Since 2018, Punctum has been engaged in a partnership with UCSB Library, in order to develop a non-author-facing fees OA book publishing model that privileges cooperative expertise and knowledge sharing between librarians, knowledge managers, publishers, and scholar-researchers. This partnership has enabled punctum to significantly extend its partner network.
punctum is a member of the Radical OA Collective. Formed in 2015, the Radical Open Access Collective is a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. Now consisting of over twenty members, ROAC promotes a progressive vision for open publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
Out of ROAC developed ScholarLed, a consortium of Open Access Presses bringing together a group of scholar-led academic book publishers, each of which makes its books available to read online for free, on an Open Access basis. punctum co-director Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei was founding chairperson of ScholarLed. As part of ScholarLed, punctum is also one main partners in the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which in turn has given rise to the Open Book Collective, which brings together OA publishers, OA publishing service providers, libraries, and other research institutions to create a new, mutually supportive ecosystem for the thriving of OA book publishing, and Thoth, and open-source metadata manager and distribution platform tailored specifically to OA books.
punctum books are available on a variety of platforms, including OAPEN, JSTOR, Project Muse, the Internet Archive, and RNIB Bookshare. They are also indexed on DOAB, CNKI, and EBSCO Knowledge Base. Our DOIs are generated via Crossref.
Academic libraries are able to support punctum books through Jisc (UK/Ireland) and Lyrasis (US/Canada).
punctum books is also a supporter of and collaborator with the Coko Foundation and the Knowledge Futures Group.