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Liverpool University Press join Opening the Future

Highly-regarded UK university press launches library membership backlist subscription programme, to fund new OA books

Published onJun 08, 2021
Liverpool University Press join Opening the Future
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COPIM WP3 are pleased to announce that Liverpool University Press (LUP) is the second press to pilot an Opening the Future OA funding programme. They will join Central European University Press who launched the first pilot earlier this year, and who recently announced they’ve already reached the target for funding an OA monograph.

We’re thrilled that Liverpool are launching with us. They have a long history of publishing in the Romance languages, and in open access publishing: they’ve explored many avenues, from BPCs to Green OA, and have been publishing OA books since 2010. This new Opening the Future programme sees them expand their commitment to disseminating research globally — and by harnessing the power of collective library funding no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.

LUP’s programme offers libraries subscription/membership access to two modern language backlist series — and in return the press will use subscription fees to produce new OA monographs, freely accessible to all.

How it works:

Simple diagram of how the OtF library collective funding model works

Anthony Cond, Liverpool University Press CEO, said:

“The strategic and societal importance of understanding different languages and cultures demands evolving models of research dissemination. The Opening the Future membership scheme is forward-looking and offers a new pathway to impact in a vital field, and Liverpool University Press is well-placed to be an early pioneer. We have been a publisher of open access books for more than a decade and a publisher of high quality Hispanic Studies research for more than a century. Now in 2021 Opening the Future will renew our commitment to open access in the modern languages.”

WP3 lead, Professor Martin Paul Eve, based at Birkbeck, University of London, said:

“We’re really excited to be working with LUP on this launch. In October 2020 we established a similar programme with Central European University Press to give member access to (and fund new OA) books on post-Communist Europe and transitions to democracy; so we’re now seeing Opening the Future become a viable option for sustaining publishing in areas of research that span different cultures and the globe. Through this initiative, libraries will gain online access to excellent research, enhancing their collections in Latin American Studies, and contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. At the same time, their membership fees will enable Liverpool University Press to publish new monographs in these research areas but this time as open access and available to anyone all over the world”.

Along with COPIM, LUP is partnering with LYRASIS to facilitate library membership participation in the USA and Canada.

More information and how to sign up

If you’d like to know more about how your library can sign up to the LUP Opening the Future and increase your digital collection for your students and researchers, more information can be found on: lup.openingthefuture.net

If you have OA funds, or if your library doesn’t need access to the backlist, you can still subscribe to an OA Supporter Membership. If you’d like to discuss this announcement or would like more information not answered in the website FAQs then please contact Martin Paul Eve at [email protected] and Anthony Cond at [email protected].

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