Fordham University Press joins Oxford UP ebook Distribution Platform
By FUPress
13th January 2011
From the press release:
Oxford University Press is pleased to announce the creation of a groundbreaking online platform for university press monograph content. Having redeveloped the award-winning Oxford Scholarship Online platform, OUP is launching University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) and inviting the University Press community to take advantage of a fully enabled XML environment with the cutting edge search and discovery functionality that has marked the success of Oxford Scholarship Online.
The expansion of Oxford Scholarship Online,” notes Tim Barton, Managing Director of Global Academic Business for Oxford University Press, “to include the research and scholarship of other university presses, creating a single platform searchable across many high-quality programs, represents a step forward in ensuring that academic content is increasingly accessible—and conveniently so.”
Responding to increased demand for online scholarly content, UPSO streamlines the research process by making disparately published monographs easily accessible, highly discoverable and fully cross-searchable via one online platform. Research that previously would have required users to jump between a variety of books, and disconnected websites can now be concentrated through a single search engine.
UPSO creates an individually-branded home for monographs from each participating university press just as it has done for Oxford Scholarship Online while allowing highly intuitive tools to deep search across all the content in the program. As such, UPSO will be the premier online research tool—for scholars, teachers, graduate and undergraduate students—and an essential resource for all academic libraries.
Oxford Scholarship Online was launched in 2003 and immediately hailed as “A superior e-book implementation” by Booklist, and “For ease of use, user-friendly design, and quality texts, Oxford Scholarship Online is among the best I have ever used” by Library Journal.  The only publisher with more than eight years of direct experience offering an academic monograph publishing model, OUP has developed a nuanced and highly successful service specifically developed to address digital monographs subscribed to by over 750 libraries and institutions of higher learning. The UPSO program builds on this experience to the benefit of the university press community, as well as librarians and users who understand the growing power provided by a post-PDF research solution.
Benefits of UPSO for academics, libraries, and partner presses:
â–Ş provides the highest quality scholarly content in all subject areas
â–Ş is fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable, with clickable citations from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support, and more
â–Ş allows users to streamline research through a single online platform
â–Ş enables libraries to reduce subscriptions to multiple smaller websites
â–Ş can be easily integrated into library systems and updated frequently with new content
â–Ş offers full customer support services as well as flexibility and choice in purchasing models
â–Ş increase discoverability and usage of university press scholarly materials
â–Ş offers university presses unique opportunity to create an XML digital workflow and join a highly successful online scholarship platform, reaching the global academic market at low distribution costs
“We are very excited about the redevelopment of OSO and the opportunity to open up the platform to other presses,” said Casper Grathwohl, VP, Digital Publisher at Oxford University Press.  “I think the timing is right—over the past year the university press community has delved more deeply into strategic conversations about how to address their digital monograph publishing and we hope that the UPSO program will offer them a solution with a proven track record in an environment that is more flexible than most other offerings that are becoming available. Although the program provides all the links to other academic content needed by researchers, UPSO is really about unlocking the power of the academic monograph, and that singular focus makes it incredibly compelling. I believe it will make a significant contribution to the development of the monograph in its next phase of life.”
A pilot program with Fordham University Press is launching in March 2011, and OUP is in talks with a number of university presses for a full launch in Fall 2011. A marketing destination site, explaining the full range of benefits of UPSO in greater depth, is coming this February at www.aboutupso.com.