We are excited to announce our participation in Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.

Launching as a pilot, Path to Open libraries will contribute funds to enabling participating presses – including Leiden University Press – to publish new books on JSTOR that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication. The initial pilot will produce about one thousand open access monographs. If successful, it will lay the foundation for an entirely new way to fund long-form scholarship while vastly increasing its impact. You can explore the Path to Open Access titles here!

Our Managing Publisher Saskia Gieling says the following: At Leiden University Press, we are dedicated to disseminating scholarly work to a broad audience, ensuring it reaches as many people as possible rather than confining it to a select few.

Path to Open was shaped through discussions convened by the American Council of Learned Societies of university presses, library leaders, and scholars. This new community-supported funding model will provide libraries with affordable access to diverse, high-quality frontlist titles, support sustainable university press publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, help authors reach a global audience, and advance equity of access to underserved researches around the world.

Leiden University Press will be publishing new books in the Path to Open program starting this year. Initial titles selected for Path to Open include China under Xi Jinping, edited by Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li; Hydropolitics in the Mekong: Water, Power and the Dialectics of Change, edited by Kim Geheb and Diana Suhardiman; Nonconformists’ Dimensions of Sufism and other Antinomian Movements in the Iranian Cultural Tradition, edited by Asghar Seyed-Gohrab; and The Making of Buddhism in Modern Indonesia: South and Southeast Networks, 1900-1959, by Yulianti.

Authors interested in learning more about this program are invited to contact Managing Publisher Saskia Gieling.