Taylor & Francis announced a new international collective funding pilot, Pledge to Open, which intends to publish 70 open access (OA) books on a broad range of global issues, including climate change, mental health, women’s rights, and race.
As the first step in the pilot, all higher education institutions in the UK can take part in the OA scheme thanks to an agreement struck with Jisc, the UK’s higher education library consortium.
Institutions can support one or more of the seven interdisciplinary themed collections, each comprising ten frontlist research books. If funding targets are met, the books will be published open access for everyone to read online, download and share.
The themed collections for this initial pilot are: climate change; green renewable energy; pandemic; populism and extremism; race and racism; wellbeing and mental health; and women’s health and rights.
All ten books in a collection will be published OA once its funding goal has been reached. If over half the target is achieved in the 12-month pledging period, a proportion of the titles will still be made OA. Pledging institutions will have perpetual unlimited access to all books in their selected collections, regardless of whether the funding goal is met.
Taylor & Francis marks 10 years of OA book publishing in 2023. With over 1,500 fully OA titles in its portfolio, combined with thousands of individual open chapters, Taylor & Francis is one of the leading open access book publishers.
Read the full press release here.