Open Access University Press | A Research Project at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Germany

The poster is an overview of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag (in english Open Access University Press), that is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Germany) for 23 months (Start in May 2018). Open Access (OA) book publishing is still in relatively early stages, leading to academic books being much less frequently published OA than research journal articles. This has various effects on the publication landscape, which are described here. Despite established publishers meanwhile also offer the publication of OA monographs, only certain researchers can actually publish, because of high Book Processing Charges (BPCs) up to 10,000 USD and more. In contrast, university presses have started to publish monographs as OA without any or at significantly lower charges; however, university presses often do not have the technical know-how of the state-of-the-art publishing of OA books possessed by academic publishers. This is why, our research project aims to develop an sustainable and easy-to-adopt publication workflow for OA monographs, which is media-neutral as well as both cost-effective and personnel-efficient. Universities shall be enabled to publish their book publications as OA by adopting this workflow. In addition, first results and an outlook ahead to the further steps of the research project are depicted on the poster.