Basler Afrika Bibliographien launches Opening the Future

Posted by Tom Grady on Feb. 10, 2026 at 1025

We are pleased to announce that Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) Publishing House is the latest press to launch an Opening the Future (OtF) open access (OA) monograph funding programme. 

The BAB Publishing House is a leading forum for scholarly works on, and from, Southern Africa and Namibia. It was founded in 1971 as the publishing arm of Basler Afrika Bibliographien, a Swiss research library and centre of documentation and expertise on the region. With a focus on Humanities and Social Sciences, the Press seeks to promote cultural exchange on important contemporary issues, and to provide African scholars with a platform. In the last few years, the Press has begun to publish titles OA where funding was available, and are keen to expand their OA capacity. 

BAB joins OtF’s other publishing partners Central European University Press, Liverpool University Press, Michigan State University Press and Boydell & Brewer. Opening the Future began as a partnership with both CEU Press and Liverpool University Press in 2021, since which time around 40 OA titles have been published already through the scheme, with funding accrued for nearly the same number again to be published in the coming years.

The OtF team is delighted to be partnering with BAB, and supporting the Press in its publishing goals. 

Partnering with OtF will support the press’ ambitions, enabling BAB to publish titles that are free to read, but which are also free to publish for the authors, ensuring that equitable access to knowledge applies to its creation as well as to its dissemination. 

Support for Southern African and Namibian Scholarship and Infrastructure

This partnership will support frontlist publishing across all of BAB’s lists as the Press already has a subject focus on Southern Africa and Namibia. The Press will offer a package containing 58 backlist titles. 

The package covers a broad range of fields, from political and social sciences, 19th and 20th century history, colonial and post-colonial studies, through to religious studies and biographical work. The library subscription funds will then collectively publish new OA frontlist titles across the Press’ frontlist. 

They will be supported by the African Books Collective (ABC), which will host the backlist packages for this programme. The African Books Collective was established in 1990 to provide infrastructure for African publishers who were finding it difficult to disseminate their books to buyers and libraries in other regions. Since this time, ABC has responded to the evolving needs of publishers and now distributes and markets eBooks, undertakes ebook production work, and provides marketing services. They remain a vital infrastructure for over 150 academic and trade publishers in the region, leveraging economies of scale on their behalf to ensure their eBooks are available on major global platforms.

Petra Kerckhoff, Head of Publishing at BAB, said “We look forward to partnering with Opening the Future, and thus expanding the avenues our authors have to publishing open access. We want to make sure that our authors have the option to share their work openly, which benefits them, other researchers, and communities in Namibia and Southern Africa.” 

Stephanie Kitchen, Executive Director of the African Books Collective, said “We are delighted to be providing the necessary support and infrastructure to one of our participating publishers as they begin this new partnership. We are also excited to see a new avenue for collective funding to support publishing from, and about, Africa.” 

Tom Grady, Opening the Future Work Package Lead at Copim/Birkbeck, University of London added that “We are pleased to be supporting Basler Afrika Bibliographien in their goals to publish more of their work open access. We’re also glad to be expanding this programme again in many senses - to be launching with a fifth publisher, and to be expanding into a new area, Switzerland, and to be working with a society publisher. We hope that, together, we’ll be able to remove barriers to publication, and disseminate the important research BAB publishes more widely and freely.”

Opening the Future is a revenue mechanism developed by the Copim Project, a project funded by Research England and the Arcadia Fund to create, implement and strengthen infrastructure for academy-owned scholarly monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We aim to transform OA publishing by enabling small, mission-led publishing initiatives to flourish on their own terms. 

• To find out more about Copim see www.copim.ac.uk. 

• To find out more about Basler Afrika Bibliographien please see: https://baslerafrika.ch/en-ch. To find out more about the African Books Collective, see: https://africanbookscollective.com/. 

• If you would like to help fund equitable OA publishing while simultaneously enhancing your own library collection please consider supporting Opening the Future at BAB. See the Sign Up page for details of which books you could own in perpetuity when joining as a subscriber member.

If you’d like to know more please contact Tom Grady and Kira Hopkins at openingthefuture@copim.ac.uk or Petra Kerckhoff on pk@baslerafrika.ch