Open Access Efforts at the Press

This guest post for International Open Access Week by Journals Marketing Manager, Jocelyn Dawson, is part of our ongoing series on Journals Publishing. Stay up to date by following our blog and checking out our previous posts.

Duke University Press has been part of several open-access (OA) publishing initiatives. Like the scholarly publishing community at large, we’ve explored different funding models for OA and have found that there is no one perfect model but a variety of good options. Here are a few OA projects at the Press:

Project Euclid

Project Euclid is a platform for high-quality mathematics and statistics scholarship and is jointly operated by Duke University Press and Cornell University Libraries. Over 88,000 journal articles, 4,760 book chapters, and 1,692 proceedings (almost 70% of the content on the platform) are available open access (as of August 15, 2015). A list of the OA titles on Project Euclid can be found here. Through a combination of support by by subscribing libraries and participating publishers, Project Euclid is able to ensure enough revenue to support the maintenance and continued development of a state-of-the art online content distribution system that is made available to publishers of OA titles at a very low cost. Project Euclid also works with libraries, scholars, and publishers to identify, digitize and make openly available historical scholarship. To learn more about the history of Project Euclid, read an interview with Mira Waller, Project Euclid co-director.

The Carlyle Letters Online

The Carlyle Letters Online provides free access to an outstanding resource in Victorian literature, philosophy, and culture: the letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The Carlyles’ correspondents included Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Funding for the Carlyle Letters Online, which receives over 45,000 letter views per month, is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Environmental Humanities, An Open Access Journal

An open access journal new to Duke University Press in 2016, Environmental Humanities brings humanities scholarship into conversation with the natural and social sciences around significant environmental issues. The journal does not charge author fees and is funded through partnerships with Concordia University; Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney; University of California, Los Angeles; Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and the Environmental Humanities Program, University of New South Wales. The journal is free to individuals and to libraries.

Knowledge Unlatched

Duke University Press was one of the 13 publisher participants in the original (2013) pilot for Knowledge Unlatched, an open access initiative for humanities and social science books. Through this pilot, libraries contributed funds to meet a target fee for a set of 28 books, covering the fees set by each publisher to “unlatch” a high quality scholarly monograph. The “unlatched” titles were then made openly available on a Creative Commons license via OAPEN and HathiTrust as fully downloadable PDFs, while the publishers continued to sell their books in other formats. The pilot originally sought participation from 200 libraries, a target that was exceeded when close to 300 libraries from 24 countries joined Knowledge Unlatched. The four Duke University Press books now openly available can be found on the Knowledge Unlatched collection title page. A second pilot will be run in 2016: some publishers will contribute individual books, to be collected into disciplinary groups of ten; Duke and Michigan will each offer publisher packages of ten books.

Additionally, many introductions to Duke University Press humanities journal issues and books are available for free.

We are always excited to explore new publishing projects, OA or otherwise. Please contact Erich Staib, Senior Editor, for more information.