UC Irvine Libraries Pilot Initiative to Support UCI Authors Publishing through the University of California Press Luminos Program
Luminos is the Open Access (OA) publishing program for scholarly monographs from UC Press. Luminos titles go through the same rigorous selection and peer review processes as all other UC press books and are published in both digital and traditional formats. The digital editions of all Luminos-published titles are available free of charge to anyone in the world, which makes them widely accessible to readers regardless of their home institution’s library budget and ideal for assigned course readings in the age of prohibitively high textbook prices. The traditional print copies are available for purchase, review copies, and other publicity such as conference booths. Both versions will be identical in content and layout, but digital editions can also include live links and interactive multimedia such as audio, video, or maps.
In the Luminos OA program, publishing costs are supported by books’ creators, rather than those who seek to read the final content. Authors publishing through the Luminos program are not paid royalties and revenue from print sales helps offset the costs of the Luminos OA digital editions. UC Press calculates the cost of OA monograph publishing at approximately $15,000 per book. The author’s publication fee for University of California faculty, books based on UC dissertations, and books in series where the editor is UC faculty is $5,000.
The UC Irvine Libraries are Garamond level supporters of the Luminos Program and in addition California Digital Library provides support on the behalf of all UC libraries. This results in a 33% discount on the Title Publication Fee for faculty members at all UC’s. In support of OA publishing by UC Irvine faculty, the Libraries will, as part of a pilot initiative in support of OA publishing, cover the remainder of the author fee (up to $5000) for one UCI faculty authored or edited book accepted by Luminos during each year of this two year pilot through 2019. For more information, contact Mitchell Brown, the Scholarly Communication Coordinator, mcbrown@uci.edu, (949) 824-9732.