In partnership with eight Big Ten-affiliated university presses, the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Center for Library Programs has expanded the Big Ten Open Books project with the publication of the second 100-book collection. 

The second collection is centered on Indigenous North Americans. The works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost. 

The Big Ten Open Books project has established a distinctive model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available on open infrastructure (Fulcrum, hosted by the University of Michigan) using open distribution models (including Project MUSE, JSTOR, OAPEN, and The Palace Project from Lyrasis) and envisions a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. Funding for this collection has been provided by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the California Digital Library. 

This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s vision for the BIG Collection, which seeks to unite the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance into one collection, shared and fully networked. 

Read more about the Big Ten Open Books collections and the project on the BTAA website.