Dive Brief:
- The University of North Carolina Press’s new Office of Scholarly Publishing Services will provide resources for faculty who want to publish their own materials in open source versions, giving UNC Press a new revenue stream from their projects.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education reports the office will have copy editing, design layout, and distribution services for an up-front fee, a shift from a revenue-recovery model that is more common in traditional publishing.
- UNC leaders expect the new initiative to help faculty publish materials they may have been keeping to themselves and expand a push for open educational resources that are meant to give students more affordable options for course materials.
Dive Insight:
University presses have been exploring new revenue streams for a number of years now as academic publishing responds to declining interest in humanities monographs, particularly. One way technology has been helping is with the opportunity to print on demand, which reduces financial risk as well as warehouse space needs. Each copy is more expensive to print, but presses don’t have to worry about hundreds of copies that never sell. E-books have also eliminated printing costs entirely, though many faculty members have continued to prefer print copies of their work rather than purely digital distribution channels.