Book publishing that’s Open Access and high quality? Consider Luminos from UC Press.

Posted On: February 29, 2016

UC San Diego authors in the market for a publisher should consider Luminos, the Open Access (OA) publishing program for scholarly monographs from UC Press. Luminos titles go through the same rigorous selection and peer review processes as all other UC press books and are published in both digital and traditional formats. The digital editions of all Luminos-published titles are available free of charge to anyone in the world, which makes them widely accessible to readers regardless of their home institution’s library budget and ideal for assigned course readings in the age of prohibitively high textbook prices. The traditional print copies are available for purchase, review copies, and other publicity such as conference booths.  Both versions will be identical in content and layout, but digital editions can also include live links and interactive multimedia such as audio, video, or maps.
In the OA model, publishing costs are shifted from the final product’s readers to the content creators, in this case: the author and UC Press. Authors are not paid royalties, as any revenue from print sales helps offset the costs of the OA digital editions. UC Press calculates the cost of OA monograph publishing at approximately $15,000; the author’s contribution for University of California faculty, books based on UC dissertations, and books in series where the editor is UC faculty is $5,000.
To support this venture, UC San Diego Library will cover the (full) author fee of $5000 for UC San Diego authors’ accepted books. For more information, contact Annelise Sklar (asklar@ucsd.edu), the Social Sciences Collection Coordinator.