In this episode, Charles Watkinson, the Director of University of Michigan Press and the Associate University Librarian for Publishing at University of Michigan Library, joins us to discuss Open Access ebooks and their role in the publishing community. Open Access ebooks are essentially freely available ebooks, usually for scholarly monographs, that are released under a license that allows reuse (most commonly a Creative Commons license).

University of Michigan Press has experimented with Open Access since the 1990's, but developed their current program starting in the mid-2000's. Their goal, under their Fund to Mission program, is to get their monograph program to almost 100% open access by 2024.

Joshua and Charles talk in this interview about release schedules and approaches for Open Access ebooks, licensing models, hybrid chapter-only models, and more. Charles also shares some of the specific approaches UM Press is taking, including combining their open access titles with their catalog subscription program.

You can learn more about University of Michigan Press' Open Access program, and see the list of books, at press.umich.edu. Also, the Directory of Open Access Books (doabooks.org) has more information about Open Access, a toolkit for authors, and more.

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