In an ambitious move to democratize access to scholarly knowledge and advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the De Gruyter eBound Foundation is thrilled to unveil UPLOpen.com, a product of University Press Library Open (UPLO), an innovative website that curates high-quality, open access scholarship from the world’s leading university presses.
UPLOpen.com is a direct response to the growing demand for open access scholarship and the urgent need to address the global challenges identified in the UN SDGs. All books are free to read online or download, and UPLOpen.com’s emphasis on the SDGs underscores the distinctive dedication of university presses to integrate the SDGs’ expansive targets into their day-to-day operations and structure.
“Publishing books of global importance is central to the DNA of university presses,” said Peter Potter, Executive Director of De Gruyter eBound. “Finding those books, however, can be a challenge amidst the noise of the internet. Our goal with UPLOpen.com was to create a welcoming place on the web where people could go to find authoritative research from the world’s top university presses. This initiative is a testament to the collective power of the academic community’s commitment to fostering positive change, inclusivity, and sustainability worldwide.”
At launch, UPLOpen.com proudly hosts more than 350 open access books from over thirty university presses, including two landmark collections: Luminos, from the University of California Press, and TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses), which concluded in 2022 but continues to release new titles. By mid-2024, the number of titles hosted on UPLOpen.com is expected to exceed 2,500, with further plans for significant growth already in motion for 2025 and beyond.
UPLOpen.com platform is committed to open principles and practices; and is fully optimized to support digital-first, open content distribution. Developed in collaboration with Ubiquity, a trusted partner of researchers, universities, and academic societies, UPLOpen.com utilizes open-source infrastructure, which benefits the broader open-source community.
According to Ubiquity CEO Brian Hole, “UPLOpen.com is unique in its integration of the SDGs into the core of academic publishing, underscoring our commitment to both advancing scholarship and contributing to a sustainable and equitable world. UPLOpen.com is also designed to catalyze a shift to open access among traditional university presses by offering them not only a high-quality online platform but also a range of professional publishing services tailored to effective OA publishing.”
