Open Access at Both Ends

Carl Straumsheim:

Amherst College Press, the University of Michigan Library and the dozens of liberal arts colleges that make up the Oberlin Group on Thursday unveiled a new scholarly open-access monograph publisher that aims to promote digital scholarship and lower the barriers to publication for researchers at smaller institutions.

As part of that concept, the press will require neither authors nor readers to pay for publication costs.

Known as Lever Press, the publishing venture is the end product of the initiative of the same name. The Oberlin Group launched the initiative in the summer of 2013 to gauge interest in how colleges and libraries could work together to improve scholarly publishing. Emboldened by a survey of faculty members that showed many scholars were less than satisfied with their options in the monograph publishing market, the group quickly zeroed in on establishing a publisher of its own.