OAPEN and Jisc Collections will set up a centralised Open Access monograph service

"OAPEN is pleased to announce a new pilot project in partnership with Jisc Collections, to co-design and set up a centralised service with UK universities to support and encourage the publication of Open Access (OA) peer-reviewed monographs. In recent years OA scholarly monographs have gained considerable momentum, and the number of OA monographs being published worldwide has shown a marked increase. The EU has included research monographs in their OA policy for Horizon 2020, including a pilot to enable funding of OA publications after the grant period. In the UK the Wellcome Trust is the first UK-based funder to extend its OA mandate to monographs and chapters; universities are engaged in OA monograph publishing or encouraging OA for monographs; OAPEN-UK is an ongoing project to gather evidence on the potential for OA monograph publishing; and finally, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library are launching a research project about "The Academic Book of the Future". OAPEN offers OA infrastructure for book publishing in a number of ways, including quality assurance; aggregation and deposit of OA publications; discovery and dissemination; digital preservation of OA books; reporting and statistics. Jisc Collections is a division of Jisc Collections and Janet Ltd. It supports the procurement of digital content for education and research in the UK, and manages a large number of research projects addressing innovative resource creation and provision. The pilot will be conducted with universities that have an interest in OA monographs – as university-based publishers, consumers, or supporters. The project is being prepared in consultation with SCONUL and RLUK and other stakeholders, in particular research funders and independent publishers, will also be involved ..."