Luminos Newsletter

The Luminos newsletter is designed to keep you apprised of news and developments about Luminos, UC Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs.

In this edition we profile Luminos’s newest member library, talk to Books at JSTOR Director Frank Smith about the inclusion of open access monographs on JSTOR’s platform, look back at OA Week, and, given that it is University Press Week, we check in on the status of university press publishing and how open access fits into its future.

Newly Published Luminos Titles

Forthcoming Luminos Titles

Membership News

We are pleased to welcome Queensland University of Technology as our newest Luminos Member Library. Queensland University of Technology, which joins us at the Courier level, has long been committed to open access advocacy and support. In 2003, the university introduced the world’s first university-wide policy to require open access for all peer reviewed journal articles and conference papers. The Luminos model is in line with Queensland University of Technology’s strong endorsement of the concept of sustainable business models for scholarly monograph publishing built on partnerships and distributed costs. If your library is ready to join as our next Luminos Member Library, please visit us at luminosoa.org or email luminos@ucpress.edu for details.

Luminos Titles Available at Books at JSTOR

We are pleased to announce that Luminos titles are now available on the Books at JSTOR platform. Like all ebooks on JSTOR, Luminos titles are DRM-free and have no limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. Users will not need to register or log in to JSTOR to access the titles. JSTOR provides chapter level discovery, free MARC records, and is supplying metadata and full text for these titles to discovery services; more information for libraries is available here. In addition, titles are preserved in Portico, ensuring that they will be available to researchers in perpetuity.

We asked Books at JSTOR Director Frank Smith about the decision to include open access titles on JSTOR. For the full interview, click over to our blog.

UC Press Celebrates Open Access Week

UC Press celebrated Open Access Week (October 24-30) with a series of blog posts featuring guest posts from Luminos authors and other OA content. What lies behind an author’s decision to publish an open access book? For Chris Benner and Manual Pastor, authors of Equity, Growth, and Community, open access publishing is part of their commitment to democratize access to scholarship of consequence. Roger Mosley, author of Keys to Play, explains what Mozart and Super Mario have in common. UC Berkeley’s Scholarly Communication Officer Rachael Samberg talks about why open access is important to her. Read more.

University Presses and Open Access

Learned Publishing, the official journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) devoted its fall issue to university presses. Among the contributors is UC Press Director Alison Mudditt, who talks about the importance that open access will play in the long term viability of monograph publishing:

“UC Press, along with a handful of other presses, has been at the forefront of developing ways not only to preserve but to reinvigorate monographs through open, digital models. A wide variety of innovative initiatives have emerged from collective models, such as Knowledge Unlatched, to new programmes (such as Luminos here at UC Press) and new presses (such as Amherst College Press and Lever Press) and the development of shared infrastructure to support these new models. Given that the core challenge of monograph publishing is that the revenue-recovery model is no longer adequate, all of these models seek to share cost recovery more widely across a range of potential funding sources. We are still in the early days, but presses are learning a great deal, and many of the early indicators are impressive. . . . “

Read more.

Scholarly Kitchen also recently weighed in on the future of university presses, looking at experiments, including Luminos, with open access publishing:

“There is an effort afoot in the university press and higher education communities to transition humanities monographs to open access, which to some is a vital element of repositioning humanities fields to take a more public role. . . .”

Read more.

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If you have news items to suggest or other comments to make, please contact us at luminos@ucpress.edu.