I’ve written here a lot about Open Access, primarily to journal articles. In fact, Hopkins has an Open Access Policy which asks our faculty to make their peer-reviewed journal articles openly available for all to read.
Now it’s time to turn our attention to Open Books. These books are produced by reputable publishers, go through editorial and peer review, and are free to read on the web. You may have to pay if you want a print copy, but it’s usually quite reasonable. We include many of these books in Catalyst so you can discover them and use them to support your research. Below are some examples with a little bit of their origin stories to show how many ways a book becomes open.
From War to Peace in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Ukraine by Daniel Serwer, SAIS
Dr. Serwer worked with a commercial publisher to make his book open.
How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation, and Community, 1865 – 1915 by Stephen Hardy
Project MUSE, run by the Johns Hopkins University Press, makes many current books openly available.
The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy by Ronald Paulson.
Encore Editions, also from Johns Hopkins University Press, digitizes older books and makes them openly available.
Myths that Made America by Heike Paul
This book was opened by Knowledge Unlatched, which organizes library support to pay publishers to make books openly available.
The Johns Hopkins Libraries have been members of Knowledge Unlatched for several years. We’re pleased to learn that Johns Hopkins University has been named a 2020 Open Access Hero by Knowledge Unlatched, because in 2019 Johns Hopkins students, faculty, and staff interacted with Knowledge Unlatched books more than any other institution.
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