The University Libraries is pleased to announce it has joined Punctum Books Supporting Library Membership Program for three years. Punctum Books is a scholar-led, queer-led, and peer-reviewed academic book publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing. As a diamond open access (OA) publisher, all Punctum Books titles are openly available and they do not charge any author-facing fees.

The University Libraries support for Punctum Books will help to subsidize:

• the publication of high-quality OA books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture & Design, with no publication fees ever imposed upon authors;
• commitment and adherence to the “best practices” (as guided by librarians and the standards of academic communities) for editorial evaluation and oversight, interoperable metadata, cataloguing, indexing, discovery, dissemination, aggregation, and preservation of its OA books; and
• the development and sustainable maintenance, in collaboration with other presses and research organizations, of open-source and community-owned infrastructure for OA books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This support is aligned with the Libraries Statement of OA Support and is one of many memberships and agreements undertaken to make more University of Iowa scholarship open access. If you have questions about the Libraries support for open access, please contact us at lib-impact@uiowa.edu.