Open Access monographs: MIT Press Direct To Open 2025

The University of Cambridge continues to support MIT Press’s Direct To Open (D2O) for 2025. Cambridge University Libraries originally signed up for the scheme in 2022 and this was renewed for a further 12 months at the end of 2024. Our support, along with over 300 other participating libraries is enabling MIT to publish all 80 books earmarked for this model as Open Access over the coming year.

The 2025 titles will begin publishing in February and a title list of all D2O published books including the Spring/Summer 2025 is now available.

As a participating institution we continue to have access to @ 2,300 ebooks from the MIT Press backlist for the period of the subscription in titles ranging across all disciplines. Records for the backlist collection as well as for all the Open Access titles can be searched for in iDiscover. Newly published title records are added regularly.

The publisher states; “Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. D2O’s particular advantage is that it enables [MIT] to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle….all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.”

Key statistics

• 321 – number of open access books funded through D2O to date
• 659,453 – total # of times published D2O books have been read on the MIT Press platform
• 12.74% / 54.78% / 32.48% – % of humanities/social sciences/STEM in D2O

Recently published D2O titles include;

• Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
• Macroeconomic Modeling: The Cowles Commission Approach
• Playframes: How Do We Know We Are Playing?
• Toy Theory: Technology and Imagination in Play
• Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie
• Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation
• The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood
• The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures since 1832
• A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future

You can click on this link to browse all the D2O published titles on the MIT ebooks platform.

Please do get in touch with the ebooks team at ebooks@lib.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Open Access monographs: MIT Press

I’m very pleased to be able to say that Cambridge has signed up to become a supporter of a new Open Access book publishing scheme from MIT Press, Direct to Open. Funded jointly by the UL’s Collections and Academic Liaison and the Engineering Library, this is a library membership scheme, whereby participating libraries pay an annual subscription. The membership fees are used to make MIT Press frontlist titles (c. 90 per year) available as Open Access ebooks straight away; and the benefit for supporters is that their institutions gain access to c. 2,300 ebooks from the MIT Press backlist for the period of their subscription, in titles ranging across all disciplines. It’s an exciting scheme from a major US university press, and will open up scholarship to researchers around the world.

We have signed up for three years (2022-2024) in the first instance. Our access to the backlist titles has been switched on, and records are displaying in iDiscover already. If you have any questions about the scheme, please do get in touch with the English Collections team (engcc@lib.cam.ac.uk).