Brian Hole from Ubiquity Press will be at the University of Victoria on Friday to talk about models for publishing Open Access Monographs. Brian will give a presentation in McPherson Library, Room 219 from 10-11 this coming Friday August 7th. All are welcome. Feel free to share this message with others who may be interested in alternative book publishing models.
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Ubiquity Press is a researcher-led publisher that spun out of University College London in 2012. We are 100% open access, with a fully professional publishing model that is nonetheless sufficiently low-cost to make OA publishing affordable in areas such as the humanities and the developing world. We also focus heavily on enabling the publishing of alternative research outputs such as data and software.
From 2014 we began offering our platform as a fully-rebranded solution for university presses and library publishing programmes. We offer all infrastructure plus a full stack of professional publishing services, so that operating a press becomes lower risk and much more sustainable. Each of the presses involved also becomes a member of the Ubiquity Partner Network, which provides peer support, shared resources and a say in the governance of Ubiquity itself.
Our model is sufficiently cost-efficient that many of our partner presses are able to experiment with innovative new business models. Examples are the Open Library of the Humanities, which sources its APCs through a library membership model, and the University of California Press’s journal Collabra, which is paying peer reviewers.
Finally, we are also contributing to the community by releasing parts of our platform as open source software. The first product to be released will be Rua, our book management platform (an alternative to OMP), in September 2015. This will be followed in October by Toru, our desktop journal management product, especially designed for editors in developing countries to work in situations where they have limited access to the internet.
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Lisa Goddard
Associate University Librarian
Digital Scholarship and Strategy
University of Victoria Libraries
