight OtF-funded titles this year. This will make for a total of fourteen titles funded this way in 2024. Our model works incrementally, flipping one book at a time to OA as and when the necessary funds are accrued. We have therefore been able to watch the number of OtF-funded titles rise steadily, and the 2024 figure will represent just over half of CEU Press’ total annual monograph publications.
Funding has grown this year due in part to entering the first phase of renewals of their original member subscriptions, and therefore accruing renewal funds alongside new subscriptions.
In order to avoid a feast and famine schedule with OtF-funded books CEU Press are pacing their releases as they establish what the patterns of new subscribers, and subscriber retention, will be in the coming years. What is clear, though, is that as they have accrued more support, they have been able to open up an increasing amount of their frontlist, and we are all excited to see how this progresses throughout the rest of 2024 and beyond!
CEU Press and Amsterdam University Press
We have another update to make regarding CEU Press, which has entered into an agreement with Amsterdam University Press (AUP), effective 1st August 2024.
CEU Press would like to reassure its library members that, while the prepayments they have made to CEU OTF will be transferred to AUP’s accounts, there will be no other change. All funds will still be used solely to publish CEU Press titles open access, and CEU Press retains full control over those decisions via their editorial staff and editorial board. The only visible change may be to the invoicing process as the Press becomes more integrated into AUP’s financial workflow. CEU Press looks forward to continuing to publish internationally recognised and high quality research on Central and Eastern Europe in the coming years, and appreciates your ongoing support of their endeavours.
The Copim OtF team will begin working with CEU Press and AUP to understand any potential impact on, or implications for, the CEUP OTF programme in the coming months.
If you have any immediate questions about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]
Liverpool University Press
LUP would also like to sincerely thank their library subscribers for their ongoing support. They have plans to publish three more OTF-funded titles this year, which will include their 10th title funded this way!
Library Advisory Board update
Many thanks to everyone who responded to our call earlier this year for library advisory board members to give us advice on our strategy and work in the coming years. You should all have had a personal reply letting you know that we are now drawing up our terms of reference to disseminate to the new members before our first meeting later this year. We’ll share those once they’re drafted and we look forward to your input and expertise!
New OtF books published in 2024
With thanks again for the support of library members - without you it would not have been possible for us to publish the following titles OA in 2024 so far:
Tess C. Rankin, Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Women’s Fiction (LUP)
László Borhi, Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes (CEUP)
Jan Mrázek (ed), Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia (CEUP)
