There are some interesting things going on in the library publishing world. As scholars become more active in the open access movement, libraries are stepping in to help them achieve their communication needs. Open access institutional repositories really took off in 2006, with many libraries around the world now providing archiving for author pre- and post-prints of scholarly articles, conference papers and other materials.

Some libraries are now looking beyond the IR model to see what other ways they can support the needs of faculty members in disciplines like the humanities which has been slower to recognize the benefit and value of open access. The University of Michigan Library formed a Scholarly Publishing Office in 2002 and has developed expertise in digital publishing. Unusually for a library-based publisher, SPO is open to all-comers, and exercises no institutional or subject constraints. So any faculty member from anywhere in the world can make use of their free services to publish works that they feel are worth making publicly available.

The international editorial collective I’m involved with, Open Humanities Press, has partnered with SPO to start publishing book series in different areas of the humanities. Our recent announcement of the partnership is below:

August 7, 2009

Open Humanities Press (OHP), together with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO), is launching five open access book series edited by members of the OHP Editorial Board. The series are:

New Metaphysics, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

Critical Climate Change, edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

Global Conversations, edited by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Unidentified Theoretical Objects, edited by Wlad Godzich

Liquid Books, edited by Clare Birchall and Gary Hall

The books are being published through a shared editing and production model that benefits from the complementary strengths of the partners: SPO, the library publisher, provides infrastructure, scale, and experience in digital production while OHP, an international group of humanities scholars, assembles boards of editors to provide editorial direction and manage peer review.

OHP’s board contains some of the most well-respected names in literary criticism and cultural studies including Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Antonio Negri, Université de Paris-VIII (St. Denis), Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University.

Authors will retain copyright for their works and have a choice of Creative Commons licenses. All of the OHP books will be freely available in full-text, digital editions and as reasonably-priced paperbacks.

Read more about the book series and how to submit proposals at the OHP website. For more details, please contact Sigi Jöttkandt (sigij@openhumanitiespress.org) or Shana Kimball (kimballs@umich.edu)