Who Owns Our Knowledge? We Do! (OA Week 2025)

In July of this year, Taylor & Francis announced their purchase of a university press. Amsterdam UP had technically (and quietly) become a private corporation in 2019, spinning off from the university to focus on their profit margin and licensing the university's name to maintain prestige and continuity. AUP was a major publisher of open access (OA) scholarship and widely regarded as a leading European publisher.

The news came as a surprise to many, leading to the resignation of more than two dozen series editors and advisory board members, who felt betrayed. Authors also expressed their outrage. One of my own books was published by AUP in 2017. Now our work was owned, without our input, by one of the corporate behemoths of academic publishing—a choice most of us would never have willingly made.

Who owns knowledge, who produces it, and how—and, most importantly, who pays for it—are central questions for researchers, publishers, and university librarians now more than ever. Lever Press answers these questions with a collective yawp: "we do." Lever Press was founded by liberal arts college libraries in the mid-2010s to offer a collective response to the rising concerns about who has access to publishing an open access book.

Rather than rely on processing charges provided by authors, their institutions, or grants—most of them publicly funded—Lever Press pioneered a cost-sharing subscription model to open access publishing, whereby dozens of colleges and universities would pay a small amount to support a larger goal: making important scholarship free to everyone without charging authors to publish their books.

But Lever Press's model goes well beyond our goal to bring free knowledge to everyone. Lever Press is collectively governed by the libraries that fund the Press. Decisions about the direction of the Press are made by librarians elected from funding institutions and major decisions are made by a vote of all members. Lever Press recognizes not only the need for scholars to own the knowledge they produce (our authors retain copyright and choice of CC license) but also for the academy to own the means of knowledge production.

Lever Press is a collectively owned project by the academy, that serves the needs of academic institutions and their researchers, and which provides free knowledge to the entire world. At every level, Lever Press makes the open access ethos real. For us, it's a commitment to knowledge for all and to collective ownership and ethical stewardship of that knowledge.