Open Access Books: The First 100 Books from Johns Hopkins University Project - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Barbara Kline Pope (BKP): This project was in development when I arrived at JHUP in late 2017. Greg Britton, our editorial director, took the lead in creating the OA proposal for consideration by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project is certainly In line with our mission as a university press to disseminate scholarship far and wide. And, we have been interested in experimenting with new business models and new ways of delivering important scholarship, especially in the humanities. It’s also appealing to move important content from an out-of-print status to one that is free and open to the world. 

As you noted, Mellon and NEH provided generous funding to bring 200 books back to life through this program. The first 100 were launched today on Project MUSE with an accompanying robust promotional campaign. We’re proud of the effort and eager to see the response. Our aim, as with all of our publishing, is to extend the reach of our authors’ work and to amplify its impact. What author doesn’t want engagement and impact? We conducted an experiment recently at JHUP comparing the reach of our open and gated content on Project MUSE, and we confirmed that we can dramatically increase engagement with our content through open publishing.

That aligns with my long experience at the now completely open National Academies Press...."