In Direct to Open, MIT Press has developed a creative model for funding ebook publishing that promotes open scholarship and helps preserve the specialized scholarly monograph as a medium. Librarians wishing to support these goals should give it serious consideration.
Direct to Open (stylized as D2O) is a book publishing model from MIT Press that enables participating libraries to act collectively to fund diamond open access (OA) scholarly monographs. Books are organized into two subject collections: Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Design, and Mathematics (STEAM). Participants can choose to support either or both collections. Since launching D2O in 2022, MIT Press has used the model to publish 240 OA ebooks, with 80 more forthcoming in 2025.
Under the D2O model, libraries financially support the publication of OA scholarly monographs, which are made available online via the MIT Press Direct platform. Rather than purchasing books for their own local collections, participating libraries share in the costs of creating open scholarship for all readers and researchers.
The books published through D2O are the press’s “‘professional’ books, defined … as original foundational scholarship, intended primarily for specialists, as distinguished from ‘trade’ titles, which synthesize prior research and aim for a more general audience” (Crow, 2022, p. 3). (Trade books are also sold through the MIT Press Direct platform.) Since the program began in 2022, 78–82 OA monographs have been published each year, so far totaling 159 in the HSS and 81 in the STEAM collection (The MIT Press, 2024a). Earlier this month, MIT Press announced that it had met its funding goal for 2025 and so will add 80 more this year (The MIT Press, 2025). The D2O titles go through the same rigorous peer review process as books published for sale.
Ebooks are hosted on the MIT Press Direct website, https://direct.mit.edu/books. As of this writing, the platform contains 4,011 books, 454 of which are OA, including the 240 D2O titles published between 2022 and 2024, with new publications being continuously added. OA books are marked with the familiar green “open lock” icon, though titles are not specifically labeled as belonging to the D2O collections. Another approximately 2,500 books on the platform—scholarly monographs published before 2022—form the D2O backlist. Finally, the platform includes trade books, which libraries can purchase separately. Records for trade books appear among search results but are marked “no access” for users whose institutions have not purchased them.
Ebook records include basic bibliographic information (title, authors, ISBN, DOI, and publication date) followed by a brief abstract (Figure 1). All ebooks are posted as PDFs, with separate files for each chapter or comparable portion (such as front matter, appendices, references, etc.). Full book PDFs are also provided, but only for OA titles. An epub viewer, called “Reader,” allows online reading; however, it is only available for the newer titles on the site. All PDFs are DRM-free, and all ebooks allow unlimited simultaneous users.
A persistent search bar appears at the top of the page. When the user is viewing a book, the domain for the next search defaults to “all books”; that can be changed to “all content” to include journal articles. Results of “all book” searches can be filtered by format (book or chapter), subject, book series, date, and availability. Users can also update searches by adding terms within specific search field filters, such as author, full text, abstract, keyword, etc. An advanced search option allows users to choose “any,” “all,” or “exact phrase” searching, limit results to a certain author’s name and/or date-range, or specify results from a certain publication (Figure 2).
The MIT Press states that it is “working toward compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA, International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) EPUB Accessibility 1.0, General Services Administration Section 508 guidelines, and the European Accessibility Act” (The MIT Press, n.d.-a). A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) was posted in September 2024 that assesses conformance with WCAG 2.2 Levels A and AA (The MIT Press, 2024b); however, I was unable to locate any external assessment of the platform’s accessibility.
Libraries can participate in D2O by supporting either or both subject collections. Each year, MIT Press sets a financial target for each collection that “represents 50% of the average direct costs for publishing the monographs in the collection” (The MIT Press, 2024c, pp. 4–5). If a number of libraries sufficient to meet the financial target agrees to participate before the annual commitment deadline—for 2025, it was November 30, 2024—then that year’s monographs will be made OA at publication with no embargo. The model allows for the possibility that one collection might be opened in a given year while the other is not.
Absent sufficient commitments to support open publishing during a given year, monographs will remain closed and available for purchase, and libraries that agreed to participate will not be charged. They will, however, receive the other benefits of participation during the pledged support period, the most substantial being term access to the D2O backlist, which is approximately evenly distributed between HSS and STEAM subjects. During the years that they participate in D2O, libraries receive access to backlist titles in the subjects they support—even if the model fails and new titles remain closed that year (The MIT Press, n.d.-d). Participants are also offered the option to purchase trade ebooks, which are excluded from the D2O backfile access, in collections of 100 at a 25 percent discount (The MIT Press, n.d.-b).
D2O has a transparent, country-specific pricing structure based on institutional size and classification. The HSS and STEAM collections are priced separately, with a 5 percent discount applied to the total cost for libraries that support both. For participants in the United States, the cost to support both collections in 2025 ranged from $1,745 for two-year institutions with fewer than 5,000 students to $6,685 for doctoral institutions with more than 20,000 students (The MIT Press, n.d.-b). The model also incorporates “dynamic” pricing, through which costs to all participating libraries may be reduced if the revenue targets are exceeded in a given year (The MIT Press, n.d.-c). Libraries can commit to supporting D2O for one or three years; if they choose three, their annual costs will not increase during that term (The MIT Press, 2024c, p. 7).
