This week marks the beginning of Open Access Week, an opportunity for researchers, publishers and authors to examine the benefits of accessible scholarship. To share more about our mission and approach to Open Access, Syracuse University Press Director Catherine Cocks shares a guest post here on the importance and value of Open Access for university publishers.
October 20 to 26 is International Open Access week, celebrating and publicizing ongoing efforts to make the use and publication of scholarly work more accessible to all.
If you’re reading this post, chances are you already know something about OA and the successes and failures of the movement to date. It’s been particularly challenging to find sustainable ways to make monographs—the key scholarly achievement for many humanities scholars—free to users. Humanities scholars generally don’t have big grants that would cover publishing charges, and books are more expensive to produce than journal articles. So you may ask, why bother? Sure, the economics of scholarly book publishing are challenging, but they always have been right?
Truthfully, times are different now, as we are all too well aware. But that’s not the most compelling reason to make OA sustainable. The most compelling reason is that when scholarly books are freely available in digital form, usage skyrockets. Sales are small and declining, sure. But the demand is huge.
I can give you a few small examples just from SU Press’s own titles. An NEH grant made it possible for the Press to make 19 of our classics in New York state and Irish studies openly available. You’ll find them in the libraries’ SURFACE repository as well as on JSTOR and Project MUSE. Though well-loved, these books are no longer young, and they were always intended for specific regional or scholarly readers. And yet, of the 643 titles we make available via JSTOR, six the top ten most often used books are OA titles. That 1963 biography of an eighteenth-century Dutch settler in Oneida County? Seventh most-often read book in our collection. Between January and June 2025, Project MUSE recorded 13,733 uses of SU Press books: 81% of those uses were of OA titles, just 19% for gated titles.
When you look at where this usage comes from, it’s just where you’d expect—those countries and institutions that don’t have the means to buy a lot of books produced in the world’s wealthiest countries or to subscribe to big e-book packages. Of the 11,117 uses of SU Press’s OA content on Project MUSE between January and June 2025, 10,909 came from users at “No Institution,” people not affiliated with a university, or whose university doesn’t or can’t subscribe. Users of OA content came from 118 countries; users of gated content came from 27.
The simple usage figure tells us nothing about the aims of the users and whether our books helped them achieve those aims. But usage figures do indicate that many more people want to read humanities scholarship than can afford to purchase individual books or subscribe to e-book collections.
It is the mission of every university press to make the fruits of scholarship as widely available as possible. Figuring out how to make open access sustainable—free to authors, free to readers, and financially manageable for presses and libraries, with their highly skilled, highly dedicated staff—that’s fulfilling our mission.