Open Access policies

NUS Press has been involved in innovating and exploring open access models for publishing since we published Geoff Wade's reference work, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shilu as an open access resource online in 2005. As a publisher in a region with severely under-resourced academic libraries, and publishing in fields like art where there is an active community of researchers unaffiliated with institutions, we feel very keenly the benefits of open access publishing. This is why for example we self-fund the OA publication of our journal Southeast of Now: Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. 

At the same time, we understand keenly that there are strong downsides of “pay to publish” models, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We see the way predatory journals are harming the operation of scholarly communications in many countries in our region.

We are dedicated to the mission of circulating academic research and knowledge beyond the academy, to researchers, communities and communities of practice in Southeast Asia and beyond the region. And accordingly we believe that functioning book markets, with excellent bookshops, are an important part of that equation, and precious public institutions to be nurtured. So we do remain committed to a commercial model of providing books for the public, where publishers, authors and their books must compete through public attention through book sales. We price our books reasonably in order to support that market.

In sum, we take a pragmatic and practical approach to open access publishing.

Key policies are described below:

Open Access Books

1) We are happy to bring our monographs and books open access if funds are available to substitute for the revenues needed to balance our costs. We also invest in open access publication, to make sure that books are discoverable in library catalogs and elsewhere. We do not publish a fixed rate for this, preferring to be flexible by book and circumstances. Please reach out to your editor or permissions@nus.edu.sg for more information. 

3) Starting in July 2025, NUS is providing funds for us to make up to five books available open access each year. Please indicate if you would like us to consider your book for this program.

Journals

Southeast of Now is fully open "diamond" open access with no article processing charges. Dependent as this is on NUS Press' financial performance year-by-year, it is a precarious funding situation, which we can only offer year by year, and we are actively soliciting sponsorship or grant support to extend this on a more sustainable basis.

China: an International Journal is a subscription journal with active readership across multiple institutions around the world. One article each issue is offered open access. We continue to discuss with the supporting institution, the East Asian Institute at NUS, on publishing models moving forward.

Self-archiving

We allow — but do not encourage — self-archiving of the final accepted version of CIJ journal article or edited volume chapter manuscripts by authors on institutional repositories, within six months of publication. Effective from October 1, 2024 we ask for six month after publication embargo before self-archiving.

We do not allow self-archiving of full-length book manuscripts on institutional repositories without special permission, and we ask for an embargo period of at least three years.

AI & LLM training rights

We are strongly interested in the affordances of LLMs for digital humanities and other work and are keen to collaborate in AI-powered research and license our materials for such purposes.

However we do hold the view that pre-training of large language models on our copyrighted content is a violation of our authors' rights, and we do not allow this, except under license.

We are progressively upgrading our back catalog of digital materials to include a machine-readable Text and Data Mining rights reservation via standards developed under a W3C process, and we strongly encourage authors and publishers who wish to reserve their rights for AI training to follow suit.