Study Architecture 
ProPEL AASL Column, October 2025
AASL Column
Barbara Opar and Alisha Rall, column editors
Column by Alisha Rall, Academic Services Librarian, Kansas State University.
Exploring Open Access Monographs: MIT’s Direct to Open Model
To help celebrate Open Access Month this October, we would like to explore the unique position of the field of architecture in the broader scholarly communication landscape. MIT Direct to Open (D2O) is an emerging model to support open access publishing for monographs.
Background: Open Access in Arts, Humanities and Design
While open access has gained significant momentum in the sciences, its adoption within the arts and humanities has been comparatively slower. Several factors contribute to this trend:
- Open Access Mandates: Compared to the sciences, the disciples of humanities, arts and design receive less government funding. As a result, there has been less external pressure to comply with open access mandates for publicly funded research.
- Importance of the Monograph: The long-form monograph remains a critical mode of scholarly dissemination of information in the arts, humanities and design fields. Most successful open access funding models, however, have been developed for scholarly journals, the standard means of dissemination of scientific literature.
- Author Fees and Funding: With the adoption of open access journals, the practice of authors covering the costs of Article Processing Charges (APC) has become the standard funding model for open access scholarship. Scholars in the arts, humanities, and design have been less willing or able (with less institutional and grant support) to cover the costs of publishing open access articles, let alone monographs.
- Production Costs: Not only does the length of the work add to the difficulty in publishing open access monographs, but the prevalence of image-heavy text in art and design works adds complexity and costs to acquire copyright access.
- Shelf Life of Scholarship: While scientific research often loses relevance within a few years, work in the arts and design maintains a much longer “shelf life.” In scientific disciplines, embargo periods can significantly reduce market competition for new material. In contrast, publications produced decades ago often remain valuable and relevant in the arts and design fields.[1]
Why Open Access Monographs Matter
Despite these challenges, there are benefits to open access publishing for the scholar, which provides a means to address the weakening monograph market.
- Scholarly Impact: Not only are OA books more likely to reach a global audience, these titles experience ten times more downloads and twice the number of citations (across all disciplines).[2]
- Decreasing Monograph Sales: Scholarly monograph sales have been steadily decreasing over the past few decades. Many books that would have sold a few thousand copies before may now only sell a few hundred.[3]
- University Press Financial Strain: Many university presses are struggling. Academic libraries represent the majority of university presses’ monograph sales. Unfortunately, library’s monograph budgets have been slashed to counterbalance the “serials crisis,” the drastic increase in journal subscription costs.[4]
As higher education seeks to find solutions to this emerging “monograph crisis,” open access initiatives may offer opportunities to reimagine the traditional publishing model and develop more equitable, sustainable funding strategies for all stakeholders.
However, open access monograph practices have led to a variety of models that can often be confusing, each offering a different blend of access between backlists, frontlists and based on different sources of funding from author payments or subscription models.
Open Access Monographs: Profile of MIT Direct to Open
Launched in 2021, MIT Direct to Open (D2O) provides diamond open access to monographs. At the heart of this initiative is leveraging the collective purchasing power of libraries to help fund releasing an ever-growing collection of open access titles. This model avoids placing funding responsibilities for Book Processing Charges (BPC) on the author.
MIT Press’s History of Architecture Scholarship:
When asked about MIT Press’s engagement with architectural scholarship, representatives emphasized the Press’s enduring commitment, stating:
“Publishing scholarly work in the field of architecture and design has been a focus of the MIT Press since its founding in 1962. From groundbreaking works like Walter Gropius’ The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Jean Gottman’s Megalopolis, and Nicholas Negroponte’s The Architecture Machine, to critical contemporary scholarship like Against Reason, Abundance Not Capital, and Sick Architecture, the MIT Press values cutting-edge scholarship that shapes the way we think about architecture and design. We encourage scholars in the field to submit their work and take advantage of D2O’s diamond open access model to reach as many readers as possible.”
How does MIT’s Direct to Open (D20) work?
Rather than buying individual titles, libraries can contribute funds to a collection of titles, so that if the funding threshold is met, the collection will be released as open access for everyone on the MIT Press Direct Platform. This cost-sharing model allows open access beyond a title-by-title model, with the target goal of funding ~80 open access books per year. Content remains open access in perpetuity once flipped.
This model supports dynamic pricing, with multiple participation fee tiers based on a participating institution’s median acquisition budget, size and degree type. While meeting the open access threshold is not guaranteed, participating institutions receive guaranteed perpetual access to all titles in the D2O collection(s) that they supported, and one year of access to the monographs backfile (~ 2,650 titles).
What types of titles are included?
From the MIT Press, libraries can either support the Complete Collection (~80 titles) or focus on two subject collections: Humanities & Social Sciences (~50 titles), and STEAM (STEM + Art & Design, ~30 titles). In 2026, D2O added publishing partnerships with Duke University Press (~20 frontlist titles from their Humanities and Social Sciences collection, plus exclusive access to a backlist collection of ~250 titles) and Goldsmith Press (~4 frontlist titles, plus access to a backlist collection of ~13 titles).
Has the D2O model been successful?
Since its launch in 2021, D2O has funded 320 open access monographs, with 407 libraries and 13 consortia participating in the program.
According to the D2O Impact Report 2025:
“On average, our open access Humanities and Social Sciences books are used 2.26 times more and receive 8% more citations than their non-open counterparts.
Our open access STEAM books are used 1.6 times more and receive 5% more citations than their non-open counterparts.”[5]
How can my institution participate?
There’s still time to support D2O 2026! The commitment deadline is November 30, 2025. If your institution is interested in learning more, please contact the MIT Press Library Relations team at mitp-library-relations@mit.edu.
Learn more about MIT Direct to Open (D2O).
[1] Patrick Tomlin, “Beyond the Monograph? Transformations in Scholarly Communication and Their Impact on Art Librarianship,” in The Handbook of Art and Design Librarianship, 2nd edition. (Facet Publishing, 2017), https://doi.org/10.29085/9781783302024; Albert N Greco, The Future of the Humanities and Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities, Marketing and Communication in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 119–46, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66170-9_6.
[2] Cameron Neylon et al., “More Readers in More Places: The Benefits of Open Access for Scholarly Books,” Insights 34, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.558.
[3] “The Costs of Publishing Monographs,” Ithaka S+R, n.d., accessed October 15, 2025, https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-costs-of-publishing-monographs/.
[4] Elisabeth A Jones and Paul N Courant, “Monographic Purchasing Trends in Academic Libraries: Did the ‘Serials Crisis’ Really Destroy the University Press?,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing (TORONTO) 46, no. 1 (2014): 43–70, https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.46.1.003.
[5] “D2O Impact Report 2025,” MIT Press, n.d., accessed October 14, 2025, https://mitpress.mit.edu/open-access-at-mit-press/d2o-impact-report-2025/.
