UC to Participate in Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative

The University of Cincinnati is participating in a new initiative of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP).

This endeavor will advance the wide dissemination of humanities and humanistic social sciences scholarship by faculty members by supporting the promotion and publishing of free, open access, digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

Through participation in this initiative, the Office of the Provost has committed to offering three publishing grants of $15,000 each annually for five years to support the publication of original long-form monographs. The grants will be awarded to UC faculty to offer a subvention for presses that award the faculty member a contract for Open Access publication.  By offsetting publishing costs, presses will have the ability to publish important, high-quality scholarship in an open access model that is freely accessible to readers and independent of market constraints.

UC is among 12 institutions participating in this initiative, including Emory University, Indiana University Bloomington, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan among others. There are 59 university presses–including the University of Cincinnati Press–that have agreed to participate in the initiative.

UC’s involvement was championed by Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian, in his capacity as a member of the

Steering Committee

of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a global coalition of 200+ academic and research libraries that works to enable open sharing of research output and educational materials in order to “democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery and increase the return on investment in research and education.”

The AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative will benefit scholars, the public, universities, libraries and presses by making new research freely available online, expanding the dissemination of scholarship within and beyond universities, and enabling the incorporation of new capacities such as annotation and commenting tools and search metadata.

The immediate task at UC is to form a proposal review committee comprised of two faculty members and one representative from the Office of the Provost to determine the criteria for evaluation of projects, identify requirements and timelines, and to evaluate projects for grant consideration.

Eileen Strempel, senior vice provost for academic affairs, and Elizabeth Scarpelli, director of the University of Cincinnati Press, will attend the April 13 Faculty Senate meeting to provide an overview of the initiative.  The grant application guidelines and call for proposals will be announced in August with the awarding of the first grant slated for fall 2017.

For more information about the AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative, visit their web site at

Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative

.

Questions about UC’s participation can be directed to Eileen L. Strempel,

strempel@ucmail.uc.edu

, or Elizabeth Scarpelli,

scarpeea@ucmail.uc.edu

.