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CWRU Open Access Agreements and Other Funding

CWRU authors are able to publish open access at no cost in select journals through agreements with several publishers. This guide provides details on each agreement for CWRU authors as well as alternative no cost options and funding possibilities..

Agreement Details

White letter p on a black circle followed by punctum books

The Kelvin Smith Library (KSL) is a Supporting Library Member (2024-26). KSL gains insights into operations, abilities to provide feedback, support of library-required operations (statistics, catalog records), supports continuous improvements in accessibility, and discounts on print purchases.

In addition, the libraries provided financial support to Punctum Books subsidies:

  • the publication of high-quality OA books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture & Design, with no publication fees ever imposed upon authors;
  • commitment and adherence to the “best practices” (as guided by librarians and the standards of academic communities) for editorial evaluation and oversight, interoperable metadata, cataloguing, indexing, dissemination, discovery, aggregation, and preservation; and
  • the development and sustainable maintenance, in collaboration with other presses and research organizations, of open-source and community-owned infrastructure for OA books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Punctum Books is a scholar-led, queer-led, and peer-reviewed diamond open-access (OA) academic book publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. Three primary concentrations for Punctum are (1) books that shift the paradigm in established disciplines; (2) books that help to create new, transdisciplinary fields; and (3) books that play in the fields of creatively speculative thought. Punctum is committed to supporting projects of translation and multilingualism across a wide variety of historical periods, geographies, and languages. All staff work remotely (equitable working conditions and no subcontracting for cheaper labor).

Unlike other publishers and OA initiatives that charge author-facing fees to publish OA books (Book Processing Charges, or BPCs), Punctum believes these fees are not sustainable and also aggravate deeply entrenched inequities in the scholarly publishing landscape. Related to this, the average cost of making an academic book, according to the majority of well-established university and commercial academic presses, can range from $15,000 up to $30,000 per title (on average), and making digital ebooks available in open-access form, utilizing all of the best practices for the curation and preservation of digital objects and their integration into global knowledge systems, and with no economic or technical barriers to authors and readers worldwide, necessitates rethinking the traditional business models for academic publishing. This includes developing new protocols that will assist us in streamlining workflows and reducing costs and overheads in ways that are fully transparent to the communities (including libraries) invested in more transformative models of open scholarly communications. The average production cost of a Punctum book is $6,500, without sacrificing quality on any level, including the care of our authors.