UP Week Blog Tour 2026 | Day 1: Best Of… Powering Open Access Through Community Support
University Press Week 2026 (#UPWeek) which takes place between 9th – 13th of November, celebrates the collective vigour of our global scholarly publishing community. Mission-driven, creative, and collaborative practices enable university presses worldwide to PowerUP every day, using our energy to fuel publications, projects, and initiatives that amplify our authors’ voices to inform our current moment and shape our future. Make sure to check out blog posts from other university presses in the Association of University Presses’ (AUP) UP Week blog tour and browse the PowerUP gallery and reading list here.
This week, Liverpool University Press is exploring the publications, projects and initiatives that demonstrate how university presses PowerUP scholarly communication. For today’s “Best Of” theme, we’re reflecting on the achievement we’re most proud of in 2026: the success of LUP Open Languages, our Subscribe to Open initiative that makes the latest high-quality scholarship in languages, literatures and cultures openly accessible to readers worldwide.
Thanks to the support of almost 500 institutions across the globe, LUP Open Languages successfully reached its subscription threshold in 2026. As a result, all thirteen journals in the collection are publishing their current content open access, making new scholarship in languages, literatures and cultures freely available to readers worldwide.
For Liverpool University Press, this is more than a successful open access initiative. It demonstrates the willingness of libraries, publishers, editors and scholarly communities to work together to expand access to research while supporting the long-term sustainability of specialist journals.
Since the initiative was introduced earlier this year, the impact has already been significant:
📖 365 articles across 44 journal issues made openly available worldwide
📈 237% increase in full-text downloads
🌍 325,000+ additional accesses to research
These figures illustrate what can happen when barriers to access are removed. Research that may previously have been available only to subscribers can now be read, discovered and cited by scholars, students, educators and independent researchers around the world.
The journals participating in LUP Open Languages cover a diverse range of disciplines and scholarly traditions, including Catalan, French, Hispanic, Latin American, Québec, and Romanian studies, as well as language policy. Several are published in partnership with leading scholarly societies and organisations, helping to ensure that specialist research continues to thrive while reaching wider audiences than ever before.
This balance between widening access and sustaining journals is one of the reasons we are particularly proud of the initiative. Through LUP Open Languages, continued library support enables the latest research to be made openly available worldwide, without open access fees for authors. In return, subscribing institutions benefit from exclusive online access to extensive journal archives, some stretching back more than a century.
As we celebrate University Press Week 2026, we would like to thank the libraries, institutions, editors, authors and readers whose support has made this achievement possible. Together, they have helped make hundreds of articles freely available to readers around the world and have shown the power of community-led open access publishing.
For us, that is undoubtedly something worth celebrating.
As Jennifer Rushworth, former editor of French Studies Bulletin, notes:
I am delighted that our thought-provoking articles can now reach more readers in an inclusive fashion without cost to our authors. Thank you to all our subscribers for your support and enjoy the content!
To read open access journal issues and find out how you can support open access for 2027 head to the LUP Open Languages page >
This Week’s Most Read Open Access Articles
- ‘Violencia e indiferenciación en Todas las sangres, de José María Arguedas’
by Nicolás Aguía Betancourt - ‘Poéticas híbridas y expandidas en la poesía española del siglo XXI’
by Vicente Luis Mora - ‘Francophone Blue Humanities’ by Jonathan Lewis, Christina Kullberg, and
Antonia Wimbush - ‘La crítica del arte conceptual en la narrativa contemporánea escrita en español: ecos y embelecos del conceptualismo’ by Vicente Luis Mora
- ‘In the company of Fata Lina: Untangling the thread of violence and gender stereotypes in contemporary Italian fairy-tale picturebooks’ by Elena Emma Sottilotta
- ‘Negotiating Women’s Bodies: An Artistic Exploration of Coercion and Agency in Interwar Romanian Gendered Advice Literature’ by Sonia D. Andraș
- ‘Modernist Wanderings: Towards an Anti-Flâneurism in Georges Perec’s Un homme qui dort (1967)’ by Horațiu Tohătan
- ‘Non-native bilingualism as a family language policy: A systematised review’
by Irene Gassín and Adrián Granados - ‘“Les vostres Catalonian Girls Preferides”: National Identity and Feminist Knowledge Production in Catalan Podcasting’ by Celia Martínez Saez
- ‘From brides to bakers: women’s organizations and identity politics of the French boulangère, 1915–2013′ by Sylvia Grove
- ‘Introduction: Virginie Despentes: an intersectional author(?) / Virginie Despentes: une autrice intersectionnelle(?)’ by Michèle A. Schaal
- ‘Rediscovering Rural Franco-Americans: Analytical Perspectives’ by Patrick Lacroix
- ‘What’s French about it? #BalanceTonPorc and the French take on the #MeToo movement from major French newspaper coverage’ by Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan and Ash Mcintyre
Read the full collection of UP Week blogposts via the Association of University Presses blog tour. #UPWeek
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