As a part of Penn Press journals’ commitment to supporting open-access initiatives, five Penn Press journals have joined Project MUSE’s Subscribe to Open Program (S2O). If the program is successful in securing support, 2025 content from these journals will be available Open Access without article processing charges.
Project MUSE, a leading platform of humanities and social sciences scholarship from non-profit publishers, will launch S2O in 2025. This collaborative effort marks a giant stride towards reshaping the landscape of equitable participation and access to a wide range of current interdisciplinary content by providing a low-risk path to increased access that benefits both libraries and publishers. As of January 2024, 24 publishers are participating in S2O, representing 87 journals and the program continues to grow.
The Penn Press journals that will participate in S2O are:
- Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, sponsored by the Weitzman School of Design
- Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, sponsored by The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
- Eudora Welty Review
- French Forum, sponsored by the department of Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
- Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development
“Penn Press is proud to participate in the Project MUSE Subscribe to Open Program alongside other publishers seeking a sustainable and equitable alternative to traditional open-access models. We are confident in the program’s success and look forward to making content from these five titles openly available to the global community of researchers in 2025,” said Penn Press Director Mary Francis.
French Forum editor Philippe Met noted, “We are looking forward to the increase in visibility that Open Access will provide for our authors’ work,” and Rosalind Beiler and Judith Ridner commented that “the editors of Early American Studies are excited to participate in Subscribe to Open. We believe open access will encourage global conversations among scholars of early American studies and expand the readership of the journal to a wider audience.”
Open Access at Penn Press
Penn Press currently provides Diamond open-access content to the academic community via four of its journals:
- Observational Studies
- Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad
- Journal of Disaster Studies
- Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies
Penn Press also supports Gold and Green open access models, and in February, Observational Studies will join the LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program, which provides a community-driven framework to enable multiple stakeholders to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access journals.
