Authors Alliance: An Interview with Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (UM) About the Big Ten Open Books Program

Dave Hansen, Executive Director of the Authors Alliance, interviews Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (University of Michigan Press) about the Big Ten Open Books Program that launched in  2023 and released a their second collection in August.

From the Interview:

Authors Alliance has had a longstanding interest in helping authors see their older books reinvigorated with new life by making them available online for free on an open access basis. One of the most exciting initiatives working on OA for backlist books is the Big Ten Open Books program. This post is based on a set of questions we posed to Kate McCready (Program Director for Open Publishing, Center for Library Programs at the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and Charles Watkinson (Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan) about what the program is and how it works.

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6) Do you have any suggestions for other libraries, presses, or others who might be interested in pursuing a similar initiative? 

When we began our work, there were no other programs actively working on making in-copyright backlist content (older than one year) open access. Now that we’ve developed systems and figured out solutions, we are happy to share our model with others. We also believe we have encouraged colleagues in other libraries and presses to focus on backlist. I would also suggest that if others are interested, we should work together to find solutions that find even more efficiencies to make this work more scalable.

Direct to Complete Interview (980 words)

See Also: Big Ten Open Books Project Launches ‘Indigenous North Americans’ Collection

See Also: Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Announces Launch of Big Ten Open Books Project

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Interviews, Libraries, News, Open Access, Profiles, Publishing