From January this year, I am a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. The aims of the group, in preparation for the mandate for the anticipated Third Research Excellence Framework in the mid-2020s, are to monitor progress towards the practical implementation of open access monographs; to promote and accelerate cultural change towards OA publishing within academia and among traditional publishers; to advise on technical barriers to OA publishing and make recommendations for further work and investment; to promote innovation and diversity in business models for OA book publishing; to advise on how best to overcome perceived and actual policy and legal barriers to OA.

Lulu officials say that Glasstree, its new online publishing platform dedicated to academic and scholarly authors, will provide a suite of online tools and services to distribute works more cost-effectively.

Quebec's first open-access press will allow many more peer-reviewed titles and books to be published. And they will all be free online.

Administrators are pushing to cut expenses of the University of New Mexico Press, which like many university presses is not self-supporting, The Albuquerque Journal reported. The university has moved the press from academic affairs to the administrative side of the university, and it will be part of institutional support services. The university has also cut an annual $250,000 subsidy to the press. Supporters of the press say that it was never intended to be a self-supporting operation and that it fills an important scholarly mission. The press has published 70 books a year and is known for its work in Chicano studies, Latin American studies and the American West, among other topics.

Reprographics business battles with CUP and OUP over course texts after court victory last month

What do changes at the art and architecture list at Yale University Press say about the current state of art publishing?

Earlier this week, Carl Straumsheim wrote in Inside Higher Ed about how in an era of declining books sales university presses are looking for new

Amid declining book sales, university presses search for new ways to measure success.

Supporters of academic publishing worry about what Northern Illinois U may decide about a small press that punches above its weight in scholarship.

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Ingenuity’s the key when you’re one of Canada’s smaller university presses.

JISC Collections exists to support the acquisition of digital content for education and research in the UK. In response to demand from our member institutions we have engaged in a series of world leading e-books projects.

This paper is the first to study the effects of several dissemination channels in an open access environment by analysing the download data of the OAPEN Library. The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible monographs. The goal of open access publishing is maximum dissemination, and this implies finding the largest possible number of readers within and outside academia. This may be supported by understanding the effects of dissemination channels. The download data stems from three channels: Website only, Website and direct access and direct access only.  From the logs of the OAPEN Library, download data were obtained containing the number of downloads and the name of the Internet provider. Based on public information, each Internet provider was categorised. The subject and language of each book were determined using metadata from the OAPEN Library.   The download data of 979 books in the OAPEN Library were analysed. The monographs were downloaded 152,662 times in the first six months of 2012. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on the data. The quantitative analysis was done using the spread sheet software Excel. The qualitative analysis was carried out using the statistical package SPSS.   Quantitative analysis shows that use is dominated by direct access. Almost three quarters of all downloads come from users who do not use the Website www.oapen.org, but find the books by other means. The qualitative analysis could not find evidence that channel use was influenced by user groups nor the state of users' Internet infrastructure. The same holds true for the characteristics of the books themselves: no effect on channel use was found for both the language and subjects of the monographs.  The goal of multichannel analysis is to determine the optimal use of resources: what configuration leads to the best results? The definition of best results in an open access environment is different from a commercial environment. the objective not financial gain, but maximum dissemination. results show that most readers are using direct download channel. direct downloads occur if use other systems than oapen library website, spite of fact it offers functions available through channels. this implies making metadata user's infrastructure used on daily basis ensures results.

As a new open access press with a liberal arts focus launches, I asked four veterans of the project to look back at the journey.