By Jean Roberts
Glasstree Academic Publishing is a non-licence cloud-based content dissemination platform supporting e-book, print and open access (OA) publishing, which was launched in November 2016. Glasstree is a subdivision of Lulu.com, a large USA-based independent publishing platform which has published more than two million books since 2002. Lulu analyzed their author database and discovered that at least 38 per cent of Lulu’s content was produced by academic authors independently publishing their works. The company was keen to look at ways it could better understand and support this academic community. It became apparent that this pattern of publishing was indicative of an emerging trend, a drive to seek alternative means of getting content into the public domain, embraced by a group of academic entrepreneurial innovators who wanted their work to become accessible and were willing to sacrifice their relationships with traditional publishing in order to do so.
After conducting direct discussions with a representative sample of those academics, Lulu supported the concept that every academic professional in every institution should have the right to publish their monographs, books, articles and papers independently. After major collaboration with these academics, Glasstree Academic Publishing was launched to better support their needs and provide a focused academic content platform, incorporating the same functions and services as a traditional academic publisher would provide. The idea was not only to replicate, but to improve upon the experience that traditional publishers provide to authors, particularly as regards the ability to redirect ownership and revenues back to the author. Glasstree offers print and digital options, copy-editing services, gold OA and peer review, as well as various discoverability and impact metric tools.
The fundamental principles of Glasstree are:
- providing an equitable profit-sharing model for academics and their supporting institutions
- providing better control and visibility of content
- the ability for authors and institutions to set the price of their own work
- a quicker route to market
- a fairer profit-sharing model (70 per cent of royalties instead of the industry average of nine per cent).
Read the full article at insights.uksg.org/
Jean Roberts is Business Development Director for Glasstree Academic Publishing
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