From: Lorraine Weston <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 17:58:53 -0800

University of California Press and the California Digital Library
Receive $750K Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

March 5, 2015 (Oakland, CA)—The University of California Press (UC
Press) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have received a grant
of $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a
web-based, open source content and workflow management system to
support the publication of open access (OA) monographs in the
humanities and social sciences. When complete, this system will be
made available to the community of academic publishers, especially
university presses and library publishers.

UC Press is committed to developing a thriving and sustainable
ecosystem for the humanities and social sciences and to preserving the
monograph as a key vehicle for original scholarship. Last month, UC
Press announced Luminos (www.luminosoa.org), a new OA program that
brings universal access and advanced digital delivery to the
monograph. Development of a new Mellon-funded content and workflow
management system will support Luminos, and other OA initiatives, by
stripping out complexity—and cost—and enabling sustainable models to
flourish.

For CDL, development of a content management solution represents the
opportunity to extend its current publishing services to better
support monographic series publications in eScholarship
(www.escholarship.org), UC’s institutional repository and OA
publishing platform. Academic units on the UC campuses are frequently
home to innovative, faculty-led book publishing programs with limited
staffing. Providing a flexible and efficient workflow management
system on the back end of eScholarship will enable these programs to
focus resources on the important work of acquiring new titles and
raising the visibility of their publications.

“We want to drive innovation that shapes—rather than merely responds
to—how scholarship can thrive in a global, deeply networked, public
sphere,” says UC Press Director Alison Mudditt. “Digital
infrastructure is essential for us to publish traditional and
innovative forms of research cost-effectively and ensure maximum
global reach. This is not a problem for UC Press alone, however, and
by developing an open source solution we hope to benefit all of
university and library publishing.”

CDL Executive Director Laine Farley comments, “I'm delighted we can
work with our colleagues at UC Press to contribute to the new
infrastructure needed to move both library and press publishing into a
more efficient and forward-looking position. This project is an ideal
blending of our expertise to realize a common vision.”

The proposed system will increase efficiency and achieve cost
reduction by allowing users to manage content and associated workflows
from initial authoring through manuscript submission, peer review, and
production to final publication of files on the open web, whether via
a publishing platform or an institutional repository. The system will
streamline production so publishers can redirect resources back into
the editorial process and disseminate important scholarship more
widely.

Over the course of two years, the system will be designed and built to
support the new open access models being pursued by UC Press as well
as CDL’s current publishing programs. Throughout the two-year grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC Press and CDL will engage
other university presses and library publishing units to ensure the
system will meet the needs of a range of organizations. UC Press and
CDL have built in a plan for long-term sustainability to ensure that
this resource will continue to serve these communities and will
realize its potential to reinvigorate the domain of monographic
publishing within the humanities and social sciences.

University of California Press is one of the most forward-thinking
scholarly publishers in the nation. For more than 120 years, it has
championed work that influences public discourse and challenges the
status quo in multiple fields of study. At a time of dramatic change
for publishing and scholarship, UC Press collaborates with scholars,
librarians, authors, and students to stay ahead of today’s knowledge
demands and shape the future of publishing. For more information
contact Lorraine Weston, Associate Director of Publicity, at
[log in to unmask] or (510) 883-8291 or visit our website at
www.ucpress.edu.

The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of
California in 1997 to take advantage of emerging technologies that
transform the way digital information is published and accessed. Since
then, in collaboration with the UC libraries and other partners, the
CDL has assembled one of the world’s largest digital research
libraries and changed the ways that faculty, students, and researchers
discover and access information. For further information contact
Catherine Mitchell, Director, Access & Publishing Program, at
[log in to unmask] or (510) 587-6132

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