As we mark International Open Access Week 2026, Edinburgh University Press reflects on this year’s theme, The Cost of Knowledge, and the importance of making research accessible to all. As a university press, our mission is to connect people and ideas, opening new perspectives and amplifying the role of the humanities and social sciences in shaping the world we live in.
Yet financial barriers can limit both who can access research and who can publish it. In this post, colleagues from our books and journals teams explore how EUP’s open access initiatives are helping to reduce these barriers and share knowledge more widely.
Gillian Leslie, Deputy Head of Books, on making books accessible to more readers
EUP’s books programme is committed to publishing world-class academic research that amplifies the critical role of the humanities and social sciences in shaping the way we think about and tackle global and local issues. Maximising the influence and impact of our books and making them as accessible to as many people as possible is an important part of our mission.
Open access is a key way for us to achieve this. With open access budgets under increasing strain, we work with authors to investigate alternative OA funding options. We have been part of Knowledge Unlatched’s OA programme since its inception, and are in our second year of JSTOR’s Path2Open initiative. Authors whose books are selected by Knowledge Unlatched or JSTOR for open access funding are not required to provide any OA funding themselves, making these programmes good options if an author requires OA but does not have funding available through their own institution.
EUP also funds gold OA for book authors who are based at our parent institution, the University of Edinburgh. We use our own cash reserves for this, as part of our mission as a university press.
The impact of lessening the cost of knowledge by making our books open access is considerable. Surveying readers who have downloaded our OA books, we receive consistent feedback about the importance of OA to independent scholars, scholars based in institutions that have very limited funding, graduate students on budgets, as well as from people who simply want to access the latest research in areas that interest and excite them.
Our readers cite access to scholarship, the ability to add books to reading lists knowing that all of their students can access them regardless of budget, the greater ease and availability of OA books to readers around the world and the reduction of barriers to knowledge and learning that OA books provide, as key benefits of OA.
As we make more of our books OA through these various initiatives, we hope that more of our readers will continue to reap the benefits of OA and that our authors’ books continue to gain even more visibility, helping us fulfill our mission of connecting people and ideas.
Chris Grieves, Deputy Head of Journals, on making journal publishing more accessible
High financial costs can exclude much of the world’s population from publishing open access in academic journals. This denies them the readership and citation benefits of open access articles. When those benefits are concentrated in the ‘elite’ institutions of global north countries (through high article processing charges, transformative deals, etc.) the inequalities in academia are only deepened.
At EUP, we have two initiatives to help combat these issues. The first of these is our Subscribe to Open (S2O) programme. Through S2O, nine journals are able to flip to open access on a volume-by-volume basis if enough institutions subscribe each year. This allows authors to publish OA with no fee.
The second is an element of our partnership with Research 4 Life (R4L). As well as providing access to all of our journals to R4L affiliated institutions in over 50 countries, we also waive the APCs for any authors based in Group A countries. In both cases, these initiatives make the benefits of OA publishing available to authors from the global south and/or from institutions with limited funding, meaning that they’re more able to influence the direction of their chosen fields.
Connecting people and ideas through open access
There is no single solution to the financial challenges of open access, but finding sustainable ways to share research is essential to ensuring that knowledge can reach beyond the institutions and individuals best placed to fund it.
At Edinburgh University Press, we believe that connecting people and ideas means creating opportunities for more voices to be heard and more readers to engage with research. By exploring different approaches to open access across our books and journals, we aim to help reduce financial barriers, broaden access to scholarship and support the exchange of ideas that can open new perspectives and shape the world we live in.
Explore open access books at EUP
Explore open access articles at EUP
Browse our Open Access Hub
Images, with thanks, from openaccessweek.org.
