UMass Boston Expands Open Access Publishing Opportunities for Academic Books

UMass Boston’s Healey Library has launched new agreements to help faculty publish academic books as open access, making their research freely accessible to readers worldwide.
on Aug 26, 2026

BOSTON – UMass Boston’s Healey Library is offering faculty new possibilities of open access publication of their academic books, in addition to its open access support for journals, which has existed until now.

It is an effort that comes after the library has already offered support to open access publications in journals. As per the University, many faculty have shown interest in being able to publish their books in open access as well, which until now has not been an easy choice.

In conjunction with its expansion, Healey Library has made an agreement with the Cambridge University Press Open EBA, which includes access to e-books published by Cambridge and a flexible fund that may assist in the publication of open access books. UMass Boston becomes the first university in North America that takes part in the program and the second one in the world, after the Max Planck Institute located in Germany.

Also, the library has completed the deal with the De Gruyter eBound UPLOpen program, thus making the list of university presses that have joined the program even wider – the list includes such prestigious institutions as Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, Stanford University Press, Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Rutgers University Press, University of California Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.

This particular deal is very important for UMass Boston because of the high research activity in the humanities and social sciences, in which the book is a necessary format of scientific publications.

Open access publishing, by eliminating the restrictions on subscriptions and access, allows faculty members to have much wider reach to a significantly larger audience. Scholars, researchers, students, policy makers, teachers, and the public at large can access scholarly publications irrespective of the financial and institutional affiliations.

This move will be beneficial for the increased recognition of faculty members’ research. Wide accessibility can result in a wider reach of academic books, which would lead to more citations and engagement with scholars' research.

Steve Smith, associate university librarian for collections and discovery services, described that this move is part of the larger initiative of the library to provide an open access route to scholarly publications.

For authorship faculty, the program provides an opportunity to guarantee that all the years spent on researching and preparing a book will have a global audience. For UMass Boston, it helps build up the research reputation of the university by bringing attention to its scholarly work.

With these new agreements, the Healey Library is trying to make open access book publishing one of the key directions of its continuous mission to promote the research of UMass Boston.