That the results of research should be available to everyone who might use them; and that book-length research, which has opened up most slowly, is where the principle now matters most.
Who We Are
Bassi Foundation Press publishes book-length scholarship: monographs, edited volumes, critical editions and long-form essays. We publish all of it in open access. Every title is free to read and download from the day it appears, in every country, permanently. We do not operate a paywall and we do not intend to.
The Bassi Foundation was established in 2018 and made its first awards in 2019. Across twenty-two rounds, from Spring 2019 to Spring 2026, it supported 271 projects by master’s and doctoral candidates, postdoctoral researchers and early-career faculty, at more than 180 institutions on five continents, in fields running from law, history, sociology and political science to literature, music, art history, philosophy, education, architecture, physics, engineering, medicine and the life sciences. The Press is the Foundation’s publishing imprint.
The Foundation, and What It Funded
Why Open Access Is the Whole Model
The Press publishes open access only. Four things follow from that.
1. Funders and Their Conditions
Requirements differ sharply by country and by output type. In the United States and Canada the public-access policies now in force reach journal articles and, in places, book chapters, but not monographs; in the United Kingdom and the European Union several funders do impose conditions on long-form work. The position for the funders our authors most often hold is set out below.
| Funder | Requirement for books and chapters | Licence | Maximum embargo |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Endowment for the Humanities | The NEH Public Access Plan does not apply to monographs or chapters in edited volumes. Its requirement, in force for awards made on or after 1 October 2025, reaches peer-reviewed journal articles only. Open-access fees are an allowable cost; for awards to organisations the budget may include up to about USD 6,000 for them. The separate Fellowships Open Book Program pays a publisher a fixed sum to open an already published book by an NEH fellow. | None required. The Fellowships Open Book Program accepts any of the six standard Creative Commons licences, and gives CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 as its example. | Not applicable to books |
| National Institutes of Health | None. The public access policy, in force from 1 July 2025, applies to author accepted manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, which it defines as a periodical. Monographs, edited volumes and book chapters fall outside that definition. | Not specified for books | Not applicable to books |
| National Science Foundation | None. Deposit is required only for articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings. NSF has said it is considering extending its requirements to book chapters, but has not done so. Publication and dissemination costs are chargeable to an award. | Not specified for books | Not applicable to books |
| Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | No open-access condition on the outputs of a grant. Mellon funds open-access book programmes, and where it does the programme sets its own terms, so check the programme rather than the foundation. | Not specified | Not applicable |
| American Council of Learned Societies | No open-access condition found on fellowship outputs. ACLS supports open-access books through prizes to authors and publishers rather than through grant conditions. | Not specified | Not applicable |
| Tri-Agency: SSHRC, NSERC and CIHR | None for books. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications covers peer-reviewed journal publications, and the revised policy issued for consultation in 2025 states that monographs and book chapters are beyond its scope. Open-access publishing costs are eligible grant expenses under the Tri-Agency Financial Administration Guide. | Not specified for books | Not applicable to books |
| SSHRC and the Scholarly Book Awards | No book-specific requirement beyond the Tri-Agency policy. The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences runs the Scholarly Book Awards, formerly the Awards to Scholarly Publications Programme, with SSHRC support; it is format neutral and offers open-access book and chapter grants alongside its publication grants. | Not specified. Confirm the current terms with the Federation before relying on a licence for an award-supported title. | Not applicable |
| UKRI | In-scope monographs, book chapters and edited collections acknowledging UKRI funding and published from 1 January 2024 must be free to view and download, through a publication platform, the publisher's website, or an institutional or subject repository. Trade books, textbooks and exhibition catalogues are out of scope. A dedicated UKRI fund is available to eligible UK research organisations and is claimed by the institution, not the author. | Creative Commons; CC BY preferred, other CC licences permitted. Open Government Licence where authors are subject to Crown Copyright. | 12 months |
| Wellcome | Original scholarly monographs and book chapters authored or co-authored by grant holders must be freely available through PubMed Central Bookshelf and Europe PMC. Textbooks, trade books and edited collections are out of scope. Open-access fees are payable by Wellcome, including after the grant has ended. | Creative Commons; CC BY preferred where a fee is paid | 6 months |
| British Academy | The Academy sets no open-access requirement for the outputs of research it funds. Open-access fees, for articles and for books alike, cannot be claimed as an eligible expense on its grants. Where a scheme is co-funded, the co-funder's policy may apply. | Not specified | Not specified |
| Leverhulme Trust | The Trust sets no open-access requirement for grant outputs. Open-access publication charges are an allowable cost during the lifetime of a grant, and must be incurred before the award ends. | Not specified | Not specified |
| Horizon Europe and the ERC | Long-text publications must be open access, either as the published version or as the author's accepted manuscript in a repository, with no embargo. Costs are eligible against the grant. Applies to Horizon Europe grants (2021 to 2027); legacy Horizon 2020 and FP7 awards permitted embargoes and are governed by their own terms. | Creative Commons; for long-text formats, CC BY-NC and CC BY-ND are compliant | None |
Requirements as published by the funders, read in September 2026; authors should always check the terms of their own award, which take precedence, and compliance with them is the responsibility of the grant holder. The Press will confirm the position for a specific award in writing before an author signs a contract.
A Point of Accuracy about the REF
The REF 2029 open-access policy applies to journal articles and conference contributions with an ISSN. It does not impose an open-access requirement on monographs, book chapters or scholarly editions.
