About
Opening the Future in summary
Shortlisted in 2021 for an ALPSP Innovation in Publishing Award, Opening the Future is a collective subscription model that, through its membership scheme, makes library funds go further: achieving the dual objectives of increasing collections and supporting Open Access. Members pay a small annual fee to get DRM-free, unlimited access to a selection of the well-regarded CEU Press backlist, with perpetual access after three years; the membership revenue is used to produce new OA monographs.
What members get
Membership is for a minimum of three years.
Member libraries and institutions have unlimited, simultaneous access to all titles in the package they’ve subscribed to during the term of their three year membership. They are entitled to perpetual access to that package at the end of their three year membership. You may sign up for access to a separate package at any time - this membership and package access will also be for a minimum of three years.
Banding and fees
Library and institutional members are banded according to their size, as recognised by LYRASIS and Jisc. Based on this, our annual membership fees are:
• €1200 high tier, per year (approx $1,425 USD / £1,000 GBP)
• €800 medium tier, per year (approx $950 USD / £700 GBP)
• €350 lower tier, per year (approx $425 USD / £300 GBP)
How to sign up
USA & Canada
Sign up via LYRASISUK
Sign up via JiscRest of World
Sign up via our siteCEU Press
Established in 1993 to reflect the intellectual strengths and values of its parent institution, CEU Press is a leading publisher in the history of communism and transitions to democracy. It is widely recognised as the foremost English-language university press dedicated to research on Central and Eastern Europe and the former communist countries. It publishes 30 new titles a year and has a large backlist of over 500 titles with e-books already available through several platforms.
Sustainable funding for OA monographs
Building on library journal membership models such as Open Library of the Humanities and ‘Subscribe to Open’, CEU Press is creating a sustainable OA publishing model that will give members access to a selection of the extensive backlist, DRM free and with perpetual access after a subscription period of three years. This membership revenue is then used to publish new frontlist books under Creative Commons licences, openly accessible to anyone.
When the revenue target is met and the entire monograph frontlist is OA, future membership fee rates can be lowered. The model has support from LYRASIS who assist with organizing library participation in the programme and has support from OAPEN. Project MUSE host the books, providing MARC records, KBART files and supporting discovery systems, and subscribers have access to COUNTER compliant statistics. Membership is open to libraries and institutions worldwide. There are no catches and no hidden fees - members won’t be asked to pay more on top of their annual fee to access ‘more’ or ‘better’ titles. Packages won’t suddenly change.
Key benefits for OA
The revenue from the membership – that yields access to the backlist – will be used to fund the frontlist to be OA. Library membership fees will pay for only those books that do not already have funding. If a proposal for a book comes to CEUP with partial OA funding, the Press will use Opening the Future membership fees to share the production costs and publish the book OA.
The aim of this approach is to continue to yield a sustainable source of revenue for a press while achieving the desired commitment to making more titles OA. Given the current global library environment and existing budget pressures that have now been exacerbated by Covid-19, a consortial model of funding promises a cost-effective solution for OA that means no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.
Supported by COPIM
COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits, and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. CEU Press will be provided with assistance in implementing this model through Work Package 3 of the COPIM programme including documentation of this ‘working model’ as a step towards creating a free, open toolkit and roadmap for other book publishers considering OA.
