University of California Signs Up to “Opening the Future Programme”

From a COPIM Post:

CEU Press and Liverpool University Press are pleased to announce that nine University of California (UC) campuses have signed up through the California Digital Library (CDL) to their Opening the Future collective funding programs. Under the terms of the deal, nine University of California campuses will receive unlimited, perpetual access to curated selections of the two publishers’ backlists: the support will enable both publishers to publish new, frontlist books in Open Access (OA) format.

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The agreement will provide nine University of California campuses with access to titles on the history of communism, transitions to democracy and Central European history and culture through CEU Press; and books on Hispanic culture and language, literature, theory and history with Liverpool University Press. Project partner LYRASIS is ensuring billing is seamless for the CDL.

CEU Press Executive Chair, Frances Pinter said “We are so pleased that UC has chosen to support our initiative. It is through forward-thinking libraries like these that we are able to move towards an Open Access global collection for all.”

Those sentiments were echoed by Liverpool University Press CEO Anthony Cond, “With nine UC campuses becoming members of Opening the Future we have hopefully reached something of a tipping point – showing that libraries can work together to fund OA collectively, where no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.”

Lidia Uziel, the Associate University Librarian for Research Resources and Scholarly Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said, “We are very pleased to support the Opening the Future program, including these two presses. With this participation, UC libraries enhance their own research collections while simultaneously supporting new OA publications on topics relevant to their research areas. In becoming subscribers, we are supporting a sustainable, open, equitable, diverse, community-owned, and community-governed publishing ecosystem, and promoting publisher-librarian partnerships around Open Access book publishing.”

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Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Collections, Funding, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing