OA Investment Criteria and Lever Press

Lever Press is a born-digital, fully open access scholarly press whose operating costs are funded by the academic library members who support and govern it. As a diamond OA publisher, there is never a charge to authors or their institutions to publish with Lever, and its books are free to read and download by anyone anywhere with an internet connection.

Among OA initiatives, Lever Press is unique in that it is governed by an oversight committee composed of representatives nominated from and elected by its member libraries; as such, academic libraries don’t just support Lever Press, they are the press. When libraries invest in Lever Press, they invest in themselves and those they serve. To put it another way, consider “value for values”--Lever Press embodies the values and commitments shared by the member libraries who provide Lever’s financial and leadership support.

As noted in Making the Case for Lever Press, “We [academic libraries] have an obligation to craft models of scholarly publishing that align with our values, models that both benefit those who need access to information and those who produce the research. Lever Press does both.”

Lever’s stated values are:

• leadership and the courage to push existing boundaries
• diverse voices and viewpoints
• the principles of equity and social justice
• building community among our members and beyond
• continuous learning

(Lever Press Our Values)

Lever seeks out, identifies, evaluates, and advocates for transformative scholarship that

• Emerges from creative dialogue within and between traditional fields of inquiry, with an emphasis on disciplinary innovation and transformation;
• Engages with issues of social and civic importance; and
• Transcends divisions between research and teaching by drawing from new models of collaborative inquiry addressing a broad audience.

(The Lever Press Editorial Program)

• The Lever Press funding model described on the Join Us web page is intended to share the costs of running the press equitably among its members, and anticipates that a net membership gain over the previous phase in excess of the estimated required budget will result in reduced costs for all members (i.e., the more members who join, the less it will cost for everyone)
• The membership model uses a tiered pledge fee structure based on an institution’s most current materials expenditures; annual pledge fees range from $500 to $12,000 and have not increased since 2022
• The current Lever Press agreement is for a term of three years, and a copy of the pledge agreement is linked to on the Join Us page
• Lever’s current budget is $359,150 and is based on a goal of publishing 10 - 12 titles per year
• The average production direct cost per book is roughly $5,600 ($8,000 if production staff salaries are factored in)
• Lever’s revenue comes from pledge fees (currently pledged at $309,000/year); its expenses fall under the categories of Acquisitions and Editorial (currently budgeted at $20,000), Book Production (currently budgeted at $56,650), and Overhead (currently budgeted at $282,500) which includes salaries and benefits for staff members

• As a diamond OA publisher, there is never a charge to authors or their institutions to publish with Lever Press, and its books are free to read and download by a global audience
• Lever Press is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) initiative and a member of the Association of University Presses
• Lever authors retain copyright, publish under a Creative Commons license of their choosing, and receive a $1,000 honorarium per book
• Lever Press also pays its editorial board and peer reviewers, democratizing the scholarly communication system
• Manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review process (Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines), which is clearly signaled within the book and on the book’s online catalog page upon publication
• An editorial board composed of faculty nominated from pledging institutions and confirmed by the oversight committee oversees the title acquisition, review, and development process, ensuring the scholarly quality of a work and its alignment with the editorial program. Editorial board members receive a stipend for their service.
• Multiple Lever Press authors have been interviewed on the New Books Network and other outlets, and its titles have been reviewed in publications such as Kirkus Reviews, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Englewood Review of Books, and Music and Musical Performance: An International Journal
• A growing number of titles are also award finalists or winners, including
  • Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic - Finalist, 2025 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies; Finalist, 2025 Locus Awards Nonfiction category; Longlisted for the 2024 British Science Fiction Association Best Nonfiction Award
  • La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age - 2024 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award (Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender); 2023 PROSE Award Finalist in the category of Best eProduct (Association of American Publishers)

