Big Ten Open Books

Big Ten Open Books connects readers everywhere to fully accessible, trusted books from leading university presses. The first collection of 100 books is on the subject of Gender and Sexuality Studies. The ebooks are free-to-read by anyone with an Internet connection. They are also openly-licensed under Creative Commons licenses which make most of the titles free-to-reuse in any non-commercial way. 

Open Access

Big Ten Open Books creates open content, on open infrastructure, using open distribution models - to envision a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. All titles in Big Ten Open Books have been reformatted using the latest standards in accessible publishing and the subject areas advance equity and inclusion. The ebooks are hosted on the University of Michigan’s Fulcrum platform. 

Access for Everyone

As a unique collaboration between the libraries and university presses of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Big Ten Open Books is naturally committed to creating ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility. 

Trusted

The works in this collection have all been previously published by university presses and have undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content made available. Participating presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.

This collection has established a model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s development of the BIG Collection's ambition of uniting the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and is supported by The Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge program.

For more information and to get involved, please contact Kate McCready.