Lever Press Spring 2022

The last few months have been exciting ones for Lever Press, as we successfully transitioned our editorial operations from Amherst College Press to Michigan Publishing (MPub) at the University of Michigan Library. Michigan had long supported Lever by providing financial and technical services as well as editorial assistance, and by moving our editorial operations entirely to MPub we are positioning Lever well for the future (read more here). Throughout the transition Beth Bouloukos and the staff at Amherst College Press have continued to see in-process titles through the publication process, while our new Acquiring Editor at MPub, Sean Guynes, has already begun recruiting new authors and titles and working with Lever’s Editorial Board. For more on Sean, new titles, and on the wide reach of Lever publications as told through usage statistics, check out the reports below. MPub’s innovative Fulcrum platform continues to provide access to Lever’s titles, with long-term preservation ensured through Portico. We’ve also established our organization as a non-profit corporation under the name The Lever Initiative. 

The Oversight Committee is also happy to report that Lever is in good financial shape. Our budget is solid, and we have a healthy reserve to cover any contingencies. We’ll provide a detailed budget report in an upcoming newsletter. We are also delighted to have welcomed a number of new member libraries in 2022 as part of phase II: 

• Central Washington University
• Davidson College
• Iowa State University
• Norwich University
• Penn State University
• Randolph-Macon College
• University of California, Los Angeles
• University of Idaho
• University of San Francisco
• University of Vermont
• Whitworth University

As part of phase II we will also begin working closely with LYRASIS on member development. LYRASIS already supports several open access programs which give libraries a variety of options for participating in the open access landscape. We’re happy to join this group of innovative projects and to benefit from LYRASIS’s experience in recruiting and maintaining members. LYRASIS will emphasize what is unique about Lever: that we are a library-led press that gives libraries of all sizes a chance to participate directly in leading an open access monograph project. We will also report more on the LYRASIS partnership in an upcoming newsletter. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me (houstona@lafayette.edu). I look forward to hearing from you!

Anne Houston, Dean of Libraries, Lafayette College

Chair of the Lever Oversight Committee, 2022



Sean Guynes joins Lever from Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan where he was Acquiring Editor for their open access journals program, the open access book imprint Maize Books, and the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection. Sean has a PhD in literature and has published and edited work in cultural studies for half a decade.

Sean expresses his excitement for the future of the press, saying, “Lever Press looks like a revolution in publishing to me, since it offers the opportunity for authors to publish fully OA (and in affordable print editions), and to do so at a time when reader access to scholarly work is more necessary than ever.” He is interested in acquiring broadly in the humanities and social sciences, and wants to emphasize the growing specialties of Lever Press’s lists in cultural studies, pedagogically relevant texts, and scholarship geared toward global social justice.

As he steps into his new role, Sean will continue Lever Press’s commitment to producing high quality, peer reviewed open access monographs at no cost to authors or their institutions. In partnership with Lever’s Editorial Board, Sean will help ensure the press continues to produce scholarship that works towards the creation of a more equitable world.

“Take a look at what we’ve published so far,” says Sean, “and if you find your work at home among those books or represented in our values as a publisher, I want to hear from you (sean@leverpress.org). I’m excited to work one-on-one on promising projects and to walk authors through the academic publishing process. I want to make this an equitable and painless experience for authors of all backgrounds.”

Under Sean, Lever Press aims to hit a target of publishing 12-15 titles annually within the next few years and will continue developing its list of books that uplift emerging thinkers and add new conversations to their fields.