Short answers, pulled from the story.
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes reports issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and National Academy of Medicine. It publishes nearly 500 titles a year across the sciences, engineering, medicine, and transportation.
In 1993, then called the National Academy Press, it became the first self-sustaining publisher to make its material freely available on the Web using an open access model. By 1997, a thousand reports were accessible as sequential page images.
A Mellon-funded experiment conducted with the University of Maryland Business School found that 42% of buyers would accept a free PDF when offered one, while 58% still chose to pay for a print copy. A related test of low-selling titles found that free PDF access cut print sales by only 33% over eighteen months while increasing dissemination by a factor of one hundred.
On the 2nd of June 2011, the NAP announced that full-text PDFs of all National Academies reports would be freely available for download. By early 2025, those PDFs had been downloaded 25 million times.
By April 2026-15,485 books were freely available online or for download from the National Academies Press.
A 2022 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 1.6 million downloads and found that roughly half of usage was academic, including research and teaching. The other half came from non-academic uses such as improving professional practice, informing personal decisions, and general learning.