D2O monographs are published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses, “with case-by-case consideration for authors who request a different license” (The MIT Press, 2024c, p. 3). There are no book processing charges or other fees to authors, regardless of their institutional affiliation.
According to the institutional administrator dashboard, supported access options are referring URL, IP address range, and Shibboleth single sign-on. The administrator dashboard can also be used for downloading MARC records and Knowledge Base and Related Tools (KBART) reports and for viewing and downloading usage data.
Books published by MIT Press are available in multiple formats from multiple sources. While the MIT Press Direct site, which hosts the D2O ebooks, is geared toward enabling libraries to purchase ebooks in collections, librarians who prefer to select them title-by-title can do so via aggregators like EBSCO and ProQuest. Retail versions of ebooks are also available for individual readers, and print editions can be purchased from numerous suppliers, including the MIT Press’s own bookstore. Notably, the OA books in the D2O collections are not confined to the digital format; MIT Press also sells them in paperback.
While the Subscribe to Open approach to sustainable OA is gradually gaining ground in journal publishing, collaborative funding of open access is not yet as well established as a framework for book publishing. MIT Press’s D2O, therefore, is an innovative model, although not a unique one. Structurally, D2O probably most strongly resembles the University of Michigan Press’s Fund to Mission, including that supporting libraries receive term access to both presses’ otherwise gated backfiles (University of Michigan Press, n.d.). A newer program that bears watching is JSTOR’s Path to Open, which was launched in 2023 and is currently in the pilot stage. While D2O and Fund to Mission both facilitate OA publishing from single publishers, JSTOR’s model employs a collective funding model to support selected OA titles from more than 40 university presses (JSTOR, n.d.).
MIT Press has developed a creative model for funding ebook publishing that furthers two worthwhile goals: promoting open scholarship and preserving the specialized scholarly monograph as a medium. The transparency of the price structure is admirable, and, although it is difficult to speculate about the long-term sustainability of a program that has only just concluded its third year, it has made a promising start. Although the collections, averaging 80 books per year, are fairly small, they represent an impressive range of subjects, and the quality of the monographs themselves is strong.
The platform is straightforward and easy to use, but advanced search features are somewhat limited. Some readers may find the inability to view all titles in an online reader slightly inconvenient; however, DRM-free PDFs that allow unlimited simultaneous users are always praiseworthy.
For an individual library, the local value of investing in D2O may depend on how extensive its existing holdings from MIT Press are. For participating institutions—as opposed to the community of scholars as a whole, who share the benefit of open access—the principal direct incentives to support D2O are term access to the monograph backfiles and discounted pricing on trade books. If a library already owns most of these titles, the significance of those benefits is diminished.
The broader value of participating is the prospect of facilitating OA publishing of scholarly monographs. Of course, library budgets are limited, for OA investments as for traditional purchases and subscriptions, so it’s vital that each library that invests in open publishing determines a strategy to allocate funds that reflects its own needs and values. Librarians wishing to prioritize both opening and preserving the scholarly monograph should give serious thought to D2O as a viable approach to that goal.
I recommend D2O primarily for research libraries. By design, the titles in the D2O collection are specialized monographs intended for an audience of researchers; titles of more general interest, including those that are more suited to undergraduate readers, are instead in MIT Press’s trade books collections. Therefore, D2O—and having access to the D2O backfile—is most likely to be valuable to academic libraries that support doctoral programs.
Crow, R. (2022). MIT Press Open Monograph Model (Direct to Open). Chain Bridge Group and the MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/DocumentLibrary/MITP_D2O_Report_2021_Dec_20_updated_2022_Feb_02_FINAL.pdf
JSTOR. (n.d.). Path to Open. About JSTOR. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/
The MIT Press. (n.d.-a). Accessibility. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://direct.mit.edu/pages/accessibility
The MIT Press. (n.d.-b). Direct to Open: Fees. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open-fees
The MIT Press. (n.d.-c). Direct to Open: Model Design. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open-model
The MIT Press. (n.d.-d). Participate in Direct to Open. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open-participate
The MIT Press. (2024a). Direct Title List. https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/Holdings_and_Title_Lists
The MIT Press. (2024b). MIT Press Direct Accessibility Conformance Report: WCAG Edition. https://direct.mit.edu/DocumentLibrary/VPAT/MITPress-VPAT2.5WCAG-Sept2024.pdf
The MIT Press. (2024c). MIT Press Direct to Open (D2O) General Prospectus. https://direct.mit.edu/DocumentLibrary/D2O%20Related/MITP_D2O_General_Prospectus_2025.pdf
The MIT Press. (2025, January 16). MIT Press’s Direct to Open reaches annual funding goal for 2025, opens access to 80 new monographs [Press release]. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-direct-to-open-reaches-annual-funding-goal-for-2025-opens-access-to-over-80-new-monographs/
University of Michigan Press. (n.d.). Invest in Open Access. University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://ebc.press.umich.edu/invest/
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