Library partners with publishers to open access to humanities research

Yale Library has partnered with several monograph publishers in the humanities to make the process of publishing books easier and more affordable for authors.

The library is committed to ensuring “broad access to the cultural and scholarly record” to enable open access (OA) to the growing number of resources available worldwide.

OA publishing is part of a growing, shared effort among publishers and institutes of higher learning to remove barriers to scholarship access and dissemination. The goal of OA is to encourage increased sharing and use of content by ensuring that researchers can read digital versions of the latest publications in their disciplines, free of charge.

A second goal of collaborating with publishers in the effort to expand OA is to remove the costs of OA publishing and to encourage scholars to make their research more widely available to fellow scholars.

Yale Library has recently added these monograph publishers to their list of OA partners:

Lever Press: This OA publisher is aligned with the mission and ethos of liberal arts colleges and “welcomes works exploring intellectual connections across academic disciplines and divisions.” Lever Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. The press is governed by its participating members, with the editorial board and oversight committee composed of faculty and representatives from its many participating institutions.

As a “platinum level” open access press, Lever Press is fully open access. All works are freely available to readers upon publication. Neither individual authors nor their departments bear the costs of producing and publishing the work.

MIT Press Direct to Open: This program shifts the traditional publishing model: instead of libraries making one-time purchases of individual digital copies of monographs, they fund the OA release of one of two book collections—either in Humanities and Social Sciences or in STEAM (STEM plus Art and Design)—or both collections.

As of March 2025, the MIT Press program has funded the open release of more than 320 monographs, and their data indicates that the open access titles enjoy more use and increased citations than their closed access counterparts.

punctum books: Punctum is an “independent, queer- and scholar-led, community-formed, and peer-reviewed” OA publisher. It is devoted to publishing academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture and design who want to publish genre-queer and genre-bending books that take “experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing.”

Yale Library is one of more than 100 libraries in the United States and abroad that provide funding to support punctum’s work. The author does not pay a fee to publish, and the reader does not pay to read. The content is free and available online.

University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission: Aligned with the university press’s “mission and commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” this program seeks library support to publish 75 percent (approximately 60) of its scholarly monographs as open access titles each year.

As of July 2025, more than 250 titles in the humanities and social sciences have been published as open access resources through this Fund to Mission program. The target for 2026 is to publish another 60 open access titles.

Celebrate International Open Access Week with library Zoom event on Wednesday, Oct. 22, at 2 pm.

See additional OA publishing initiatives supported by Yale Library.

Read more about Yale Library’s OA policy.

—Lindsay Barnett