The REF's initial decisions provide for an open-access requirement for long-form outputs in the exercise following REF 2029, to be implemented from 1 January 2029. Guidance for REF 2029 has not been finalised. The open-access requirements that apply to books at present are those set by funders.
2. Open Books Are Read, Cited and Discussed More
The evidence for an open-access advantage in books is now substantial. Springer Nature's 2017 comparison of its own open and non-open titles found open-access books received roughly seven times more chapter downloads in the first year (just under 30,000 per book), 50 per cent more citations on average over four years, and ten times more online mentions over three years. The download comparison covered 216 open-access books against 17,124 others.
There are two caveats. The study is publisher-produced and confined to one publisher's list, and open-access titles are self-selected, often funder-subsidised, and may differ from the comparison group in ways the figures cannot separate. The effect is nonetheless large, consistent with findings elsewhere, and in the direction anyone would predict from removing a price barrier.
3. The Alternative Asks the Public to Pay Twice
Where research is publicly funded and then locked behind a paywall, taxpayers pay once to produce the work and again to read it. That argument has moved from the pages of open-access advocacy into the policy of the largest funders in the world, and it is the reason the requirements in the table above exist at all.
4. Access Is Unevenly Distributed, and That Shapes What Counts as Knowledge
Subscription and purchase costs fall hardest on researchers at institutions without large acquisitions budgets, which in practice means most institutions outside a small number of wealthy countries. A closed monograph removes those readers from the conversation, and removes their responses from the field. Open publication also reaches the readers who are never going to hold a library card: clinicians, lawyers, civil servants, teachers, journalists, campaigners and the people affected by what the research describes.
Alongside this, open publication makes scholarship easier to check. Methods, sources and supporting material are available for scrutiny rather than described at second hand, which supports verification and reproducibility, and lets a chapter be set on a reading list anywhere without a licensing negotiation.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two stages stand between a proposal and a contract.
The first is independent peer review. It requires a minimum of two external expert reports on the proposal and sample material, a formal author response, further rounds where the revisions warrant them, and a second review of the complete manuscript before acceptance. The second is our Advisory Board, whose members work in the fields we publish in. The Board reviews each proposal that has cleared peer review, assesses it for quality and suitability, and recommends it for publication, or does not.
Publishing Principles
Every proposal is read by external reviewers in the relevant field, and the complete manuscript is reviewed again on delivery. Publication follows a recommendation from the Advisory Board.
The Press follows the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines for book publishing. Its policies on authorship, originality, corrections and retractions are published in full.
Every title is published in the version of record, open access and without embargo, deposited for preservation and registered with persistent identifiers.
The List
The Press has no closed list, no hybrid option and no embargoed version, and every title is open from the day of publication. Proposals are declined, including proposals from authors who hold funding.
Governance and Independence
Bassi Foundation Press is governed by its trustees. Editorial decisions, however, rest with the Editorial Director and the Advisory Board. Neither the trustees nor any funder of an individual title has a role in deciding whether that title is published, what it concludes, or how it is reviewed. Members of the Advisory Board recuse themselves from any proposal in which they have an interest.
Our ethics, corrections and research-integrity policies are published in full.
Laura Bassi
The Press is named for Laura Bassi. Born in Bologna in 1711, she defended forty-nine philosophical theses in public disputation in April 1732 and took her degree that May, the second woman in Europe to receive a university degree, after Elena Cornaro Piscopia at Padua in 1678. In October of the same year the Bolognese Senate appointed her to a professorship at the University of Bologna. She was the first woman appointed to a university chair in Europe. She was twenty.
The chair came with conditions. She was permitted to lecture in public only on appointed occasions, and taught instead where the institution allowed her to. In 1745, when Benedict XIV reconstituted the elite of the Bologna Academy of Sciences as the twenty-four Benedettini, Bassi petitioned for a place and was admitted as a supernumerary twenty-fifth member, with the obligation, which she used fully, of presenting a paper to the Academy each year. Paula Findlen’s study of her career reads these manoeuvres as a strategy for securing, one concession at a time, a standing that the institutions of the day had no intention of granting her outright.
In 1738 she married the physician Giuseppe Veratti. From around 1749 she taught experimental physics from a laboratory in their house, daily and by her own syllabus, for nearly thirty years, and made the house school one of the principal routes by which Newtonian physics, and later the new science of electricity, entered Italian teaching. Her students included Lazzaro Spallanzani. Voltaire, seeking admission to the Bologna Academy in 1744, sought her sponsorship and had it; Dorothea Erxleben, the first woman to take a medical doctorate in Germany, cited her example. By 1760 her salary equalled that of the university’s most celebrated professors.
In 1776, two years before her death, the Institute of Sciences appointed her to its chair of experimental physics, with Veratti as her assistant. She had been doing the work from her own house for twenty-five years. She died in Bologna in February 1778, after an academic career of nearly five decades.
Further Reading
On Laura Bassi:
- G Berti Logan, ‘The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth-Century Italian Woman of Science’ (1994) 99 American Historical Review 785.
- M Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi and Giuseppe Veratti: An Electric Couple during the Enlightenment’ (2009) 5 Contributions to Science 115.
- B Ceranski, »Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem«: Die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1711–1778) (Campus Verlag 1996).
- P Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy: The Strategies of Laura Bassi’ (1993) 84 Isis 441.
The Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna, with Stanford University Libraries, has compiled a digital archive of the family’s papers, the Bassi–Veratti Collection.
- TB Dykeman (ed), The Neglected Canon: Nine Women Philosophers (Springer 1999).
- LL McAlister (ed), Hypatia’s Daughters: 1500 Years of Women Philosophers (Indiana University Press 1996).