The Libraries of theUniversité Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and theEditions de l’Université de Bruxelles (EUB), its publishing imprint, collaborate to provide free online access to recent books published by EUB which are out of print. The e-books are available on theDigithèque web site, the collection of digital copies of printed books created by the Libraries.
Providing online open access to EUB recent books is valuable
For the public, who can freely read the books online,
For the authors, whose books are offered a second life,
For the publisher, whose collections become more visible.
Around 20 books are already available online, related to political science, sociology, European law, history, history of religions, statistics, environment…
Other open access initiatives of ULB include: The Study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe commissioned by DG Research-European Commission; BICTEL/e, the Directory of electronic theses and dissertation; the Digithèque, its digitization program of ancient books from the Libraries’ collections and their online full-text availability; its Institutional Repository, under development, which aims to collect and provide online open access to publications and scientific works by ULB professors and researchers....
Comment. This is an excellent idea. Instead of letting OP books disappear from view, the original publishers should issue OA editions. One day presses will routinely publish monographs in dual OA/TA editions, and use the OA editions to increase the visibility and sales of the TA editions. But for presses reluctant to adopt that model today, creating an OA edition of an OP book is a small investment with large gains for the author, for readers, and for the press.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/29/2007 09:26:00 AM.
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.
