UCL Press Releases Innovative Open Access Book Formats to Improve Scholarly Research

UCL Press is delighted to present its open access books online in three new distinct and innovative formats: enhanced digital editions, monographs with scholarly functionalities, and BOOCs (books as open online content).

Developed by Armadillo Systems (producers of the award-winning Turning the Pages system and Digital Bodleian), UCL’s platform offers new ways of publishing digital scholarship and responds to the needs of scholars working in non-traditional formats.

Its three strands are as follows:

Enhanced digital editions These beautiful digital books are presented in a format that offers both thematic and chronological navigation. Highly illustrated, they feature slide shows of images, deep zoom features, audio, video and 3D, and the format is perfectly suited to highly illustrated research outputs dealing with artefacts and manuscripts. Titles available as enhanced editions include the popular Petrie Museum of Egyptology: Characters and Collections and Treasures from UCL.

Scholarly monographs

UCL Press’s scholarly monographs are presented in an online reading format with a suite of scholarly functionalities: here you canhighlight, take notes, search, cite, export and save or share a personalised copy or extract. Content will include the output of UCL’s groundbreaking social media study Why We Post, including the popular titles How the World Changed Social Media and Social Media in an English Village by renowned anthropologist Daniel Miller. Additional best-selling titles will include Temptation in the Archives by the late Lisa Jardine and Suburban Urbanities, edited by Laura Vaughan.

BOOC (Books as Open Online Content) These innovative ‘living books’ feature articles of various types, in a non-linear thematic presentation that offers readers the option to select and sort subjects they wish to read. With long and short articles, blogs, videos, audio and Storifys, content is added to these ‘books’ over a period of time. The first BOOC, which captures the outputs of Academic Book of the Future, an AHRC/British Library project, will launch in late Summer 2016. Find out more here.

FURTHER INFORMATION

UCL Press is the UK's first fully open access university press. Re-established at UCL in 2015, UCL Press publishes peer-reviewed scholarly monographs, edited collections, textbooks and journals, by both UCL academics and non-UCL academics. All its books are made available as free, downloadable PDFs from its website, as well as in print for sale through retailers at affordable prices, and many of its books are also made available on a free, enhanced, browser-based platform. Its mission is to make its published outputs available to a global audience, irrespective of their ability to pay.