Today’s post is a part of University Press Week 2024’s blog tour. This year, the members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—an organization of 160 mission-driven publishers in the United States, Canada, and around the world—have chosen #StepUP as the theme for University Press Week. Every day, university presses worldwide step up to educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act.
Today’s post explores how Penn Press Journals strives to do this by making content from a large percentage of our program Open Access—freely available to readers all around the world.
Penn Press publishes five Diamond (free to the author and reader) open-access journals: Foucault Studies, Journal of Disaster Studies, Manuscript Studies, Observational Studies, and Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad. Two of these titles, Foucault Studies and Observational Studies, are accepting funding through the Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP), a community-supported initiative to provide sustainable and equitable access to a broad readership by providing libraries and other institutions with a framework to evaluate and collectively fund journal titles.
Five Penn Press journals are participating in Project MUSE’s S2O Program for 2025. Subscribe to Open also takes on a community-based approach: if subscriptions to the MUSE collection surpass the minimum sustainability threshold, the current year’s content of the participating titles will be opened to all readers. If the threshold is not reached, that year’s content will remain gated. Five Penn Press journals are participating in MUSE’s S2O offer for 2025:
- Change Over Time
- Early American Studies
- Eudora Welty Review
- French Forum
- Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development
Additionally, Penn Press offers free access to our journals to all users in many low-income countries. Through our journal hosting platform, Project MUSE, and in collaboration with Google Scholar, which ensures that the content is discoverable, Penn Press journals can be accessed by any user from the list of qualifying countries. The initiative is part of MUSE’s mission “to promote the broad dissemination of essential humanities and social science scholarship, and in support of equity in access to scholarly resources.”
Our Green Open Access policy is compliant with funder mandates from the NEH, Plan S, and UKRI, among others.
Penn Press recognizes that there are multiple pathways toward the goal of sustainable Open Access models in the humanities and social sciences. We are committed to exploring multiple approaches to find frameworks that both provide long-term viability to our journals and ensure broad global reach for our content.
