In partnership with your university press, we’re excited to offer your book on JSTOR through our Path to Open program. Path to Open is a groundbreaking Books at JSTOR initiative that supports the transition of high-quality scholarly monographs to open access at scale. Titles in this program are available to millions of researchers through JSTOR’s participating institutions for three years, after which they become fully open access for all readers worldwide.

Because JSTOR subsidizes the digital publishing costs for each title, university presses can more confidently invest in authors working across a wide range of subjects and emerging fields. This support helps expand bibliodiversity and ensures that important scholarship can reach global audiences.

This unique model is guided by a Community Advisory Committee representing publishing, library, and author communities, ensuring equity, sustainability, and transparency throughout the program.

Authors with titles in this program benefit from global reach, impact data demonstrating the influence of their scholarship, the opportunity to contribute to a sustainable path to open access, and opportunities for community recognition—all with no author fees.

If you’d like to promote the availability of your title on JSTOR, this toolkit makes it easy. You’ll find ready-to-use copy, social media assets, and outreach ideas—currently supporting open access works and aiming to add resources for non–open access titles in the future.

Customizable resources

Share news about your book easily with customizable, ready-to-use content you can post on your faculty page, department profile, blog, campus announcement, or social media channels.

These templates make it simple to let colleagues, students, peers, and your broader community know that your book is available through Path to Open.

Additional outreach opportunities

Looking for more ways to promote your book? Start by creating a brief summary you can reuse, then explore the ideas below—or come up with your own. 

Ideas specific to open access titles are outlined below.

Summarize your title

Before reaching out to collaborate with cross-functional partners, prepare a short overview of your open access book.

  • Download the title list to locate your book’s open access JSTOR link in the Stable URL column. Remember that titles become open access three years after publication (e.g., 2023 titles become open in 2026; 2024 titles in 2027; etc.). Prior to that, users can authenticate through a participating institution. 
  • Summarize what makes your book unique and include the link whenever you share it. For example: 

Covid and…: How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic
Copyright year: 2023
Editors: Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland, and Jennifer Malkowski
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Award: Winner of the 2024 ARSTM Book of the Year Award

Conduct outreach

Once you’ve summarized your open title, consider:

  • Letting instructors and colleagues know that your book is freely available for course adoption or research use
  • Adding your open access book link to your Google Scholar, ORCID, LinkedIn, or other professional profiles
  • Writing a short blog post, commentary, or author reflection to share your work with broader audiences
  • Asking your campus library to feature your book in a news item, social post, or faculty spotlight
  • Sharing your book with your university’s communications team for possible coverage or newsletter inclusion
  • Requesting that your department highlight your book on its website or in a program newsletter
  • Presenting your work at a department talk, conference, or webinar
  • Submitting your book to scholarly associations for member spotlights, newsletters, or blog posts

Let’s collaborate

Have a great idea or success story you want to share? We want to hear about it! Complete this form to get the conversation started.

View image credits from this page

Georges Seurat. Landscape at Saint-Ouen. 1878 or 1879. Part of Open: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artstor.