The NAP's stated mission is seemingly self-contradictory: to disseminate as widely as possible the works of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and to be financially self-sustaining through sales.
The National Academy Press, as it was known in 1993, was the first self-sustaining publisher to make its material available on the Web, for free, in an open access model.
Significant implications to publishing strategies are produced by these numbers, especially in the context of NAP's "long tail" experience when it gave away free access to PDFs (about 50% of the list) to low-sales content, which resulted in only 33% loss of sales, over 18 months (while enabling 100 times the dissemination).
Multiple articles and presentations by Barbara Kline Pope, executive director of the NAP, and by Michael Jon Jensen, director of publishing technologies for the NAP from 1998 through 2008, provide background on the evolving business strategies for "free in an environment of content abundance" that the National Academies Press continues to pursue.
On June 2, 2011, the NAP announced that it would provide the full text of all of the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as free PDF downloads.