(2 April 2013) De Gruyter, the academic publisher based in Berlin, will be offering 100 titles from its e-dition series at the crowdfunding platform Unglue.it. Each individual title that raises USD2,100 at the site will be made available worldwide as open-access content.
Unglue.it is making eBooks free and universally accessible to libraries and book lovers alike. It works by users contributing an amount of their choosing to the book titles offered at the platform by publishers. If the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher will release the book under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND).
“The demand for open-access books at De Gruyter has been increasing continuously,” said De Gruyter CEO Sven Fund. “This has motivated us to offer select e-dition titles atUnglue.it and see if users are willing to help increase the number of open access works available.”
De Gruyter will offer books from 1958 to 2003 that currently can no longer be ordered. These books are in both English and German and cover a wide range of subjects, including law, linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. Unglue.it users can help determine which titles are offered first by putting De Gruyter titles on their “wishlists”. The De Gruyter page on Unglue.it is at https://unglue.it/pid/popular/4311.
“We’re really excited and honored to be working with De Gruyter. Their broad commitment to both Open Access and to high quality publishing really distinguishes them from their competitors,” says Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar Inc., the company behind Unglue.it.
Unglue.it is a crowdfunding platform which rewards rights holders for making their ebooks available to the world under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org). Unglue.it runs campaigns for previously published books, allowing book lovers to pledge toward giving them to the world. When rights holders’ target prices are reached, they receive funds in exchange for issuing an unglued ebook edition which can be freely read, copied, and shared, worldwide. For more information, see https://unglue.it/press.
Visit De Gruyter here: www.degruyter.com
