Skip to main content
SearchLoginLogin or Signup

Punctum Books Library Program Welcomes Tilburg University

Published onJul 31, 2020
Punctum Books Library Program Welcomes Tilburg University

Punctum Books is thrilled to announce that Tilburg University Library is now a member of our Supporting Library Membership Program. Tilburg University strongly supports the principles of Open Access and Open Science. With the Tilburg University Action Plan it showed that open science and open access became pivotal ambitions within the university strategy 2018-2021. The university library of Tilburg actively wants to stimulate researchers to publish open access. Therefore, its open science coordinator Daan Rutten is thrilled to cooperate with Punctum: “Open access rapidly becomes the standard for journal articles, but academic books lag behind. To change this and to get scholars in book-publishing fields as Humanities and Law to go OA, we really need quality publishers such as Punctum, with a different and non-commercial business model, and without the enormous ‘book processing charges’ charged by some of the big publishing houses.” 

The Punctum Books 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. See the current list Supporting Library Members.

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 collective 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 collective 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 Tilburg University Library 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.

Comments
0
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?