• As a diamond OA publisher, there is never a charge to authors or their institutions to publish with Lever Press
• Lever authors retain copyright, publish under a Creative Commons license of their choosing, and receive a $1,000 honorarium per book as part of Lever’s commitment to ethical publishing
• Full publishing documentation for authors is provided on the website along with the author and contributor agreement templates, and Lever’s acquiring editor works directly with authors to ensure they understand the technical instructions and can meet publication requirements
• By publishing with a born-digital press, authors can take advantage of the digital affordances offered by its host platform Fulcrum–audio, video, and image files–as well as the ability to include additional material that doesn’t appear in the book itself such as course syllabi and assignment worksheets, thus freeing authors from the constraints imposed by traditional print-centric publishing
• Lever Press demonstrates its commitment to pedagogy by publishing books with classroom and education value:
  • titles about the undergraduate classroom, e.g. Culture and Content in French: Frameworks for Innovative Curricula; Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives
  • titles about the academy and how to change it, e.g., Academic Pipeline Programs: Diversifying Pathways from the Bachelor's to the Professoriate; Faculty as Global Learners: Off-Campus Study at Liberal Arts Colleges
  • titles that can be used in college courses, e.g. La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age; The Politics of India under Modi: An Introduction to India’s Democracy, Economy, and Foreign Policy; Sophokles’s Women of Trachis
  • titles that are both scholarly and appropriate for a general audience, e.g. An Asian American Theology of Liberation; Casa Pueblo: A Puerto Rican Model of Self-Governance; Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live
• Published titles receive professional marketing and outreach attention through email and social media announcements, submission of titles for reviews and book awards as applicable, arrangement of author interviews, and related marketing efforts. Both the emailed new title announcements to members and Sharing Lever Press Books - A Guide for Member Libraries provide ideas to help members share information about newly released titles.

Some thoughts from authors on why they chose to publish with Lever Press:

We wanted to work with a publisher “who is aligned with our values of giving voice to people. We have noted that Lever Press seeks proposals that bring diverse perspectives to current social, moral, and political issues.” [Phillip Joy, Mount Saint Vincent University, co-editors, Queer Compassion in 15 Comics]

“As professors who teach in liberal arts programs, we are also attracted to Lever Press’s commitment to interdisciplinary, accessible, public humanities scholarship that embraces undergraduates as a primary segment of its audience.” [Suzanne Churchill, Davidson College, Linda A. Kinnahan, Duquesne University, and Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, co-authors, Travels with Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (forthcoming)]

“We are passionate about Lever Press’s open-access platform and the suitability of publishing research with its roots in the digital humanities in a born-digital format.” [Mackenzie Cooley, Hamilton College, and Wu Huiyi, CNRS (France), editors, Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue]

“I was struck by the novelty of the approach to digital publishing and by the broad coalition of institutions behind [Lever Press]. Its funding and publishing model has really convinced me. The association with liberal arts colleges and the focus of the program make the press a very good fit with my manuscript. Both are cross-disciplinary in nature, interested in broad societal issues and socially engaged, while remaining committed to high standards of scholarly work.” [Gregor Dobler, Freiburg University, author, Being at Liberty: The Productive Force of Unproductive Moments (forthcoming)]

“Lever’s mission matters to me on a personal level: I’m an Indigenous studies scholar, and much of my work concerns Indigenous communities. I was able to easily share my research with participating tribal community members—there was nothing in the way of red tape that often makes research reciprocity difficult. Overall, this aligns with my understanding of the liberal arts mission: interdisciplinary materials shared with a wide audience in the pursuit of better global education and understanding.” [Zoe Antoinette Eddy, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, editor of forthcoming title]

“[M]y hope is to reach a broader group of readers than just those who have access to well-appointed research libraries or can pay the high costs of scholarship published by commercial publishers. As a teacher, I find the thought of accessible research being available for use in a class without having to consider the cost for students or the department quite appealing—the possibility to use a CC BY-NC license is a strong point in Lever Press’s favor from my perspective.” [Stefan Ekman, University of Gothenburg, author, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic]

“The Platinum open access model is a key reason for Lever Press to be my first choice of publisher for this project. Broadening access to knowledge, broadening definitions of knowledge, and diversifying audiences and styles of scholarly enquiry, are guiding principles in deciding what to write, and where and how to publish.” [Jo Lindsay Walton, University of Sussex, author of forthcoming title]

For more insights, see the impact story Why Authors Publish With Lever Press.