Open University Books

[Elvisa Schimke]

Makingworld literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and poetry and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.

We've decided to offer a 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written by women, along with any book translated by a woman, for the whole month of August. Discount applied AUTOMATICALLY at checkout.

Our 2019 Fall/Winter books are now available for perusal and preorder! Featuring new work from Open Letter favorites Quim Monz, Merc Rodoreda, and Sergio Chejfec, the second part of Rodrigo Fresn's barn-busting trilogy, Israeli novelist and translator Michal Ben-Naftali, and brand spanking new translations of Rainer Maria Rilke.

JSTOR, part of the non-profit ITHAKA, and a cohort of leading university presses announced today Path to Open, a program to support the open access publication of new groundbreaking scholarly books that will bring diverse perspectives and research to millions of people.

Launching as a pilot, Path to Open libraries will contribute funds to enable participating presses to publish new books that will transition from licensed to open access within three years of publication. The initial pilot will produce about one thousand open access monographs. If successful, it will lay the foundation for an entirely new way to fund long-form scholarship while vastly increasing its impact.

In a recent New York Times guest essay, University Presses are Keeping American Literature Alive, Margaret Renkl argues the value of bibliodiversity for society and spotlights the barriers facing presses and their authors. Studies show that monograph first copy costs are high and many books never break even nor reach their full impact. Presses find it increasingly difficult to invest in new ideas and the emerging authors who can build new or historically under-supported fields of study. This conundrum persists despite growing evidence from JSTOR and others demonstrating that open access significantly increases readership of books. A new way forward is needed to lower financial risk while maximizing the impact that digital access offers.

Presses have been experimenting with solutions for several years, but have yet to derive a scalable, sustainable approach. Path to Open originated in conversations between presses eager for alternative models and took shape as presses, librarians,and scholars came together, convened by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), to explore and define transformational approaches and how to scale them.

Presses and ACLS asked JSTOR to join the discussions and to help pilot Path to Open given its extensive experience developing scalable solutions with the community. JSTOR works with thousands of publishers and libraries to fund the digitization and preservation of back issues of academic journals and has a successful fund-to-open model for primary sources through Reveal Digital. The JSTOR platform itself reaches millions of users every day, offering the reach and impact that authors, presses, and libraries are looking for.

About JSTOR

JSTOR is a mission-driven, nonprofit digital library. We strengthen the depth and quality of research by bringing together journals, books, images, and primary sources on a platform with unique tools for teaching and exploration. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve access to knowledge and education for people around the world.

JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

The Association of University Presses, in collaboration with Ithaka S+R, published a report Tuesday looking at print revenue and its relationship to open-access monographs. Monographs, while defined differently depending on the audience, appeal to specialized academic readers and are typically longer than journal articles.

Hardcover and paperback open-access books both fared well in sales, the report found. For electronic sales, such as through Amazon Kindle books, 53 percent earned at least some digital revenue, and 20 percent of open-access books generated more than $2,000 in revenue.

In partnership with six member university presses, including Indiana University Press, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has launched the Big Ten Open Books project. This unique collection of open access scholarly monographs unites the rich collections held by Big Ten university libraries while creating pathways for sustainable, open access monograph publishing. The first collection, published in the summer of 2023, focuses on gender and sexuality studies.

Joining Indiana University Press are Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press. Each press has cultivated its respective catalog of titles to bring a total of 100 e-books to the inaugural open access collection.

The books provided by IU Press were published between 1978 and 2006 and, when combined with the dozens of books from Big Ten publishers, create a free global resource on the topic of gender and sexuality.

"These books have been given a second life," explained Gary Dunham, Director, IU Press and Digital Publishing. "As out-of-print materials, scholars and students were forced to share access to a small number of print copies housed in libraries. Now these digital editions provide an open resource easily incorporated into curriculum and classroom engagement. Every student can literally be on the same page, at the same time."

The works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost. Each title has undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the scholarship contained in the collection.

In addition to direct access at BigTenOpenBooks.org, libraries nationwide will be able to add the title of this collection to their catalogs through major discovery systems such as EBSCO, Ex Libris, OCLC, and OAPEN. The collection will also be in JSTOR and Project MUSE.

"This collection is the first of its kind, not a one-of-a-kind," said Erin Ellis, Associate Dean for Organizational Strategy, Diversity, and Inclusion at IU Libraries. "Already Indiana University Press is preparing to participate in the next collaboration and seeking books from its backlist that will advance inclusion and diversity. The energy and effort of our authors and editors, and especially of Michael Regoli, our Director of Publishing Operations, is quite visible in this launch and is celebrated by Indiana University."

Big Ten Open Books are free to read for anyone with an Internet connection. They are also openly licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which make most of the titles free to reuse in any non-commercial way. All the books can be downloaded as both PDF and EPUB3 files, meaning that readers can use them offline as well as online. We don't apply any "digital rights management" (DRM), so when you download a file it won't "expire."

In addition to 22 books in the new BTAA Open Books Project, IU Press also has an open access collection titled Open Indiana. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Indiana University Press received funding through the Humanities Open Book Program to digitize and make open access 200 titles from its backlist.

This project aims to reveal the potential for joining up people, places and pages, led by the material histories of medieval books in National Trust collections. Can you reveal the links between making, using and caring for medieval books over centuries of ownership?

Within this broad framework, the student will be encouraged to define their own doctoral research project, possibly choosing to concentrate upon a specific number of books, or upon a particular geographical area or location. The number of known medieval books is limited, under 150, and how they are approached (across sites, through selected case studies) will be part of the first year of the project to determine. The resulting research will inform a range of public-facing National Trust outputs including guidebooks, on-site presentation, web content and volunteer training.

Joining a growing cohort of doctoral students working with the National Trust, the successful candidate will be offered training in object handling and the Trust's collections management system and will be given the opportunity to learn about working with a range of audiences. There will be opportunities for the student to share their research with National Trust staff, volunteers, partners, community groups, and across the National Trust.

The lead supervisor is Dr Susie West, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Heritage at The Open University. She has expertise in the built environment, Heritage Studies, material culture and book history. As an architectural historian, her interests lie in the English country house. She is a trustee and officer for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Dr Susie West OU people profiles (open.ac.uk)

The National Trust supervisor is Ms. Yvonne Lewis, Assistant National Curator for Libraries. She is a historian and rare books librarian with expertise in library history, provenance research, practical book production techniques and the reading experience. Yvonne Lewis - Assistant National Curator (Libraries) - National Trust LinkedIn

3a8082e126