Trailblazers: the UK open access initiative for ECRs – Open Access Books Network

"Trailblazers was established in 2024 by the universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, and Salford, with Liverpool University Press (LUP), to provide early career researchers (ECRs) with an opportunity to publish their first monograph open access and benefit from a series of workshops to support their publishing journey. These institutions came together to develop a new approach to open access monograph publishing that is not reliant on expensive Book Processing Charges (BPCs) in the long term, or money from funded research. Whilst funding is currently based on the BPC model, all partners have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which includes a commitment to explore alternative funding models to support sustainable open access for monographs.

Growing the number of institutions involved in the scheme is an important step towards being able to develop a different model. Currently each institution funds its own authors and open access costs are reduced the greater the volume of books being published. Following positive feedback and interest from the UK higher education sector, the scheme in 2025 has been opened to other universities and we are pleased to be joined by Liverpool John Moores University and the universities of Reading and Wolverhampton, enabling more ECRs to benefit from the scheme.

In this post we’ll provide the perspective of one of the founder libraries, the University of Salford, and explore how Trailblazers fits into Salford’s open content strategy and our experience of selecting and supporting authors."