il 20 febbraio 2013 il consorzio Open Edition ha lanciato la nuova piattaforma web Open Edition Books per le discipline umanistiche e le scienze umane e sociali. Più della metà dei libri disponibili sulla piattaforma sono accessibili liberamente con modalità Open Access.

I libri si possono consultare liberamente online. La possibilità di scaricare i file pdf, invece, è vincolata alla sottoscrizione di un abbonamento a tariffe molto contenute (modello Freemium) da parte di biblioteche accademiche o di altre istituzioni.

OpenEdition Books is the final addition to our comprehensive series of publishing platforms for the humanities and social sciences. The new service is the book distribution platform on the OpenEdition portal, a non-profit-making initiative whose aim is to develop Open Access to research results in the humanities, social sciences and beyond. The service is not an ideological gesture. It is a genuine academic program, in which ideas are seen as seeds that require constant cross-fertilisation to attain their full potential. OpenEdition is run by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing, the Université d’Aix-Marseille, the EHESS and the Université d’Avignon, and financed by the French national research agency within the framework of their Facilities of Excellence program.
OpenEdition Books began with over 350 books, a figure that soon grew to 1000. The platform was constructed in partnership with prestigious publishers in the domain of academic publishing: institutional publishing bodies such as the Collège de France, Éditions de l’EHESS, Openbooks Publishers (Cambridge), CEU Press (Budapest and New York), Presses universitaires de Liège and the École française de Rome (Italy), as well as great many French university presses from Provence to Brittany. The platform’s publishing consortium already has thirty members, with new partners joining every week from the French-, Spanish-, English-, Portuguese-, German-, and Italian-speaking worlds and beyond. All it then takes is a little time to digitise the books and publish them online to millions of OpenEdition readers.
Like our member-publishers, we realised it wasn’t possible to develop Open Access without finding ways of financing the publishing work required, a task that has never been more indispensable. To do this we invented the Freemium model, composed of an alliance between researchers, publishers and libraries within the framework of a commercial offer proposing value added services to libraries as part of a transaction for financing Open Access publishing. This will become relevant in June of this year when we activate the sales functions of OpenEdition Books.
Member-publishers agree to publish over 50% of their books on Open Access Freemium. It is these books that are already available for consultation today. Due to their publishers’ commitments, they will permanently remain on Open Access. It is our belief that electronic publishing can work without compromising quality, by encouraging our academic ecosystem to traverse the new frontier that is Open Access for all [da qui].

URL: <https://books.openedition.org/>