De Gruyter to Cooperate with Unglue.it Toward Achieving Open Access with Crowdfunding
Berlin, 2 April 2013 – Starting today, the academic publisher De Gruyter will be offering 100 titles from its e-dition series at the crowdfunding platform Unglue.it. Each individual title that raises 2,100 dollars at the site will be made available worldwide as open access content.
Unglue.it is an innovative service provider that is making ebooks free and universally accessible to libraries and book lovers alike. How it works: users contribute an amount of their choosing to the book titles offered at the platform by publishers. If the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher will release the book under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.
"The demand for open access books at De Gruyter has been increasing continuously," says De Gruyter CEO Sven Fund. "This has motivated us to offer select e-dition titles at Unglue.it and see if users are willing to help increase the number of open access works available."
De Gruyter will offer books from 1958 to 2003 that currently can no longer be ordered. Both English and German books from a wide range of subject areas will be offered.
"We're really excited and honored to be working with De Gruyter. Their broad commitment to both Open Access and to high quality publishing really distinguishes them from their competitors", says Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar Inc., the company behind Unglue.it.
De Gruyter
The academic publishing house De Gruyter can look back on a history spanning over 260 years. The Berlin-based group of companies releases over 1,250 new titles each year in the fields of medicine, the humanities, natural sciences, and law, in addition to more than 650 journals and digital media publications. The De Gruyter Group includes the publishing houses Versita, Birkhäuser, Oldenbourg Wissenschaft, and Akademie. www.degruyter.com
Unglue.it
Unglue.it is a crowdfunding platform which rewards rights holders for making their ebooks available to the world under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org). Unglue.it runs campaigns for previously published books, allowing book lovers to pledge toward giving them to the world. When rights holders’ target prices are reached, they receive funds in exchange for issuing an unglued ebook edition which can be freely read, copied, and shared, worldwide. For more information, see http://unglue.it/press.
- People:
- Eric Hellman
- Sven Fund
- Places:
- Berlin