Worth the Effort?

By Carl Straumsheim. Library directors at selective liberal arts colleges may this fall found a new open-access publishing house. In the months ahead, the libraries still need to convince faculty members the effort would be worth the time and money. The Lever Initiative, founded last summer by the liberal arts college libraries that make up the Oberlin Group, is investigating the possibilities of establishing an open-access publishing house for scholarly short-form monographs. After a review of the market and a survey of faculty attitudes, the task force published its first report in March, summarizing the first phase of the effort. Read more...