MIT Press’s Direct to Open: Bridging the Library and Press Divide

Sponsored by MIT Press

Recorded on 03/17/2021
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 184

Who doesn’t love a good ice cream social? Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, believes that partnerships between university presses and libraries are key to developing sustainable knowledge dissemination practices. During his time at MIT Libraries, he would invite members of the Press to their annual ice cream social—he viewed any opportunity to mingle between groups as essential.

Emily Farrell, Library Partnerships and Sales Lead at the MIT Press, agrees, noting that university press and library staff are often more alike than they realize. “There’s an incredible number of very idealistic, nerdy, bookish folks that … love what they do, and they do it because the mission really matters, and I think that that personal resonance and connection, it shouldn’t be undervalued in terms of what it can produce.”

In this third episode, Emily and Greg chat about the potential that new relationships between presses and libraries hold. Emily also breaks down the adaptability of MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) model for other presses, and key performance indicators of its success, like increased author buy-in. Greg explains the valuable role consortia can play by highlighting innovative projects like D2O for libraries to keep on their radar.

About the guests:

Gregory T. Eow
President
Center for Research Libraries

Greg Eow is President of the Center for Research Libraries, responsible for setting strategic directions and overall CRL programming and services in collaboration with the CRL Board of Directors, CRL staff, CRL member libraries, and CRL strategic partners. Before joining the Center for Research Libraries in 2019, he served as the Associate Director for Collections at the MIT Libraries, where he led an administrative portfolio that included scholarly communications and collections strategy, digital preservation, acquisitions and metadata creation, and the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Eow has held previous appointments as Charles Warren Bibliographer at the Harvard Library and as Kaplanoff Librarian for American History at the Yale University Library. Eow currently serves on the Management Board of the MIT Press as well as the Board of Directors of the Chicago Collections Consortium. He is a member of the American Historical Association.

Emily Farrell
Library Partnerships and Sales Lead
MIT Press

Emily Farrell is Library Partnerships & Sales Lead at the MIT Press where she works with libraries on ensuring access to digital content. Before the MIT Press, she worked in both sales and as an acquisitions editor for linguistics, developing a program in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, at De Gruyter. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from Macquarie University, Sydney. Emily serves on the board of the non-profit legal services organization UnLocal, as well as the Foundation for the Yonkers Public Library.

Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:

• Episode one: Exploratory Phase No More
• Episode two: Determining Success and Incentives
• Episode four: Changing Conditions in the Scholarly Ecosystem

Listen to our previous series with MIT Press, Finding a Place for Open Access Monographs:

• Episode one: A Lack of Product-Market Fit
• Episode two: Starting from Scratch
• Episode three: Defining the Framework
• Episode four: Peer into the Crystal Ball

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