Path to Open: A History
The following originally appeared on the American Council of Learned Societies website, and is reposted here with permission.
Path to Open—now beginning its third year—is a multiyear pilot that offers a community-driven approach to open access (OA) books. The model was developed by a small group of leaders hailing from different sectors of scholarly communications but united by a shared mission to raise the visibility and accessibility of humanistic scholarship.
The story begins in early 2021 when John Sherer, the director of the University of North Carolina Press, had a new idea for supporting open access books. Along with other scholarly publishers, UNC Press had been experimenting for nearly a decade with open access models. The Press received an award in 2014 from the Mellon Foundation to develop the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and was also active in the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) initiative and Knowledge Unlatched. All these programs experimented with different open access models, and all had significant merits. But none were financially self-sustaining or capable of supporting large numbers of books, limiting options for both authors and presses. As a result, without external funding or the ability to pay a book processing charge (BPC), most humanistic authors could not publish their monographs as open access, and the move toward OA was in danger of stagnating.
“Path to Open was developed to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community.”—JSTOR
A new program launched by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2020 offered new inspiration. The Fellowships Open Book Program provided a stipend of $5,500 (currently $6,600) to publishers whose authors were supported by NEH research funding. The subvention offset the costs of retroactively opening books three to five years after their initial publication and provided an honorarium for the authors. The lag between publication date and the “flip to open” date allowed presses to recover costs through book sales and significantly reduced the financial risk of opening a book. And unlike many previous OA pilots, a broad array of university presses were enthusiastically participating in the NEH program.
Could this model be extended to create a “third way” for publishing monographs, one co-existing with the traditional models of books for sale or books made immediately open access? Could it be a model that operated without ties to specific grant funds or to a BPC? Sherer began describing to colleagues his idea for a community-based program in which libraries would subscribe to a collection of new e-books over a set period of time. The subscription fee would generate the funds needed to open all the books in the collection a few years after their publication.
The model addressed several issues that authors and university presses frequently encountered. First the model would significantly reduce open access book fees. Presses would receive $5,000 per book, dramatically less than fees for other programs, which in 2021 generally ranged from $10,000 to $15,000 per book. It would provide to participating libraries immediate digital access to high-quality books as well as a means to support the eventual opening of those books. It would alleviate publishers’ concerns about open access editions eroding the print sales of new books. And finally, it would provide a buffer for authors whose tenure and promotion committees still required the production of a conventional printed book.
Charles Watkinson, the director of the University of Michigan Press, and Sharla Lair, a strategist at Lyrasis, a non-profit membership organization that serves libraries, museums, archives, and knowledge communities worldwide, soon joined the conversation, along with publishing consultant John Lavender. Both Watkinson and Lair were involved with managing the ACLS Humanities EBook Collection (HEB), a highly respected collection of humanities books available by subscription to libraries and individuals. In April 2021 Sherer proposed his “third way” idea to the HEB advisory committee, which included ACLS vice president and COO James Shulman. The small group of Sherer, Watkinson, Lair, Lavender, and Shulman continued discussions in subsequent months, eventually bringing others on board—including University of California Press director Erich van Rijn—to further develop the possibilities for the “third way” model. In April 2022 they invited John Lenahan at JSTOR to join the conversation. As a trusted aggregator of scholarly content, JSTOR brought to the table an established digital platform, a network of publishing and library partners, and experience with collection management.
“The committee supports the longevity, effectiveness, and sustainability of the Path to Open pilot initiative. It comprises representative community members who provide feedback, recommendations, and insight as well as outreach and community-building support for the pilot.”—Charge for the Path to Open Community Advisory Committee, convened by ACLS
This small and nimble group developed the model together over the summer and fall of 2022, establishing trust and deepening relationships during regular conversations held every other Friday morning. But beyond working out the logistics for how the “third way” would function, the group also considered larger, more theoretical questions about why this model matters for humanistic scholarship. Alongside the greater accessibility and discoverability for groundbreaking books, the “third way” would allow many smaller university presses to engage for the first time with open access. These small publishers—which comprise half the membership of the global Association of University Presses—are leading producers of scholarship in emerging or specialized disciplines but often lack the technical and financial resources to experiment with open access. Payments from libraries would reduce the financial risk for small presses, while technical support from JSTOR would provide them with a ready digital platform.
The “Friday group” also understood that growing the community around the model and allowing it to develop in ways that would benefit everyone—publishers, libraries, and scholars—would be key to its success and sustainability. They further identified bibliodiversity as a core value of the program and considered ways to manage the pilot that would amplify underrepresented voices and emerging disciplines. During this period ACLS commissioned an illustration, “The Stressed Humanities Monograph,” to help articulate for scholars some of the complexities and challenges revealed in these discussions. The illustration highlights the connections and interdependencies that form the infrastructure for producing humanistic scholarship. For ACLS the questions posed by the various constituencies resonated with its own mission to “support the creation and circulation of knowledge that advances understanding of humanity and human endeavors in the past, present, and future, with a view toward improving human experience.” The organization signaled its strong commitment to further exploring these questions with the creation of a new staff position. Sarah McKee—previously the manager of the Digital Publishing in the Humanities program at Emory University—joined ACLS in November 2022 to support accessible, equitable, and innovative publishing through the Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship initiative.
After a presentation at the Charleston Conference that same month, the newly named Path to Open concept launched in December, made possible with a significant investment of funds, technical infrastructure, and communications from JSTOR. Publishers and libraries began to join soon thereafter, and the pilot was launched with the announcement of the collection’s first 100 titles in fall 2023. During this first year of operation at JSTOR, work also commenced at ACLS to expand the community support necessary to sustain and refine the program. Beginning in summer 2023, with funds provided by UNC Press from its 2014 Mellon grant, ACLS worked closely with Educopia to hold focus groups with various stakeholders—publishers, librarians, authors, administrators, and aligned open access advocates—to capture their perceptions of and hopes for Path to Open.
In November 2023 Educopia gathered an interim advisory group to develop the structure and charge of the Community Advisory Committee, which convened in January 2024 with seven members representing university presses, libraries, and scholars. Its charge is to “support the longevity, effectiveness, and sustainability of the Path to Open pilot initiative. [The committee] comprises representative community members who provide feedback, recommendations, and insight as well as outreach and community-building support for the pilot.” The next 300 books in the Path to Open collection were released in May 2024. The following month, with input from the committee and funding from both JSTOR and Mellon, JSTOR committed to providing immediate Path to Open access to all historically black and tribal colleges and universities in the United States during the pilot.
By January 2025 Path to Open enjoyed global participation from 48 university presses and more than 235 libraries, based at institutions ranging from small community colleges to large research institutions. Through 2026, the Community Advisory Committee will work closely with JSTOR to involve more publishers, libraries, and especially scholars in conversation about how the pilot is developing and what adjustments are needed to sustain a program for open access books that is vibrant, bibliodiverse, equitable, and community-driven. In January 2026, the first books selected in 2023 will flip to open, putting Path to Open well on its way toward opening 1,000 university press monographs as promised in the launch of the pilot. At that point, it will have become the most far-reaching and sustainable open access program to date for authors and for university presses.