University of Virginia Library, UVA Press Partner to Make Original Scholarship Freely Available with Aperio Press

Ed. Note: It’s always interesting and often informative to read articles that explain library services, open access, etc. to various user and potential user communities.

From UVA Today:

Students and parents often and understandably object to the high cost of textbooks, and colleges and universities also incur high costs to make academic research in scholarly journals available to students and faculty alike.

It’s a problem that affects everyone – students, researchers and scholars, the colleges and universities where they work, and the public who often have no easy access to the latest studies. A new partnership at the University of Virginia aims to solve these problems and to make new knowledge more readily available – and free.

Called “Aperio,” the new digital publishing partnership between the University Library and University of Virginia Press employs the latest technology to produce what’s called “open access” to research, scholarship and other educational materials – eventually including textbooks. (“Aperio” is a Latin word meaning “to uncover, to open, to make public.”)

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“The library and the press share an interest in creating a platform for open-access publishing that can accommodate different content formats,” Mark Saunders, director of the UVA Press, said. “That mutual interest resulted in Aperio, an imprint that allows the library to publish its open-access journals and the press to distribute our open-access ebooks.

“What is most exciting, however, is the opportunity afforded by Aperio to develop open educational resources – in other words, free electronic textbooks – that we plan to develop together with UVA faculty,” Saunders said.

“This is a historical turning point for libraries,” UVA Open Publishing Librarian Dave Ghamandi said, “from acquiring and collecting content and making it available locally to partnering with scholars to produce and widely disseminate their work.”

The cost of subscriptions to academic journals has skyrocketed during the expansion of digital content over the past few decades. At UVA Library, these subscriptions – already consuming 62 percent of the collections budget spent on journals in 2001 – rose to 83 percent by 2016, according to Ghamandi.

Read the Complete Article (approx. 1525 words)

Background

See Also: Aperio Press From University of Virginia Library and Press “Announces Its First Journal: the Journal of Modern Philosophy” (September 11, 2018)

University of Virginia Library and University of Virginia Press Announce Launch of Aperio Journals Publishing Service (May 31, 2018)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing