Indiana University Press featured in Big Ten Open Books project
Big Ten Open Books launches second collection: In partnership with eight Big Ten-affiliated university presses, the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Center for Library Programs announces the publication of its second 100-book open access collection. Indiana University Press provided 4 books to the collection, published between 1996 and 2007. IU also played a large role in the first Big Ten Open Books collection, Gender and Sexuality Studies, contributing 22 books to the collection. Strategically, IU Libraries has made open access publishing a priority and is committed to advancing fair and sustainable practices for disseminating research and creating openly accessible scholarship for everyone.
The 200 books in these collections represent not only unlocked research possibilities, but also new classroom tools for student investigations and assignments without incurring textbook costs.
The high-quality scholarly works in these collections have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost to the reader or author. As open collections, anyone with internet access is able to access the knowledge without fees or barriers. This is one way the BTAA is making the scholarship produced by academic presses in the Big Ten more productive and visible.
Each title has undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content. Making these works openly available allows them to have tremendous impact through broad engagement and knowledge sharing. Big Ten Open Books creates ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility.
The Indigenous North Americans collection explores the history, culture, religion, and resilience of Indigenous populations from the 15th century to present day. Events of Indigenous diplomacy, evolution, education, and contributions to North American history are highlighted in this collection. The presses partnering on this phase of Big Ten Open Books are Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, University of Illinois Press, Indiana University Press, University of Michigan Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of Nebraska Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.
The Big Ten Open Books project establishes a distinctive model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available on open infrastructure using open distribution models and envisions a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. Funding for the Big Ten Open Books project is provided by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the California Digital Library.
In the 21 months since its launch, the books in the collection have been used nearly 200,000 times in over 210 countries and territories, an average of 2,000 times each. Total reported usage across all distribution platforms (adding Project Muse and individual press websites) exceeds 400,000 downloads.
Big Ten Open Books will be launching three more collections over the course of 2025 and 2026:
Collectively, our institutions’ more than 75,000 faculty, staff, and researchers are supported by over $19 billion in research expenditures, and our institutions have invested significantly in our capacity to further the research mission by advancing public knowledge through open publishing. Together, we produce roughly 15% of the research publications in the United States.
Assistant Dean, Engagement, Strategic Partnerships, and Communications
