About MSU Press

Michigan State University Press is the scholarly publishing arm of historic Michigan State University (1855), the nation’s pioneer land-grant university and the prototype for the institutions established under the Morrill Act of 1862. Although a formal Press was not established at MSU until the mid-20th century, scholarly publishing was an important part of the institution’s mission from early on; significant and influential technical publications were regularly issued from the colleges as early as the mid 1870s. 

Since its founding in 1947, the mission of the Michigan State University Press has been to be a catalyst for positive intellectual, social, and technological change through the publication of research and intellectual inquiry, making significant contributions to scholarship in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. 

The Press has been publishing titles OA since 2002, and is keen to increase this because we are committed to fostering equitable access to knowledge for all. 

The OtF Model

Opening the Future is a monograph subscription model that makes library funds go further through its collective membership scheme: achieving the dual objectives of enhancing collections while also supporting open access. Members pay a small annual fee to get DRM-free, unlimited access to a closed selection of the well-regarded MSU Press backlist, with perpetual access after three years. The membership revenue is used only to produce new OA monographs, without forcing authors to find funding for book processing charges (BPCs). 

Since 2020, OtF has enabled the OA publication of 37 titles across its participating publishers , with several more in the pipeline. The program was shortlisted for an ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Award soon after launching. 

Open Access for Books

The move to OA monographs must be a sustainable and bibliodiverse one - it must be sustainable for presses like ours and also for libraries. 

For us, OA enables works to become the foundation blocks of Humanities and Social Sciences and with which our civilisation stands a better chance of becoming fairer, more equitable and more inclusive.  

Open access for books is now high on the international policy agenda. Many models are prohibitive, though, for authors who do not have funding.  Book Processing Charges (BPCs), for example, worsen inequality by favouring the most wealthy institutions and authors, whereas collective library funding models like ours seek to spread the funding of OA books so that no single institution bears a disproportionate cost.