Starting today, the university press (Universitätsverlag Ilmenau) of the Ilmenau Technical University (Technische Universität Ilmenau) will publish each of its books in dual editions, one OA and one priced/printed. (Thanks to press director Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.)
This is a mandate laid down in a new university regulation published today. Excerpt (in Google's English):
Special characteristic of the [Ilmenau University Press] is the obligation to open ACCESS....
Without open ACCESS no book! ...
A goal of the the publishing house is it to offer to the scientists of the university a favorable and easily attainable platform for their scientific publications. The university publishing house promotes the free accesibility to scientific information by a parallel, free and durable on-line publication (open ACCESS) of the publications published by the publishing house. It is anxious to ensure to offer its publishing house products to corresponding to real market conditions, but favourable prices in the book trade around as far a spreading as possible....
A similar statement appears on the University Press home page (in Google's English):
This service is embedded...to an optimal visibility to contribute spreading and Rezeption of the scientific publications. Therefore the text published as book is offered not only for a favourable price in the book trade, but published parallel as electronic document in the digital library Thuringia. This form of hybrid publishing has large advantages for the authors. They profit from the world-wide accessibility in the Internet, without having to do without the user-friendly read version in form of a printed book.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/27/2007 01:42:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
