The MIT Press has announced that Direct to Open (D2O) will open access to over 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons, after reaching its full funding goal for 2025.
"It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that our academic community can unite to publish high-quality open-access monographs at scale," says Amy Harris, senior manager of library relations and sales at the MIT Press. "We are deeply grateful to all of the consortia that have partnered with us and to the hundreds of libraries that have invested in this program. Together, we are expanding the public knowledge commons in ways that benefit scholars, the academy, and readers around the world."
Among the highlights from the MIT Press's fourth D2O funding cycle is a new three-year, consortium-wide commitment from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and a renewed three-year commitment from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). These long-term collaborations will play a pivotal role in supporting the press's open-access efforts for years to come.
"The Florida Virtual Campus is honored to participate in D2O in order to provide this collection of high-quality scholarship to more than 1.2 million students and faculty at the 28 state colleges and 12 state universities of Florida," says Elijah Scott, executive director of library services for the Florida Virtual Campus. "The D2O program allows FLVC to make this research collection available to our member libraries while concurrently fostering the larger global aspiration of sustainable and equitable access to information."
"The libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance are committed to supporting the creation of open-access content," adds Kate McCready, program director for open publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. "We're thrilled that our participation in D2O contributes to the opening of this collection, as well as championing the exploration of new models for opening scholarly monographs."
In 2025, hundreds of libraries renewed their support thanks to the teams at consortia around the world, including the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the CBB Library Consortium, the California Digital Library, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CRL/NERL, the Greater Western Library Alliance, Jisc, Lyrasis, MOBIUS, PALCI, SCELC, and the Tri-College Library Consortium.
Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open-access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books, to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model.
Many other models offer open-access opportunities on a title-by-title basis or within specific disciplines. D2O's particular advantage is that it enables a press to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle. Thanks to D2O, all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access, with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
The MIT Press will now turn its attention to its fifth funding cycle and invites libraries and library consortia to participate. For details, please visit the MIT Press website
