Punctum Books Library Program Welcomes Columbia University

We are thrilled to announce that Columbia University Libraries has joined punctum’s Supporting Library Membership Program. Columbia plays a vital role in championing global higher education and open access initiatives. Punctum would like to extend special gratitude to scholarly communications and projects interim director Nicky Agate for her advocacy and leadership in developing our new collaboration.

Our Supporting Library Membership Program was initiated with metadata management, scholarly communications, and collection management librarians at UCSB Library and OAPEN. When libraries support punctum, they not only receive specific things that are meaningful to them (such as MARC & ONIX records, usage stats, etc.) but they are also helping to support the operations of a press that shares values with the library community. Columbia joins the University of Groningen, Duke University, KU Leuven, UC Irvine, Iowa State University, UC Santa Barbara, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and University of Guelph Libraries as part of punctum’s emerging membership program.

Our hope at punctum is to work directly with librarians in order to ensure that our catalog is fully integrated into universal research systems, including repositories, while ensuring our books are available to a global readership without economic or other barriers. In supporting punctum, libraries invest in a more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and non-profit publishing ecosystem that we believe is crucial for the cultivation of more creative modes of scholarship and their open dissemination and preservation as public knowledge. Libraries can be assured that they are investing in a press that works toward new modes of economic and operational sustainability while collaborating with other presses and organizations such as ScholarLed and Invest In Open to help build open infrastructure for open access books.

Punctum’s Library Program adopts a consortial funding model, inspired by Open Library of the Humanities, whereby small annual contributions from libraries form a robust revenue pool that enables a cost-effective method for funding open access — we are stronger together. With consortial library funding for OA books, no single institution bears a disproportionate cost and each institution decides for itself what is an appropriate level of support.

We are immensely grateful for the support of Columbia University Libraries and look forward to working alongside them in enacting meaningful change to not only the way in which scholarship is accessed and utilized, but also supported and generated.