Cornell launches an Open Access university press

Cornell University has begun a new publishing venture that will make books freely available on the Internet.

Cornell University, located primarily in Ithaca, New York, announced in January that it has created Internet-First University Press, which will offer old and new books under Open Access. The new publisher was launched with a catalog containing four original publications and several titles that were previously out of print. In addition to free online access, readers will be offered the option of purchasing printed copies through a print-on-demand system. Internet- First is built within Cornell's institutional archive that uses the DSpace software developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; see Open Access Now, October 20, 2003).

"What this model does is reduce the financial risk for the publisher by eliminating the need for a large inventory," says project leader J. Robert Cooke, Cornell Professor of Biological and Environmental Engineering. Cooke is coordinating the project together with colleagues Kenneth M. King, a former Cornell Vice-Provost for Information Technology, and Ross Atkinson, the Associate University Librarian for Collections. Internet-First will be selective in choosing the books that it publishes, and has an Editorial Board that will review all potential publications.

Books published by academic university presses tend to have a narrow audience. Interestingly, in the Internet-First model, authors do not receive advance royalties, but are paid when each print on- demand copy is ordered. "Faculty members value having their scholarship read, and the Open Access approach provides immediate, worldwide access," says Cooke. "Our first authors are all distinguished faculty with no need to build up their résumés. They have no pressing financial need or were smart enough to know they weren't going to get much money anyway."

The University plans to add monographs and graduate student theses to the catalogue. Future projects include the publication of multimedia material, such as videos and photographic collections.

http://dspace.library.cornell.edu