Looking Back on 2025 - OtF Annual Report

Posted by Tom Grady on Jan. 12, 2026 at 1447

The year 2025 was a very busy one for Opening the Future. The main news is that our list of participating publishers doubled, offering still more routes to authors to publish OA and more backlist content to enhance local library collections (and there’s another press on the way in spring 2026 too, bringing the total to 5)!  Read on for more on this and other news.


New Publishers

We spent much of this year onboarding and launching with two new publishers, Michigan State University Press and Boydell & Brewer, the latter of which was done in partnership with Fulcrum and Lyrasis, two key non-profits in the US. 


Both of these new partnerships were very exciting for us; firstly, they represented two thirds of one of our main goals for the 2024-2026 portion of our project, which was to onboard three new publishers. 


They also represented an expansion of our work in other ways. We were excited to expand into the US with Michigan State University Press, and also to move into a new subject area of African and Diaspora Studies, including titles on black experience in America and beyond. We were also very pleased to partner with Boydell & Brewer, an independent and mission-driven academic publisher, to demonstrate that our model works with a broad range of publisher types, in addition to the university presses we have so far worked with.

They also expanded OtF’s support into entirely new subject areas including Medieval Studies, Music, and Performance Arts. And we greatly valued the partnership that Boydell & Brewer brought us to with both Fulcrum and Lyrasis. 

Library Engagement and Title Impact

We are grateful to the many libraries that opted to renew their membership with us in 2025, and were also very pleased to see them joined by several new institutions: the University of Limerick (via the IReL Consortium), the University of Leicester, the University of Warwick, Lafayette College, and the London School of Economics. 


We are grateful to them, and to all of our supporters without whom it would not have been possible to publish 8 new books open access this year, without paywalls or author fees (with more funded but not yet published - read on for more details there). 

As in our last annual report, we also gathered some usage statistics on our titles. As the OAPEN data we base our report on is only available to October 2025, this does not cover the whole year but shows that the OtF-funded titles are being read extensively. 

The OtF-funded titles at Liverpool University Press were accessed a total of 4,095 times from January to October 2025. The OtF-funded titles at CEU Press, meanwhile, were accessed 15,433 times in that same period, for a combined total of 19,528 times.

Excluding any other platforms they were read on, this means that the OtF-funded books were read on average 64 times per day in 2025.

Or, to look at this another way, averaged out across all 39 titles, that's around 500 accesses per title. *

* (This is OAPEN usage data only - the books are all available on multiple other platforms, so these figures are indicative, meaning that total usage and uptake is likely much greater still).

This degree of usage demonstrates one of the core values of publishing research open access (dissemination and reach), and we appreciate the financial support of our library members in enabling this.

Recognition of the Model 

Opening the Future also featured prominently in the Ithaka S+R report "The Current State of Academic E-Book Business Models: Access Strategies and Budgeting Realities." (13 August 2025) https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.323373 where it was noted:

"...initiatives that strengthen the capacity of university presses and independent publishers to produce open access monographs—whether immediately or through phased approaches—are viewed as essential in protecting these presses’ capacities to publish alternative voices. As such, these open monograph efforts underpin the sustainability of these publishers and also safeguard their ability to curate and disseminate specialized and underrepresented areas of scholarship to a wide range of readers...the real value is that the library views [Opening the Future] more as a subscription model plus supporting open access, as opposed to providing open access support alone.”

OtF-funded Publications in 2025 

Eight OtF-funded CEU Press titles were published in 2025, with more imminent -  11 more were funded in 2025 and are at various stages of writing, peer review and production. 

This brings the total number of funded titles at CEU Press to 66 - a highly impactful number, representing titles that would not have been published openly without this library investment in OtF. 

CEU Press 2025 published titles:


Due to some lengthy editorial processes, no OtF-funded LUP titles were published in 2025. The next title will be Anticolonialism, race and violence in Basque radical nationalism (1892-1936) by Maria Reyes Baztán (forthcoming, February 2026).


Author perspectives 

Some of the authors who were published OA through OtF funding were kind enough to share their thoughts on a series of blog posts published last year. You can read them all in full on the links below but a couple of quotes highlighted to us how important the OA and OtF mission is:


LUP author Tess Rankin said "Without a university affiliation for most of the publishing process, I would not have been able to apply for institutional funding for open access, and working outside of a university setting means that my book could easily be less visible than others. Being able to link to an open access version of my book in my email signature and on my website means that people are more likely to encounter and engage with the book."


Daniel Silva, another LUP author said "The impact of having my books published in Opening the Future is immeasurable. The typical cost of an academic book tends to be inaccessible to many students and scholars, thus limiting the reach of one’s intellectual work. At a time in which critical academic work in the humanities and social sciences is being politically targeted, the accessible circulation of scholarship is ever important. I am grateful to Liverpool University press for being involved in open access publishing, something that is aligned with the spirit of so much scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences."


The longer blog posts can be found at the following links:


The future, 2026 and beyond…

As for 2026, we expect the year to be very busy - but also short. This is because the Research England and Arcadia funded 'Copim Open Book Futures project', of which we are a part, concludes at the end of April 2026. Therefore, much of our work this year, alongside ongoing operational and administrative duties, will be finalising our post-project plans and continuation of Opening the Future - don’t worry the program will continue to operate as before and indeed we have plans to grow it, but there are some changes for the team behind-the-scenes once the project-funded 'start up' phase concludes. 


Related to that, another of our current activities is establishing a Community of Practice to better support our publishers and library community, and to facilitate new publishers or members interested in joining to make the necessary connections with other organisations, ask questions, and share experience and knowledge. We'll also be disseminating some project reports in April that we hope will be useful to publishers, libraries, and practitioners.


And next month we'll be presenting on what we and our publishers have learned during the Opening the Future project at a Copim Open Book Futures conference, being held in February in person (London) and online, and which is free to attend. We hope that some of you will be able to join us there, with some tickets still available at this link on the project website.


Finally, we are on the cusp of launching with a new publisher, which will once again expand both the geographic spread, and type, of our participating publishers and will offer even more backlist content and subjects to enhance library catalogues. We'll be announcing this later this month! 

So the future is pretty bright from our point of view.

As of January 2026 there is now a breadth of backlist scholarship available on topics ranging from African Studies and black experience in America; to medieval music; Latin American language, politics and culture; the history of the Ukraine/Russian region; European politics and history; performance studies and much more. See openingthefuture.net for links to all the member presses and their backlists.