Click the headings below to expand (and contract) the FAQs and answers
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that open access in scholarly communications is the optimal solution in a time of severe societal restriction. It seems clear that there is an opportunity to reassess how academic books can reach the world. Even without the context of Covid-19, open access is a benefit to scholars and readers alike - the following list of positive benefits is taken from the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit:
Increased readership, usage and citation
Wider and more diverse audiences
Real-world impact and public engagement
Quicker and more lasting impact
More possibilities for readers to engage with and improve research
Greater author control
Compliance with funder mandates
During the first phase of Covid 19 many university and commercial publishers made their content open to the world as they rushed to assist students and researchers to gain access to content while libraries were closed. Over the months of mid-March until the end June 2020 CEU Press made 279 titles open to anyone with access to the Internet. Through the Project MUSE platform downloads exceeded 350,000 in 129 countries for books that under the closed model would have sold a couple of hundred copies in hardback. Growth in ebook usage was dramatic.
The Covid pandemic has at once exposed how vital open access is to the future of scholarly communications while also ripping the heart out of the library budgets that can make that transition possible. Opening the Future is designed to be affordable to yield excellent value per book. At an average projected cost of €16.00 per backlist title, €32.00 per frontlist title, or €10.67 per book on aggregate. Whichever way you look at it, Opening the Future provides a good return on library investment.
Our policy is to first seek funding from other sources and only if that is not available (which it is still not in most cases) would we apply the funds raised from this project to make books open.
We hope that with the documented success of Opening the Future we will have a model that could lead to the widespread transition of university presses worldwide to OA. This could be something like a publisher hub to facilitate support and enable library choice and is being worked on by Work Package 2 of COPIM.
Open access is of clear benefit to research funders, who can then ensure the maximum public impact of the work that they fund. Funders have, in the past, supported other consortial membership schemes in the journal space and we hope that this will translate to books as we seek a more open future.
Nothing less than to show a route to sustainable OA for the foundational publications of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Revenue targets can be reached as more libraries join up. Once achieved we will reduce the membership fees, or with members’ consent, make more books open access.
As soon as we have the revenue, the next book to be published will be OA.
You can keep track of our OA publishing progress at >
Members receive access to packages of 50 titles from CEU Press’s extensive backlist on Central and East Europe and the former Soviet Union - the history of the region dating back to the middle ages, communism and transitions to democracy. There are four packages to choose from but each will contain titles proven by recent download figures to be popular and current according to data from Project MUSE. One package has been curated by an independent panel of subject expert library colleagues. While not a pick and mix model entirely there is sufficient choice for libraries to select what meets their collection and reader requirements best.
Library and institutional members are banded according to their size, as recognised by LYRASIS and Jisc. Based on this, our annual membership fees are:
€1200 high tier, per year
€800 medium tier, per year
€350 lower tier, per year
Membership is for a minimum of three years.
Member libraries and institutions will have unlimited concurrent/simultaneous access to all titles in the package they’ve subscribed to during the term of their three year membership. They will be entitled to perpetual access to that package at the end of their three year membership. You may sign up for access to a separate package at any time - this membership and package access will also be for a minimum of three years.
Member libraries and institutions will have unlimited concurrent/simultaneous access to all titles in the package they’ve subscribed to during the term of their three year membership. They will be entitled to perpetual access to that package at the end of their three year membership.
The books in the subscription packages are hosted on Project MUSE in their standard DRM-free, unlimited-use model for ebooks. Content is delivered in chapter-based PDF format. Full-text searching is available across all books and within individual titles. MUSE supports authentication via IP, Shibboleth, and referring URL. Participating libraries will be able to make use of MUSE’s Library Dashboard to access MARC records and KBART files customised to their holdings, and to retrieve COUNTER 5-compliant usage statistics.
MUSE collaborates with all major library discovery vendors and will ensure the packages are set up as collections to be activated in all pertinent discovery services. Books on the MUSE platform are preserved through participation in PORTICO’s E-Book Preservation service.
Project MUSE is committed to the accessibility of content and complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), in a manner consistent with the Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. They have a full accessibility statement on their website: .
The four packages of 50 titles each have been assembled in different ways. The first covers History and is primarily made up of the most accessed titles on the Project MUSE platform. The second is Political Science, again selected by their ranking on Project MUSE. The third, selected by the editors at CEU Press, is wider in subject areas and includes gems in literature, such as the Classics list, gender studies, Roma, labour, public health, nationalities, Jewish studies, human rights and more. The fourth is a package made up of titles selected from the other three packages, by a small independent panel of librarians.
No, all backlist package titles that you are subscribed to will be DRM-free and accessible by multiple users simultaneously.
The new titles funded by the program to be published open access will be hosted on Project MUSE, and OAPEN and ORL. OA books will be available in PDF format with CC BY NC ND licences. Project MUSE supports open access books with MARC records, KBART files, and metadata sharing with major library vendors, to ensure that OA content is widely discoverable through library systems. The books will also be listed in DOAB.
You can keep track of our OA publishing progress at
Yes. All OA titles will be available to purchase in print form. The revenue that we need to make books OA is already reduced by the amount that we hope to raise from continuing print sales. Print books can be bought through the normal channels.
Yes. We appreciate that some institutions may not wish to sign up to a book package, or may not be able to. However they might still want to support, and help to fund, the Open Access monographs that CEU Press will be publishing. For these institutions we have created an ‘OA Supporter Membership’. It is simple and quick to join: just fill in the sign up form with the appropriate details and we’ll do the rest. No further action is required from you once we have processed the payment.
The CEU is fully behind this initiative. The University provides a level of financial support/subsidy for its Press that is consistent with other universities and without which this programme would not be possible. This is truly a partnership between the Press, its parent institution and the library community: from subscribing members to platform providers like MUSE, OAPEN and DOAB, and from licence and library experts like Jisc and LYRASIS, to sales agents LYRASIS and Knowledge Unlatched.
Transitioning to Open Access is hard and we’re in the midst of a transition where we need to accommodate the needs of libraries with a model that is new. We understand that libraries often need to go through extensive deliberations amongst their own stakeholders to see if it is worth investing in our particular offer. As a small press we do not have the resources to talk to every librarian, so we rely on sales agents such as LYRASIS and Knowledge Unlatched who are already communicating with librarians every day.
COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits, and by the Arcadia Foundation. CEU Press will be provided with assistance in implementing this model through Work Package 3 of the COPIM programme including documentation of this ‘working model’ as a step towards creating a free, open toolkit and roadmap for other book publishers considering OA.