University of Rhode Island Libraries join a growing international collective of institutional libraries collaborating with Punctum Books.

The Supporting Library Membership Program was initiated with metadata management, scholarly communications, and collection management librarians at UCSB Library and OAPEN. When libraries support Punctum, they not only receive specific things that are meaningful to them (such as MARC & ONIX records, usage stats, etc.) but they are also helping to support the operations of a press that shares values with the library community.

At Punctum Books we enjoy working directly with librarians in order to ensure that our catalog is fully integrated into universal research systems, including repositories, while ensuring our books are available to a global readership without economic or other barriers. In supporting Punctum books, libraries invest in a more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and non-profit publishing ecosystem that we believe is crucial for the cultivation of more creative modes of scholarship and their open dissemination and preservation as public knowledge. Libraries can be assured that they are investing in a press that works toward new modes of economic and operational sustainability while collaborating with other presses and organizations such as ScholarLed and Invest In Open to help build open infrastructure for open access books.

Punctum Books’s Supporting Library Membership Program adopts a consortia funding model, inspired by Open Library of the Humanities, whereby small annual contributions from libraries form a robust revenue pool that enables a cost-effective method for funding open access — we are stronger together. With collective library funding for OA books, no single institution bears a disproportionate cost and each institution decides for itself what is an appropriate level of support.

We are immensely grateful for the support of University of Rhode Island Libraries and look forward to working alongside them in enacting meaningful change to not only the way in which scholarship is accessed and utilized, but also supported and generated.

Check out the library’s open access fund here.

Punctum Books’ announcement regarding URI Libraries’ membership.