ATLANTA, GA – November 5, 2018 – University of Michigan Press, part of the University of Michigan Library, and LYRASIS, one of the nation’s largest non-profit technology and services organizations serving archives, libraries and museums, are proud to announce the launch of the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection (UMP EBC), now available for sale. The new collection will be hosted on the Fulcrum platform and will be available in its entirety through an exclusive partnership with LYRASIS, making this a fully not-for-profit model committed to enriching the community and making more valuable content available for libraries.
The new University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection is a comprehensive collection of Michigan’s new scholarly electronic books as well as an extensive backlist collection, with options for print add-on. It features extensive peer-reviewed, faculty-selected content in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, with particular strength in political science, performing arts, classics and archaeology, and American studies.
By using Fulcrum – a community-based, open source publishing platform – for hosting, the collection will showcase the full richness of the research in a durable, discoverable, accessible, and flexible form. As well as books, the collection contains long-form digital works featuring integrated multimedia, podcasts, and even 3D models. Fulcrum was developed at the University of Michigan Press with initial funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. LYRASIS and the University of Michigan Press developed a partnership in 2017 to provide sales and administrative support for content and services offered on Fulcrum with the goal of creating new models in order to disseminate digital content and new forms of scholarly output to the scholarly community.
LYRASIS, to support this new collection and the community it serves, developed the business model for distribution and purchase. This new model is a community supported initiative, developed and supported by the scholarly and library communities and will be entirely not for profit and mission-driven, eliminating for-profit licensing models and maximizing value for the researchers, libraries, and end users alike. The model developed by LYRASIS and Michigan is intended to be replicable and generalizable, thereby also serving as a tool for the scholarly publishing community for future collections.
Celeste Feather, LYRASIS Senior Director of Licensing and Strategic Partnerships, says of the new collection, “It’s an exciting new model that we are proud to introduce alongside University of Michigan Press. It is non-profit from start to finish and represents the trends toward community-supported publishing initiatives that have been steadily growing within the fields of libraries and scholarship over the last few years. We are committed to creating new opportunities for our members and beyond that make more content more widely available, with library-friendly terms.”
Charles Watkinson, Director of University of Michigan Press, added, “Our authors are ground-breaking scholars who don’t want to have to squeeze their richly digital research outputs into the confines of a print facsimile. In keeping with its focus on innovation, LYRASIS has enabled University of Michigan Press to create a new form of content collection; full of multimodal content but still easy to incorporate into library catalogs. The libraries who buy the UMP EBC will be investing not only in acquiring a comprehensive collection of leading scholarly ebooks, but also in the growth of open source, sustainable, and community-accountable research infrastructure.”
Visit the University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection website for more information. The collection will be available for purchase entirely through LYRASIS. LYRASIS is also partnering with Michigan to make the Fulcrum platform available to other publishers, especially those based in libraries who share the open source vision.
About LYRASIS
LYRASIS (www.lyrasis.org), a 501(c)(3) is a non-profit, technology and product membership organization supporting enduring access to our shared academic, scientific and cultural heritage through leadership in open technologies, content services, digital solutions and collaboration with archives, libraries, museums and knowledge communities worldwide.