Alignment with your library’s investment priorities

Collection Subject Areas

The Big Ten Open Books collections offer an insightful journey into crucial themes shaping our world, fostering thoughtful scholarship and knowledge sharing from backlist titles in the following subject areas:

• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Indigenous North Americans
• African-, Asian-, and Hispanic American Experiences
• Health Disparities and Disability Culture
• Human Environmental Impact

Cost

To establish sustainable funding, the program employs a mixed funding model:

• Institutions affiliated with authors in the collections can sponsor specific titles written by their institution’s scholars.
• Institutions without affiliated authors can contribute general support for the program or can sponsor individual titles.

The cost of sponsorship is $3,800 per title. This fully funds the creation of an open access version of the backlist title and you can read how that figure breaks down. The full list of titles available for sponsorship can also be found on the website under Sponsor A Book.

Big Ten Open Books collections are distributed through Michigan Publishing, with funds collected via the trusted non-profit library partner Lyrasis.

Title Selection Process

Librarians and publishers engaged in a robust process to identify theme areas for collections that are pertinent and of interest to researchers, students, and readers everywhere. From there, the catalogs of the participating university presses were mined for titles that aligned with the theme areas, contain relevant materials, and have been rigorously reviewed against the highest quality standards.

Metrics & Usage Reporting

The Book Analytics Dashboard represents usage for the published collections across a number of different platforms including JSTOR, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and Fulcrum. We can provide reporting on usage of works by authors affiliated with a specific institution on demand.

Copyright

True open access requires that titles are not only readable for free, but also reusable in contexts such as open textbooks and text and data mining. While the choice of Creative Commons license is determined by individual publishers after consultation with their authors, the default is a CC-BY NC license.

Metadata

• Both KBART files and MARC records are available from ftp.fulcrum.org/bigten

• The collections are available via common discovery systems (e.g. OCLC, ExLibris, EBSCO, etc.) Books in the Big Ten Open Books collections are also distributed via JSTOR, Project MUSE, and OAPEN. They are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books.

  
  

Accessibility Standards

• Titles are hosted on the open-source Fulcrum platform, developed by the University of Michigan Library. All titles are remediated to WCAG 2.2 AA and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 standards before publishing.

• Fulcrum aims to meet the latest WCAG 2 AA standards and the platform VPAT® can be downloaded as a PDF from Fulcrum.

• A VPAT for the collection with detailed conformance reporting is forthcoming.

  
  

Preservation

• All titles are archived in CLOCKSS.
• All titles are also archived in Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust).