Colleges, Libraries and Presses Team Up to Publish Open Scholarship (And Rethink Model) | EdSurge News

"The traditional producer-consumer relationship between university presses and libraries has shifted. A number of presses now report to their university libraries, a trend that has been under way for several years now.

'What’s been good to see is strong negotiations among the three parties,' says Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, which has signed up to take part. 'That itself takes us a long way past where we were a decade ago.'

Twelve universities have committed to the AAU/ARL/AAUP project so far, including Emory, Michigan State, NYU, Penn State, and Virginia Tech. To participate, they agree to pony up a 'baseline grant' of $15,000 that will underwrite an open-access digital monograph of 90,000 words or less. (The grant amount and word count are negotiable depending on the press and project.) Universities agree to subsidize at least 3 monographs a year through the program, and to stick with it for at least 5 years.

As of late March, about 60 university presses had signed on to be involved—nearly half of the AAUP’s member presses. They include big operations like Oxford University Press, as well as smaller and mid-size presses including the University of Akron Press, the Johns Hopkins University Press, NYU Press, and the University of Virginia Press.

Everyone involved stresses that it’s early days yet and that many details still need to be worked out. The AAUP’s Peter Berkery says the first books aren’t likely to emerge from the pipeline until 2018."