Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program

Punctum Books, founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2011, and now incorporated in Santa Barbara, California as a non-profit corporation co-directed by Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, is a scholar-led, peer-reviewed, diamond open-access (OA) academic book publisher devoted to trans-disciplinary and genre-bending work that takes risks with form and style, and to fostering authors both within and outside the Academy who want to push the boundaries of established disciplines and methodologies and who understand the importance of sharing their work with the Global Commons.

Punctum does not charge authors publication fees, and all of their editorial, production, and post-production work is conducted in-house in Punctum’s offices in Santa Barbara, California and Tirana, Albania with everyone having the opportunity to work remotely (no subcontracting for cheaper labor and equitable working conditions). Punctum’s commitments to and care for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are evidenced in their Directorship, catalog and also in their Editorial Advisory Board.

The Supporting Library Membership Program

The Supporting Library Membership Program is designed to support the ongoing operations, development, sustainability, and governance of a collectively funded open-access publishing platform (punctum books) that cannot exist without consortial investment from university and college libraries, and which returns extremely good value for such investment.

• The publication of high-quality open-access 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, discovery, dissemination, aggregation, and preservation of its open-access books; and
• The collaborative development and sustainable maintenance of open-source and community-owned infrastructure for open-access books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

• Full transparency through an annual financial and activity report, in which we share the titles we have published each year, the activities with which we have been involved within our own press and within the larger community of OA publishing, an overview of our finances, and download stats for our e-books and numbers for our print sales;
• Biannual newsletters with information regarding what we have been doing as a press and how we have been collaborating across the landscape of OA books with organizations and other publishers around the development of community-built infrastructures for OA book publishing;
• A seat on Punctum’s Library Advisory Board, because we believe that the libraries that support us should be part of our governance (librarians who want to opt out of this can do so);
• CSV, ONIX, KBART, and BibTeX catalog formats from Thoth (thoth.pub), a community-led metadata management system which we helped to build and develop, for all of the books in Punctum’s catalog, as well as for other OA presses who have their catalogs incorporated into Thoth (MARCXML records and other file formats under development);
• COUNTER-compliant usage statistics & reader metrics, provided by OAPEN for whole books, and by JSTOR and Project Muse, for chapter-level usage for the books in Punctum’s catalog;
• Cross-referenced metadata (including DOIs) for all of the books in Punctum’s catalog (provided by Crossref) and by JSTOR and Project Muse, for chapter-level usage);
• Open annotation layer on all of Punctum’s e-books and e-book chapters (provided by OAPEN Library + Hypothes.is);
• Long-term preservation, provided by Portico, of all of Punctum’s e-books and associated metadata;
• Acknowledgment of supporting libraries on Punctum’s website (on our Institutional Partners webpage);
• The right to use Punctum’s logo in marketing activities; and
• A 40% discount on all of Punctum’s print editions purchased directly from Punctum (all of Punctum’s print editions are also available through GOBI Library Solutions). To contact Punctum directly to purchase discounted print editions of our titles, contact vincent@punctumbooks.com.

Pricing

U.S. library and institutional members are tiered according to the Basic classification in Carnegie Classification. Participation can be at one-, three- or five-year commitments.

Canadian library and institutional members are tiered according to FTE. Participation can be at one-, three- or five-year commitments.