Monographs are an integral part of the Humanities, an area of academia known for its slower shift into the open access world. While journals and ebooks have adjusted to OA models with relative ease, publishers have struggled to do the same with monographs. What can be done?

In October 2019, MIT Press received a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund to publish a collection of monographs open access and to develop a sustainable publishing framework that other presses can use. Over a year later, with a pandemic in between, MIT Press is ready to unroll its library collective action model, Direct to Open (D2O).

In the first episode of our four-part series, Emily Farrell, Library Partnerships and Sales Lead at MIT Press, offers a refresher on the goals of D20 and an update on the development process in the past year. Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, joins the conversation to offer his perspective on CRL’s and other consortia’s role in bridging the divide between libraries and publishers.