Big Ten Academic Alliance announces ebook launch
In partnership with six member university presses, the University Librarians of the Big Ten Academic Alliance announce the launch of the Big Ten Open Books project, a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
The first 100-title collection centered on Gender and Sexuality studies is now published. 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 selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of the collection to trust the veracity of the content made available, the organisation says.
The Big Ten Open Books first collection brings to the reader a wide variety of materials in arts, humanities, and social science disciplines that are centred on gender and sexuality themes. The organisation says the collection’s impact will be seen through its broad sharing of knowledge and high quality scholarship. Big Ten Open Books aims to create ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability, and flexibility.
This collection has established a model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available, on open infrastructure, Fulcrum, hosted by the University of Michigan, using open distribution models (including Project MUSE, JSTOR, and OAPEN) to envision a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s development of the BIG Collection's ambition of uniting the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and is supported by the Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge program. The partner presses are Indiana University Press, Michigan State University Press, Northwestern University Press, Purdue University Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Wisconsin Press.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues its advocacy for a sustainable and open ecosystem of publication. Collectively, our institutions’ more than 50,000 faculty are supported by over $11 billion in research funding, and our institutions have invested significantly in our capacity to further the research mission by advancing public knowledge through open publishing. Together, it produces roughly 15% of the research publications in the United States.
