Michigan State University Press launches Opening the Future

Posted by Kira Hopkins on May 27, 2025 at 1324

Copim Open Book Futures is pleased to announce that Michigan State University (MSU) Press is the latest press to launch an Opening the Future (OtF) open access monograph funding programme.

MSU Press joins OtF’s other publishing partners Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, who implemented OtF in 2021, since which time they have published nearly 40 open access (OA) titles cumulatively through the scheme, with funding accrued for nearly the same number again.

The OtF team is delighted to be partnering with Michigan State University Press, and supporting the Press in its publishing goals. Since its foundation in 1947, MSU Press has remained committed to its mission to catalyze intellectual, social and technological change via its publications. Additionally, the Press has been publishing titles OA since 2002, and is keen to expand its OA capacity. Partnering with OtF will support this goal, enabling MSU Press to publish titles that are free to read, but which are also free to publish for the authors, ensuring that equitable access to knowledge applies to its creation as well as to its dissemination. 

It will achieve this via OtF’s simple, yet highly effective, funding model: subscriptions to a selection of a closed backlist are used to fund the OA frontlist. Libraries get unlimited, DRM-free access to curated packages of the Press’s high-quality backlist, with perpetual access after three years. They will use the revenue from the membership/subscription fees to fund frontlist titles to become open access immediately on publication. Publishing the OA titles is a rolling process: as soon as they have the funds to produce a title they publish the next one in line, and so on, with no delay. The more members they have, the more books they can publish OA. 

Subject strength

In particular, this partnership will focus on monographs on African and Diaspora Studies, a subject for which MSU Press is well-known and regarded. The Press will offer a package containing 66 backlist titles, from across their relevant lists. The package covers a broad range of fields, from political and social sciences, history, colonial and post-colonial studies, through to the arts and literary studies. The library subscription funds will then collectively publish new OA frontlist titles in these same areas. The Press particularly wanted to focus on this subject because it is a topic that they are keen to make as widely available as possible and which they feel has wide interest in academia and also within relevant communities. 

From our perspective at Opening the Future we are delighted with this partnership. We are glad to expand our work enabling publishers to open up their monographs into new areas, both geographical and disciplinary. Since we left our initial pilot phase of the project in mid-2023, we have been consolidating our support for our current publishing partners, and also continued to refine, and advocate for, the model. We are therefore very excited to take another step past this phase by onboarding a new partner. We greatly look forward to working with MSU Press on this project! 

Elizabeth Demers, the Director of Michigan State University Press, said “We look forward to working with the Opening the Future team on this partnership, through which we’ll be further expanding our OA book publishing program. This will allow us to increase the impact of our African and Diaspora Studies lists, and enable them to reach more of their intended audiences, reinforcing our commitment to fostering equitable access to knowledge for all.”

Tom Grady, Opening the Future Work Package Lead at Copim/Birkbeck, University of London said “We’re really excited to be working with MSU Press on this launch. We’ve been running the program for a few years successfully with two publishers so this is a milestone in seeing the model grow to become a real option for sustaining publishing in areas of research around the world and spanning different cultures. The program helps to remove barriers to publishing as well as barriers to reading, and the possibilities are huge for global dissemination of high quality scholarship.”

Opening the Future is a funding mechanism developed by the Copim Project, a project funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund to create, implement and strengthen infrastructure for academy-owned scholarly monographs in Humanities and Social Sciences. We aim to transform OA publishing by enabling small, mission-led publishing initiatives to flourish on their own terms. 

To find out more about Copim see www.copim.ac.uk. 

To find out more about Michigan State University Press please see their website at: https://msupress.org/. If you would like to help fund equitable OA publishing while simultaneously enhancing your own library collection please consider supporting Opening the Future at MSU Press. See the Sign Up page for details of which books you could own in perpetuity when joining as a subscriber member.

If you’d like to discuss this announcement please contact Tom Grady and Kira Hopkins at openingthefuture@copim.ac.uk or Elizabeth Demers, the Michigan State University Press director, at sherbur1@msu.edu.