Big Ten Open Books presents new 'Indigenous First Americans' Collection
To inform public understanding of Indigenous and native individuals, and particularly their diverse identities and experiences, a collection of 100 high quality books from seven BTAA presses is the newest Big Ten Open Books collection, launched in 2025.
In partnership with seven Big Ten-affiliated university presses, the Big Ten Academic Alliance's Center for Library Programs announces the expansion of the Big Ten Open Books project with the publication of the second 100-book collection.
The second collection is centered on Indigenous North Americans. The high-quality scholarly works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost to the reader or author. Each title has undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content. Making these works openly available allows them to have tremendous impact through broad engagement and knowledge sharing. Big Ten Open Books creates ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility.
The Indigenous North Americans collection explores the history, culture, religion, and resilience of Indigenous populations from the 15th century to present day. Events of Indigenous diplomacy, evolution, education, and contributions to North American history are highlighted in this collection.
The presses partnering on this phase of Big Ten Open Books are Michigan State University Press, Penn State University Press, University of Illinois Press, University of Michigan Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of Nebraska Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.
The Big Ten Open Books projects has established a distinctive model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available on open infrastructure (Fulcrum, hosted by the University of Michigan) using open distribution models (including Project MUSE, JSTOR, OAPEN, and The Palace Project from Lyrasis) and envisions a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. Funding for this collection has been provided by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the California Digital Library.
This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance's vision for the BIG collection, which seeks to unite the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance into one collection, shared and fully networked.