Open Access (OA) benefits authors, libraries, and readers by providing wider access and discovery to scholarship.
While OA is not the best option for every title, it furthers the mission of the Press and the ambitions of the author in a number of ways:
- OA allows for improved discovery and seamless access of ebooks, as they appear in library catalogs across the world.
- OA broadens the reach of books to communities that would not otherwise be able to access the work.
- OA allows for digital enhancements in the book that would be impractical or prohibited in a commercially packaged ebook.
- With the appropriate Creative Commons license, OA books allow other authors to, in the words of the license itself, “remix, tweak, and build upon” the text, further extending the reach of authors’ work.
OA is also sometimes required by funder or institutional mandates.
Books made OA by NYU Press will be:
- Peer-reviewed, edited, designed, produced, and marketed to the same standards as NYU Press’s conventionally published books. All NYU Press books, whether open access or not, further our mission to “foster knowledge that resonates within and beyond the walls of the university.”
- Available for users to read and download on Open Square.
- Available through institutional vendors’ OA channels. In some cases, such vendors will also make the books available on the open web.
- Available at no cost through consumer-facing ebook vendors, such as Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
- Available for purchase through the usual commercial print channels.
- Discoverable through library catalogs, the Directory of Open Access Books, and the open web. In partnership with NYU Libraries’ Knowledge Access Department, NYU Press attempts to bolster discoverability for books on Open Square so that all users can find our books through search engines and library catalogs throughout the world.
- Licensed under a Creative Commons license. The specific license will be determined in consultation with the author, with CC BY-NC-ND as the default. The CC license will appear on the book’s copyright page as well as on Open Square.
Publishing appropriate new books open access at NYU Press generally requires outside funding to support the costs of publication.
NYU Press also makes titles from our back catalog available OA. These titles can be read or downloaded on Open Square and carry a CC BY-NC-SA license.