Boydell & Brewer announces landmark partnership with Opening the Future, Lyrasis, and Fulcrum at Michigan Publishing

"Boydell & Brewer's Sales and Marketing Director Antje King is pleased to announce the launch of the new Opening the Future (OtF) program to fund open access publishing at the press. In partnership with Fulcrum and Lyrasis, this collaboration aligns with Boydell & Brewer's commitment to expanding open access publishing in a sustainable way, ensuring that more high-quality content can be made accessible globally.

Boydell & Brewer is an independent academic publisher specializing in the humanities and social sciences, founded over 55 years ago and employee-owned since 2015. They are the first non-University Press to take up the OtF model, opening the pathway for other mission-driven, scholarly publishers. Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, who originally devised OtF said "When we first launched this program as a pilot with one press in 2021 we always hoped that other scholarly publishers would take it up and use OtF to fund more OA books. This partnership between Fulcrum, Lyrasis and Boydell & Brewer is an important step in sustaining and normalizing the model beyond the original project start-up phase".

The program enables libraries to invest in open content without placing a disproportionate burden on any single institution. It increases their local collection through perpetual, DRM-free access to curated backlist books at discounted prices. Titles available are on medieval history and literature, music, African politics and economics, and film and theatre across the Hispanic, Lusophone, African, and Germanic worlds. The membership revenue is used only to produce new OA monographs, enabling greater equity for authors that don't have funding of their own."