The National Endowment for the Humanities has created a number of programs to expand public engagement with open-access books. The University of Michigan Press has been fortunate to receive the federal funder's support. For example, The Michigan Asian Studies Open Access Books Collection was funded by the Humanities Open Book initiative to make 100 significant books about the society, culture, and history of East, South, and Southeast Asia freely available. Now the Fellowships Open Book Program is helping the Press to make the works of authors funded by NEH programs freely accessible.

• A Player and a Gentleman, edited by Amy Hughes and Naomi Stubbs, excerpts the diary of the nineteenth-century traveling actor Harry Watkins to shed light on antebellum America's lively social and cultural life. The book is linked to a complete transcription of the diary created and hosted by the University of Michigan Library.
• Listening to the Lomax Archive, by Jonathan Stone, explores the visits that John Lomax and his son Alan made to several southern African American prisons in 1933, and the recordings of folksongs they brought back to the Library of Congress. The open-access book includes links to audio resources such as oral histories, radio program excerpts, and the songs themselves.

By helping make particular titles open access, NEH contributes to the larger program of making the majority of the University of Michigan Press's new book list freely available around the world. Fund to Mission, as the program is known, leverages support from four different sources to cover the publishing costs of scholarly monographs without requiring any payment by the author.

Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH, compliments the work of the University of Michigan Press

"For over 50 years, the National Endowment for the Humanities has been proud to support not only first-class research, but the dissemination of knowledge to scholars, teachers, and the general public. NEH is pleased to have been able to support the open access editions of several University of Michigan Press monographs written by NEH fellows. We applaud the leadership of the University of Michigan and their innovative Fund to Mission initiative, which brings together presses, libraries, funders, and authors and offers the potential of greatly expanding the availability of freely available, high-quality humanities scholarship to readers around the world.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. For researchers working to increase understanding of the humanities, the NEH offers a variety of grant programs, brought together in a helpful "matching tool."