More Ebooks at Your Fingertips Thanks to An Open Access Project Supported by JMU Libraries
Posted October 21, 2024 in General Collections News, JMU Libraries News
In 2022, the JMU community gained access to over 2,000 ebooks published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Press when JMU Libraries joined the Direct to Open (D2O) project.
Since then, the JMU community has gained access to more than 700 additional ebooks across all disciplines, thanks to D2O and the hundreds of libraries worldwide that support the D2O program.
In honor of International Open Access Week, we’re thrilled to share the news that 240 of these new ebooks were funded and made open access by the D2O program. Making a book “open access” means that it is openly available to anyone to read without a fee to the reader. According to D2O’s recent impact report from MIT Press, “On average, our open access Humanities and Social Sciences books are used 3.75 times more and receive 21% more citations than their non-open counterparts. Our open access STEAM books are used 2.67 times more and receive 15% more citations than their non-open counterparts, on average.”
You can find these ebooks in JMU’s Library Search by adding the phrase “MIT Press” to your search terms — or by browsing one of these lists:
By supporting D2O, an innovative, sustainable framework for open access books, JMU Libraries is helping facilitate a collaborative open access approach to publishing professional and scholarly books. This is only one of many ways we seek to support sustainable scholarship – providing open, inclusive, and equitable access to creators and their audiences.
Learn more: See MIT’s Direct to Open 2024 impact report or contact Yasmeen Shorish, JMU Libraries’ Director of Scholarly Communications Strategies.