Open access is a model of publishing and distributing scholarship online with no barriers to access for readers. With OA, the expense of publishing is generally not offset by sales or subscriptions, and other means to cover the initial and ongoing costs are necessary. To address this need, models to fund OA publishing have been developed to share the publication costs between a publisher and others, such as institutions, academic libraries, funders, and authors. With viable models for sustainably funding publications, OA can be one approach to publishing journal articles and books.

As a university press and not-for-profit organization, we strive to keep publishing costs low and publications affordable. Traditional commercial publication is our primary model and has proven for us to be a sustainable way of publishing both journals and books at prices that libraries and individuals find reasonable. At the same time, we welcome the opportunity to consider OA projects and to partner with authors and funders on viable approaches to open-access articles and books.  We believe that sustainable OA publishing must—and can—allow a press to invest in its staff and in its authors’ work. 

The Press is involved with several OA initiatives. We are an active participant in TOME, the initiative to publish open-access books. Our experiments in open access include the textbook Building the American Republic.  All of our OA titles are now available at OAPEN.org. We support green open access across our portfolio of more than 90 journals. To learn about journals and open access, read more here https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/open.