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Punctum Books Library Program Welcomes the University of Texas at Austin

Published onFeb 19, 2020
Punctum Books Library Program Welcomes the University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas Libraries at UT Austin is the newest member of the Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program. UT Austin has a innovative and progressive record of working to ensure its scholars publish and access OA research. UT’s collaboration with punctum books supports the development of unique and thought provoking voices in scholarly publishing, as well as the creation of new infrastructure to facilitate open access scholarship. We would like to extend particular thanks to scholarly communications librarian Colleen Lyon and our new Library Advisory Board member and UT humanities librarian Shiela Winchester.

The Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program was developed in collaboration with UCSB Library and OAPEN. Members of this program support the operations of a press that shares values with the library community and a vision for a more equitable and accessible scholarly commons. The University of Texas at Austin joins Columbia, 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.

For the sake of discoverability, reuse, and scholar support, we work directly with librarians to ensure that our catalogue is fully integrated into research systems, including repositories, while also ensuring that 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 that collaborates 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 collective library support 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 grateful to the University of Texas Libraries at UT Austin for their commitment to open access research and publishing. We look forward to working alongside UT toward the future of scholarship.

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