Will Open Access Revolutionize Academic Publishing?

“Major players in the world of commercial scholarly publishing have little shame,” says Bryn Geffert, librarian at Amherst College and the man behind the new Amherst College Press.

Fed up with a scholarly publishing industry that, Geffert says, does “far more to lock down information than to disseminate it to those who need it,” Geffert spearheaded Amherst’s effort to endow an open access university press. The venture is described in Emily Gold Boutillier‘s article in the Spring 2013 issue of Amherst Magazine (which is, of course, free to access).

Geffert has been thinking about this for a while. In 2011 he penned a plea for shotgun weddings between libraries and presses, and described in that article an effort between a consortium of small colleges to found a joint liberal arts press.