In partnership with seven Big Ten-affiliated university presses, the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Center for Library Programs expanded the Big Ten Open Books project with the publication of the second 100-book collection.
The Indigenous North Americans collection explores history, culture, and literature, from the 15th century to today. Books from eight university presses are featured in this subject collection, including 36 titles from the University of Nebraska Press.
The high-quality scholarly works included in the collection have all been previously published in print by the partnering university presses and are now being made openly available in digital form to read and reuse at no cost to the reader or author. Each title has undergone a rigorous selection and quality certification process that allows readers and users of this collection to trust the veracity of the content. Making these works openly available allows them to have tremendous impact through broad engagement and knowledge sharing. Big Ten Open Books creates ebook collections that aspire to the highest standards of discoverability, accessibility, durability and flexibility.
“The UNL Libraries sponsored two titles authored by UNL faculty in this collection, which center Indigenous voices. These books ensure vital human experiences and perspectives are freely available to readers worldwide and reflects UNL Libraries commitment to open, equitable access to high quality information,” said Melissa Gomis, chair of collections strategy and open scholarship with UNL Libraries. “We’re thrilled to have Nebraska authors and Nebraska Press titles featured so prominently and now available freely worldwide.”
The two titles sponsored by UNL Libraries in this collection are "Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians" (University of Nebraska Press) edited by David J. Wishart, emeritus professor in the School of Global Integrative Studies, and "The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England" (University of Minnesota Press) by Matt Cohen, professor of English.
The Big Ten Open Books project has established a distinctive model for unified, open-access publishing of scholarly monographs. It creates open content that is immediately and universally available on open infrastructure (Fulcrum, hosted by the University of Michigan) using open distribution models (including Project MUSE, JSTOR, OAPEN, and The Palace Project from Lyrasis) and envisions a robust programmatic future for open monograph publishing. Funding for this collection has been provided by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the California Digital Library.
This work is aligned with the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s vision for the BIG Collection, which seeks to unite the collections of the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance into one collection, shared and fully networked.
For additional information on the Big Ten Academic Alliance, please contact Kate McCready, Program Director for Open Publishing at kate.mccready@btaa.org.
