Welcome to Big Ten Open Books, a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. We are dedicated to promoting open scholarship through the curation of open book collections from scholarly monographs published by our university presses.

Driven by the core values of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility, the project aims to transform how academic resources are shared and used. By emphasizing discoverability, we make it easy for scholars and readers to find the information they need. Accessibility ensures that everyone, no matter their affiliation or location, can freely access these publications. Durability preserves this knowledge through technological and accessibility advancement. Flexibility allows the Big Ten Open books project to support diverse interests across an everchanging scholarly landscape.

The first Big Ten Open Books project was launched in 2023 as a collection of 100 open access books on Gender and Sexuality Studies. To start reading in the Gender and Sexuality Studies collection while we work on our forthcoming 2025-2026 open book collections, click here.

To learn more about the 2025-2026 collections, click here.

Participating presses include: Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Ohio State University Press, Penn State University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Illinois Press, University of Michigan Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

To learn how to get involved, click here.

Collective action, at scale, to open trusted content for the public good.

The Big Ten Open Books project has established a model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content, on open infrastructure, using open distribution models - to envision a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s development of the BIG Collection's ambition of uniting the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues its advocacy for a sustainable and open ecosystem of publication. Collectively, our institutions’ more than 50,000 faculty are supported by over $11 billion in research funding, and our institutions have similarly invested significantly in our capacity to further our missions to advance knowledge. Together, we produce roughly 15% of the research publications in the United States.

The foundation of Big Ten Open Books is collective action including the partnership between university presses and libraries to develop the program’s model, as well as the multi-press collaboration that populates the content. At scale is our aspiration to develop a programmatic, sustainable approach to our work that mirrors the size and impact of our member institutions. To open is the work to create open-access editions that can be read and reused by anyone, anywhere. Trusted content describes the rigorous selection and quality certification process that every title in this collection has undergone. For the public good is one of the north star ideals for the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. We have a commitment to contribute to building a just, trustworthy, scalable, and sustainable open knowledge ecosystem in order to advance open, more equitable scholarship.