 Thank you for listening in to this project report for the CNI Fall 2021 membership meeting. I'm Emily Farrell, the Library Partnerships and Sales Lead at the MIT Press, and this presentation, Progress Towards Opening the Monograph, the MIT Press Director Open, will give you an overview of the Press' major initiative to open our monographs program in 2022. The MIT Press was established in 1962 and publishes books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science and design, very much in line with the research strengths of MIT itself. There's an interdisciplinary focus in our programs, an interest in distinctive design, the essence of which is captured well by the press colophon, which you can see here, designed by Muriel Cooper. Our program is now 250 books a year or more that includes monographs as well as a growing list of trade books, 40 journals, textbooks, reference works, and other initiatives and collaborations, including the MIT Press Reader, MIT Kids Press with Candlewick Press, and the development of the Knowledge Futures Group. The MIT Press has a mission to lead by pushing the boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community, and aligned with MIT's mission to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. Open Access is in clear alignment with this mission, and we've been experimenting with Open Access in different forms for two decades. Our journals program now includes eight diamond OA journals, four gold OA journals, and we've worked in different capacities with open books through funding from the Mellon Foundation for a recent collection of urban studies and architecture books, partnered with the Tome Initiative, and we've also worked together with the MIT libraries to open books. In the last two years, we've been making a concerted step towards finding ways forward for open books in a more comprehensive way. And books have presented a greater challenge than journals so far. Recognizing that conventional market models no longer sustain monograph publishing, we wanted to find a more open, equitable way forward. So we've developed this model, Direct to Open, with generous support from the Arcadia Fund. Direct to Open takes an incentivized library collective action approach to open our new monographs on publication, beginning in 2022, and that will be around 90 books per year. Throughout 2021, we've been working with the library community to come together to support opening our monographs. Libraries receive incentives as individual libraries and again access to our monographs archive of around 2,500 books as supporters and receive discounting on our trade books collection. The fees are distributed across libraries to reach our financial threshold. If multiple libraries participate than needed, we go above the goal, we distribute the fees. So getting into more of the details, what is Direct to Open? Direct to Open is a collective model, so we need libraries to work together to support this model to make it work. Working as a collective, it decreased costs for all. The models library-centered, we wanted to come up with a model that would move us away from book processing charges, which we know are inequitable. Partnering with a collective of libraries helps us make that shift away from book processing charges. The model is comprehensive. Previously, when we'd worked in different ways, either with book processing charges or through funding, we were opening individual titles or small subject collections. We wanted to build a model that would open our monographs program moving forward as a whole rather than choosing title by title and giving one book precedence over another. The model is also incentivized. We knew we needed to offer something beyond something to support for the common good. Not because we think that libraries aren't interested in investing in a model that's purely open access and supports the wider access to knowledge, but we do know that often the existing structures can get in the way, whether that's how money's siloed in a library, or the fact that standard ways of collections and acquisitions need to show a certain sort of return on investment that is not easy to show when you have a pure open access model. It's incentivized in that libraries are not only contributing to opening books, but they also gain the individual incentive of accessing the back file of monographs on our platform. It also includes a guarantee. So libraries that agree to participate in direct open, get access to the back file of monographs, and even even if we don't reach the threshold. So that means they still retain the incentive, even if the model doesn't reach the threshold in the first year. So the way the model works is libraries come together to pay a fee. We calculated this fee based on the size, type and budget of the institution. We wanted to make the model more granular so that even the smallest libraries would be able to afford the fees for the model. Libraries can choose to support the whole set of monographs. So around 90 books. We've also split it into two collections into a humanities and social sciences collection and a stem plus art and design. That way we had the option of or the opportunity to reach a partial threshold and open some books depending on the patterns of support for the collections. As I mentioned, the incentives that libraries then receive in becoming supporters or participating in direct open is access to a back file of monographs throughout all the way through to the end of 2022. That's around 2500 books. So returning that access on as soon as libraries commit so libraries that are already participating in direct open already have access to those books, and it includes books all the way through the end of 2021. So it's very, it is very current content. If director open is not successful, libraries don't have to pay the fee but still receive access to the content for 2022 through the back file content through 2021. We're also offering our trade books collection in a separate collection that is still under a standard sales model and participating libraries receive additional discounting on that model as an incentive. We've also set up the model from the beginning to cascade such that if we receive contributions above the threshold, those fees are redistributed rather than the threshold increasing in some way. So once we reach financial goal, we then redistribute the fees. This is also an annual commitment. We didn't want to ask libraries to commit for more than one year because we know that this is a challenging time for library budgets, but we have offered libraries the opportunity to come in on the model up to three years at a cap fee. We were also lucky enough to have a contribution for the first year from MIT libraries that we're using to reduce the fees for masters, bachelor's and associates level institutions. Because of the model, we got to a place where we are able to offer a model that is comprehensive. So he's looking towards opening our full monographs front front list. It is financially sustainable. We only open the content if the threshold is met. It provides a large value to libraries and incentives including the back large amount of back file content that goes up to very content current content. And also the fee cap. So in the cascading. So, over time, with more collective behavior, we hope to see lower fees for all libraries. Some of the challenges, because it's a new model and there are some. It is challenging to go all in is a big lift to get support for a new model across a large number of libraries. And it does ask for a culture culture shift towards collective action. It requires quite a lot of administrative work. We're working very closely with a large number of libraries and consortia. And it also asks and requires a lot more collaboration and coordination both internally and across libraries, but all of these things offer a lot of opportunity for us to. And some of the progress we made speaks to that. We've had a tremendously positive response from libraries. It's meant that we've increased the direct conversations we're having having with libraries, we've received a lot of feedback that went into developing the model. We've increased our consortia relationships and we are thrilled to have relationships in place with CRL know with Gwilla palsy big 10 academic alliance have come in to support director open. We're also working closely with CRK and in Canada call in Australia and just in the UK. We're currently, as I'm recording this mid November, halfway to our goal with a deadline of November 30 years. We've also seen half our commitments for three years, which gives us a lot of affirmation that this is a good direction and that there's a desire from the library community to support what we're doing over time. We'll be publishing a white paper soon that provides more details for the model, particularly with an interest for like for other university presses to look at what we're doing and to understand the details. And in cases interest there or the ability for them to use the model. And by the time you're listening to this, we will have made an announcement about what is coming after the deadline. We've seen a really fantastic array of institutions contribute to direct to open a large number at the PhD level, but also a good number of libraries that are masters and bachelor's institutions. We've seen a large percentage of our participating libraries come from the US, but increasing numbers of libraries from Europe, a good number of Canadian institutions particularly through the partnership with CRK and you in the UK and also a few from Australia. We've pleased with the progress that we've made so far in modeling director open. We predicted that it would take three years to reach our full threshold and to have already gotten halfway to the goal before the end of a whole year is really exciting and a very positive thing to see. If you'd like some more information, please do get in touch with me Emily Farrell. You can see my email address here, or you can also go to the website we have a lot of information up including the full fee table, a prospectus with some background and rationale for the model, as well as further information about the details of how the platform works, how we're working with discovery services and the other sorts of administrative details that that librarians will need. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conference and I look forward to hearing from you.