Lever Press

The Oberlin Group of Libraries launched the Lever Initiative in 2013 to appraise the opportunities relating to a group of Liberal Arts Colleges establishing a new Open Access publishing venture for scholarly monographs. TBI was commissioned to undertake a study to evaluate the attitudes of authors and members of The Oberlin Group towards such a venture, and to identify and review initiatives already underway. Our second phase of work with The Oberlin Group in 2014, explored how a partnership model could be used to help establish a new OA monograph publishing service.

Following on from our work together, the Lever Press was founded in 2016 – an open access monograph press which is funded by the investment of libraries serving over 50 small liberal arts colleges.

For our third phase of work with Lever Press we designed a membership model for the next phase of the organisation’s development. Our work involved a landscape review, qualitative research, workshops, and financial modelling.

“Thank you so much for your excellent presentation yesterday, and for all of the work you put into this project. It will be a huge help to us as we try to navigate the path into our next phase.” 

Michael Roy, Dean of the Library, Middlebury College, USA