Big Ten Open Books was initiated in 2022. As part of six-month planning process, surveys and discussion sessions involving collection development libraries, university press staff, and an open call for participation identified a group of interdisciplinary themes. The collections being developed reflect themes that both librarians and presses within the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) identified as important to raise public awareness of.

After analyzing books in a broad spread of member library collections using the Gold Rush tool, a “wish list” of titles published by the Big Ten university presses was developed. BTAA presses were approached to see whether they would be interested in participating in a collection and either opted in or opted out. The main reason for opting out was that the press's subject focuses were not relevant to the topic being considered. 75% of Big Ten university presses have participated in at least one collection.

The standard due diligence workflow adopted by presses for rounding down the requested titles to ones they can include in the collection involves a mix of (a) reaching out to authors; (b) checking contracts; (c) and checking sales life cycles. When authors have passed away or are out of contact, some presses have needed to rely on contractual terms alone. The work of making sure that older books can be made open access requires intensive work. It has been one of the most burdensome aspects of collection building for the presses.

As well as responding to the library requests, presses have also supplemented library wish lists with their own suggestions. All books included have to have appeared under a university press imprint, and thus have been through the quality assurance process typically employed by university presses. This involves acquisition editors, peer reviewers, and editorial boards working through multiple steps even before copyeditors and designers get involved.

All of these steps in selecting and validating books in Big Ten Open Books mean that the collections deliver trusted information.