New Open Access (OA) Resources: Luminos, Open Library of Humanities, Open Book Publishers

The UC Libraries are supporting a number of innovative open access initiatives in scholarly publishing this year.

Luminos (http://www.luminosoa.org/) is the University of California Press’s new OA publishing program for monographs.  The project has strong support from UC scholars as founders, editors and board members and the initiative meets all of the UC Libraries’ principles for ebook publishing.  The Luminos model provides a subsidy for each monograph published and a contribution toward an author waiver fund.  Additional discounts separate from library membership are provided to UC-affiliated authors or editors.  The business model redistributes production costs and payments from a reader-based model to a multi-stakeholder model including authors, libraries and publishers.

The Open Library of the Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org/) is a new collection of online journals and books in the humanities developed by UK scholars and hosted on a Ubiquity Press open source platform at University College London.  The journals will launch first; publication of monographs is envisioned as a later stage.  The partnership business model was created by UK scholars in the humanities and includes no author fees (there is initial funding from the Mellon Foundation).  Libraries contribute an institutional membership based on FTE.   Open Library of the Humanities is the platform selected by LingOA (http://www.lingoa.eu/) an initiative by the linguistics community to convert its journals to open access. The first issue of Glossa, a journal of general linguistics that is part of the LingOA family, is available here (Volume 1, Number 1, April 2016, http://www.glossa-journal.org/). Glossa is the replacement journal for Lingua, an Elsevier journal whose editorial board resigned in order to create a lower-cost open access outlet for high-quality linguistics research.

Another UK-based scholarly ebook initiative in the humanities, Open Book Publishers (http://www.openbookpublishers.com/) offers a mixed economic model that includes free streaming access, low cost downloads, library memberships, print sales and grant funding.  There are currently 55 books available with 12 books forecast per year.  Library memberships include free digital files and discounts on print editions.  There are no author fees.  Although the model is not entirely open access, the initiative offers low cost dissemination of various formats of humanities books and free streaming versions for all users (including non-members).

CDL is fully funding the three OA resources on behalf of all UC libraries.  Several University of California Libraries are providing additional levels of support to Luminos beyond CDL’s contribution.  Another OA ebook collection, Knowledge Unlatched (Round 2), is locally funded by a number of campuses in 2016.

The Shared Cataloging Program (SCP) has already distributed title-level records to the campuses.  Title examples are below.

A. Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires, http://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/detail/13/imperial-matter/

B. ASIA Network Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, http://www.asianetworkexchange.org/

C. Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University, http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/342/advanced-problems-in-mathematics–preparing-for-university